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A DW article, exploring what ‘compassion fatigue’ is, and how it can shape the way we view the world. 

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A DW article, exploring what ‘compassion fatigue’ is, and how it can shape the way we view the world. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What research did Brad Bushman carry out, what were his results, and how convincing do you find his evidence? What does the work of Yasmin Aldamen reveal about the role language plays in desensitization? How can social media affect (in both a negative and positive way) compassion fatigue? Overall, to what extent is it our responsibility to resist compassion fatigue in order to properly understand and interact with what’s going on in the world? How best can this be done?

KEY TERMS Compassion fatigue, Overexposure, Empathy, Unstable emotion, Desensitize, Humanistic perspective

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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February 23, 2023

Images of the death and destruction in Ukraine are everywhere. Compassion fatigue is a natural response to such overexposure, but empathy can be rebuilt. It's all in the way media and social media users represent crises.

Many people have become desensitized to images of the suffering in Ukraine

It's easy to turn away from another news article or social media post about war and violence. After all, we're constantly bombarded with images of traumatic events when we're online.

The phenomenon, known as compassion fatigue, or empathy burnout, causes us to lose our capacity to react and help those in need.

"I felt this after the invasion of Ukraine," said Jessica Roberts, an assistant professor of communication studies at the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa in Lisbon. "When I first heard about the atrocities it was horrifying, but then I heard about another town and my reaction was less extreme."

Compassion fatigue does not have to be permanent. As Susan Sontag wrote in her 2003 essay "Regarding the Pain of Others": "Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers."

So just how can we translate compassion into action? Here we take a look at how compassion can both fatigue and be rebuilt.

Compassion fatigue and violence numbness

Brad Bushman, a media researcher at Ohio State University in the US, has conducted experiments illustrating how violence in digital media formats like video games and films can desensitize people's responses to suffering or violence in real life.

In one study, Bushman and his colleagues had 320 students play either a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 minutes. After playing, participants were instructed to answer a questionnaire, but during this time they heard a fight break out in the hallway outside.

"In reality this was a recording of professional actors having a fight. We also had a research assistant outside the room kick a trash can and start groaning," Bushman told DW.

They then measured how long it took participants to help the groaning assistant. On average, it took people who played the nonviolent game 16 seconds, whereas those who played the violent game took 73 seconds.

What's more, said Bushman, those who played the violent video game reported the fight to be less serious than those who played the nonviolent game.

It would be too simple to conclude here that violent video games cause violence, but in Bushman's experiments, they did appear to temporarily change people's responses to violence in the real world.

"The consequence of seeing violent images is that you become numb to it and you think violence is no big deal. The real-world consequences are that you're less likely to help someone who's a victim of violence," said Bushman.

Compassion fatigue is a form of emotional protection

According to Bushman, the underlying psychological mechanism behind compassion fatigue is desensitization.

"Really, it's a kind of emotional or attentional filtering that protects us from suffering becoming too stressful or traumatic to cope with," said Bushman.

It's also possible to detect desensitization to violent images in people's physiological responses to stress.

"If you measure peoples cardiovascular arousal responses or startle brain waves (using electroencephalography), you see that people's physiological shock responses to violent images are dampened in those people who've just been playing a violent video game," said Bushman.

But, he argued, desensitization to violence and trauma can be an important adaptive strategy for people whose work involves frequent exposure to traumatic events, like soldiers, aid workers and doctors.

The problem arises when this desensitization is detected in the "ordinary" population.

"This adaptation is one of the mechanisms that actually drives further aggression and violence in society," said Bushman, referring to research showing how conflict in Israel and Palestine escalates violence in children.

Compassion fatigue toward refugees

Yasmin Aldamen, at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul, emphasized the dangers of how compassion fatigue can lead to greater violence and hate speech in society. Aldamen's research focuses on the impact compassion fatigue and negative media representations have on Syrian refugees in Turkey and Jordan.

"We found that framing negative images and messages of refugees in the media opens the door for audiences to lose empathy for them or even have hatred for refugees," Aldamen told DW.

Sadly, this is not new or surprising. Violence toward refugees and migrants has existed as long as humans have fled conflict and been transplanted. But what is new is how quickly media and social media can drive compassion fatigue and subsequent hate speech and racism.

