Why People Can ’t Agree on Basic Facts

Your brain is programmed to get a kick out of information. This makes our current digital era a celebration for your mind. While the agricultural age gave us easier access to nutrition, and the industrial age dramatically increased our quality of life, no other era has provided so much stimulation for our brains as the information age. It is as if, finally, our brain has succeeded in building its own amusement park that is perfectly customized for itself. Consider the numbers: every day we produce approximately 2.5 billion gigabytes of data and perform 4 billion Google searches. In the short time it took you to read the last sentence, approximately 530,243 new ones were executed. It would seem that the digital revolution should come in handy when trying to alter people’s minds. If people love information, what better way to influence their beliefs than to offer data? Yet, a puzzling phenomenon emerged with the rise of the digital age. As information about the world became readily accessible, people were still inclined to argue about the facts. For example, despite photographic documentation of the 2017 presidential inauguration, many disagree about the number of people who attended the event; and in the face of a publicly available birth certificate of the 44th President of the United States, there are diverse opinions regarding his birthplace. When debating, our instinct is to burst in with ammunition in the form of facts and figures that support our view. But what ac...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Science Source Type: news