Author: Christian Jarrett / Source: Big Think
In what feels like an increasingly polarised world, trying to convince the “other side” to see things differently often feels futile. Psychology has done a great job outlining some of the reasons why, including showing that, regardless of political leanings, most people are highly motivated to protect their existing views.
However a problem with some of this research is that it is very difficult to concoct opposing real-life arguments of equal validity, so as to make a fair comparison of people’s treatment of arguments they agree and disagree with.
To get around this problem, an elegant new paper in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology has tested people’s ability to assess the logic of formal arguments (syllogisms) structured in the exact same way, but that featured wording that either confirmed or contradicted their existing views on abortion. The results provide a striking demonstration of how our powers of reasoning are corrupted by our prior attitudes.
Vladimíra Čavojová at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and her colleagues recruited 387 participants in Slovakia and Poland, mostly university students. The researchers first assessed the students’ views on abortion (a highly topical and contentious issue in both countries), then they presented them with 36 syllogisms – these are formal logical arguments that come in the form of three statements (see examples, below).
The participants’ challenge was to determine whether the third statement of each syllogism followed logically from the first two, always assuming that those initial two premises were true. This…
The post “My-side bias” makes it difficult for us to see the logic in arguments we disagree with appeared first on FeedBox.