I haven't had time to delve to deeply into this one, but it seems fascinating. It would explain so much about so many threads here. If it works for political candidates, what about political ideologies, religion, science, etc? Perhaps most importantly off all: when will they have one of these machines that I can plug into at the mall and get my "open-mindedness score" for a quarter?
Posted by BYSOAL (Member # 3846) on :
Love the irony that Fox News is running the story.
I'm not sure I've ever accused anyone who identified themselves as Republican or Democrat as being open-minded. But that's likely just my jaded output on life. People in general will find it easier to accept a set amount of information and resist change from that point on. I'd wager it often takes a fairly jarring event to force someone to wholeheartedly acknowledge new circumstances and information.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
This basic result (that people highly invested in something tend not to engage critical reasoning parts of the brain when looking at disconfirming information) has been known for a long time. It goes along with one of the fun bits of cognitive dissonance in which presenting information that sucessfully challenges something that a person is invested in often leads to that person believing in that thing more strongly. Which is why I say that it's possible that people have become such strong partisans in part because both parties suck pretty hard.
Posted by BaoQingTian (Member # 8775) on :
Yeah, I remember the basic result from Psych 1010. However, being an electrical engineer, something is just more real to me when they can hook up a machine and see what's going on inside. Otherwise, to me it's like the people are the engineering "black box", impossible to know what's going on inside and only able to observe the output. (Except in the case of people, they are able to lie). That's why I thought the article was so cool.
Posted by AvidReader (Member # 6007) on :
I think part of the problem is that people are so used to being lied to. It seems like everytime I see something that looks really cool or really bothers me, it turns out to be incomplete or flat out wrong.
Or maybe it's the rational my brain uses to reinforce the predetermined "right" answer.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)