Upton Sinclair, 1934:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Nietzsche: “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” And, “Few serve truth, in truth, because — only few have the pure will to be just, and of those — again, very few, have the strength to be just.”
Winston Churchill: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
George Orwell: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
Aldous Huxley: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”
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The Nickerson finding (1998). Most ask “Can I believe this?” for ideas they want to believe. And, “Must I believe this?” for uncomfortable changes.
https://lnkd.in/e8cT3NfS
Kahan, Taber & Lodge found leaders with strong PRIOR beliefs were more likely to engage in “retaliatory arguments” rather than thinking. More knowledge does not produce truth-seeking. Intelligence doesn’t fix the problem; it often sharpens the excuses.
Kahan’s identity-protection model argues the driver isn’t pursuit of truth: people use analytic thinking to form and maintain beliefs that signal loyalty to their preferences — not to determine the truth, per se. Their currency is debate strategy and “Saul Alinsky Rules”—personal attack.
https://lnkd.in/eP_U2_vQ
Cambridge (2021, n=1,207): those whose identity was threatened by facts were 13–14% less likely to correctly “understand” when information contradicted desires.
https://lnkd.in/e4gZbgC9
https://lnkd.in/etj84-3y
Pew/Yale: a study found that humans personally loyal to a cause often know the correct answers to factual questions — but choose to respond to cast their desire in a favorable light. When researchers offered small cash incentives for correct answers, the partisan knowledge gap was cut by more than half, and when respondents were incentivized to say “I don’t know,” the gap nearly disappeared. In other words, the “disagreement about facts” is substantially performed tribalism, not actual ignorance.
https://lnkd.in/e5nCEcVy
Neuroscience confirmation: A brain-imaging study found that “loyal” groups overendorsed attitude-consistent messages and underendorsed attitude-discrepant ones — showing both a desirability bias (what I want to be true) and an identity bias (who said it matters more than what was said).
https://lnkd.in/e-n6gqDX
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Michael H Peters
Change is harrrrrrrd. Humans don’t do it easily, or gracefully. NIMBY.com BeHisChange.com
