I en artikel i The Boston Globe, ”How facts backfire”, kan man läsa om undersökningar som visar att många människor som konfrontreras med påståenden som strider med deras förutfattade meningar inte bara vägrar ifrågasätta sina premsser eller ändra sin uppfattning. Tvärtom tenderar de att gå stärkta i sin tro på deras till synes motbevisade teori:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger…

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information.

Detta är vad som händer när man bara integrerar och glömmer bort att reducera. Koherensteorin om sanning är falsk. Standarden för sanning är inte andra idéer utan verkligheten. Låt detta tjäna som en påminnelse om behovet av att komplettera integration med reduktion. Så nästa gång du konfrontreras med påståenden som krockar med dina övertygelser, då är det dags att granska dina premisser. Då är det dags att ställa dig själv följande fråga: Vilka fakta gav upphov till den här idén?