Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

It's a good filter to cut through distracting BS that would otherwise bog you down.

If you're surviving and thriving, your worldview is not so bad.

A worldview is a paradigm of reality constructed over decades. It makes sense to require higher standards of evidence for apparent exceptions to the hard won rules eked out from decades of observation and insight.

Although the author was clearly trying for fair "equivalence" claims, I found that his best effort at this fell short:

> As researcher Dan Kahan has demonstrated, liberals are less likely to accept expert consensus on the possibility of safe storage of nuclear waste or on the effects of concealed-carry gun laws.

There's the very big question of what "less likely to accept" really means. Presented with good evidence of the above two points, I (believe) I would say "well, I accept X, Y and Z, but my objections to this were not limited to those points, and I still object to expanding these because ".

That's quite different from saying "that's fake news! it's all a bunch of crap! i'm not listening to any of that!"

Studies that fail to differentiate between these two responses to "facts that don't fit their worldview" are somewhat pointless.

Was curious if this was true. Looked at the front page of papers from day 1 after the election, and couldn’t find a single mention of Russia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/business/media/trumps-vic...

>A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens their ideological worldview. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence — that is, we engage in confirmation bias, giving credit to expert testimony we like and find reasons to reject the rest.

>Political scientists Charles Taber and Milton Lodge experimentally confirmed the existence of this automatic response. They found that partisan subjects, when presented with photos of politicians, produce an affective “like/dislike” response that precedes any sort of conscious, factual assessment as to who is pictured.

>In ideologically charged situations, one’s prejudices end up affecting one’s factual beliefs. Insofar as you define yourself in terms of your cultural affiliations, information that threatens your belief system — say, information about the negative effects of industrial production on the environment — can threaten your sense of identity itself. If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on the safety of vaccines or GMOs feels like a personal attack.

If you are objective, you are not threatened by surprising new information, even if it might have some negative implications that jump to mind. You evaluate it against every other relevant information source you have on the topic, sometimes requiring more complex chains of information, and assign a level of trust to the new info.

Nicely done.