Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Worldviews, Beliefs, and Psychology

So apparently, neither Trump nor Clinton supporters will change their minds according to this study. More relevant to my research is the reasoning outlined below:
As much as we like to think that we use reason to evaluate evidence and come to conclusions, “It really goes back assward, a lot of times,” said Peter Ditto, a psychologist at University of California, Irvine. “People already have a firm opinion, and that shapes the way they process information.” We hold beliefs about how the world works and tend to force new information to fit within these pre-existing narratives. Psychologists call this motivated reasoning, and it means that once people have thrown their support behind Trump or Clinton, they will tend to downplay or ignore things that paint their candidate in a bad light.
In a similar vein, once activists (i.e. anti-war groups) adopt a particular position about nukes, drones, bases etc....they rarely change minds and adopt the alternative view often represented by government officials.