There has been a sort of constant dialogue the past five months about what do to do about the forty percent of the electorate whose support of Donald Trump is unwavering. How do we engage with them? Do we reason with them? Do we rationalize for ourselves a means whereby we can accept them as they are? Do we call our own beliefs into question? I stumbled across a New Yorker article, Why Facts Don't Change Our Mind, from back in February that I don't recall being discussed in this community. It is well worth your time if you have been puzzling over the dilemma of what approach makes sense in dealing with those who seem resistant to logic and reason.
I offer up a few excerpts to tease, but highly recommend that you read the entire article as the context for the findings under discussion are extremely important:
In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.
Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
Another book discussed in the article delves into an area that I addressed (with less eloquence) in the conclusion to my series musing about the nature of change. There are natural obstacles to collaboration, and indeed, almost everything in modern life is a collaborative act, for:
Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.
The entire article is extremely well-written. It is chock-full of supporting studies, clear and concise commentary, and accessible to a lay person. (Psychology degree not required.) The article goes a long way towards explaining why logic, reason, and facts often fail to persuade.