It's something we see time and time again, after refugees fleeing the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, with the crisis in Ukraine and with refugees fleeing conflict and climate change in North Africa.

"There's evidence showing that people give less aid money after a disaster over time. It's already happening with the earthquake in Turkey and Syria," said Roberts of Universidade Catolica Portuguesa.

Compassion fatigue is temporary and can be reversed

Compassion fatigue can be reversed, according to Roberts and Aldamen. They say you can rebuild your capacity for compassion over time.

"We can use social media to create empathy and compassion between people. In our research, we looked at Humans of New York, where a guy focused on the positive and relatable stories of people's lives, instead of their trauma. It helped to create great empathy, " Roberts told DW.

Aldamen has a similar mission. She is calling for media outlets and people on social media to change the way they represent refugees and other vulnerable populations.

"My study recommends reporting of the Syrian refugee crisis (and other crises) from a more humanistic perspective. Media outlets need to display some of the more positive stories from the refugee crisis to ensure that people do not suffer compassion fatigue to exposure to tragic stories," Aldamen told DW.

She also said it's important for news articles to involve calls to action on individuals or policymakers so readers can help those in need rather than observing a crisis they feel cannot be solved.

Here's how to donate to earthquake aid efforts in Turkey and Syria.
Edited by: Clare Roth Correction, February 20, 2023: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Yasmin Aldamen. DW apologizes for the error.

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One year of Ukraine war: Why we get compassion fatigue - DW - 02/23/2023

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Images of the death and destruction in Ukraine are everywhere. Compassion fatigue is a natural response to such overexposure, but empathy can be rebuilt. It's all in the way media and social media users represent crises.

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A Guardian interview, in which artist Jenny Odell explains why she thinks ‘clock time’ threatens to destroy us all. 

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A Guardian interview, in which artist Jenny Odell explains why she thinks ‘clock time’ threatens to destroy us all. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Does our perception of time undermine our ability to understand reality?

KEY TERMS Clock time, Important, Fantasy, Chronos vs. kairos, Out of time

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, The arts, Human sciences

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enny Odell, the artist and writer, appears on my screen. She's 35 years old, with long dark hair, a fringe, and big glasses with dark frames. She's in her kitchen in Oakland, California. She loves nature and for a while she taught art and design at Stanford. In her art she finds objects and images, often on the internet, and arranges them into beautiful shapes. She likes looking at random things and thinking deeply about them. Four years ago she published a book called How To Do Nothing, where she explains that the internet, by being such a useful servant to us, has managed to turn itself into our master; the result is that we no longer pay attention to what's really important.

Get off all those apps, she says, and start looking at the real world, which actually does need our attention. Barack Obama said How To Do Nothing was one of his books of the year.

Now Odell has written a new book, Saving Time, in which she says that our woes are even deeper and more pernicious than she'd thought. We have a worse problem than the attention economy, she explains - our understanding of time itself.

It's 10.30 on a sunny California morning for Odell and 5.30 on a dark British evening for me. This is "clock time", the type of time, Odell believes, that has taken over our brains, as opposed to all the other sorts of time - sundial time, tidal time, time as represented by the circadian rhythms of trees, birds, insects, reptiles and mammals, including us. There are many more types of time, too: geological time, seasonal time and, of urgent concern, climate time. There are lifespans and health spans. There is time that seems to stand still. And then there is time that comes to an end, when you die. But it's clock time our society is focused on, clock time that harms us, divides us, steals from us and makes us destroy the planet. Clock time is all about productivity, money and economic growth. But clock time is really a fantasy.

'I like to pay really close attention to the things in front of me': Jenny Odell in Piedmont Park, California. Photograph: Winni Wintermeyer/The Observer

Given the circumstances, I can't quite greet Odell with either "Good morning" or "Good evening", because neither would exactly be true. In our conversation, it is both 10.30am and 5.30pm. Clock time is already messing with us. "Time," I say, "must be just about the hardest thing to think about." Odell is silent for a while. "Yes," she says.

Looking back in time, she tells me she grew up in Cupertino, California, "in a neighbourhood that is now extremely unaffordable as it's really close to Apple". Her American father was an electrical engineer; her mother, from the Philippines, worked for Hewlett-Packard. Odell is an only child. Her mother noticed "that I was happier if I was outside. I liked to pay really close attention to the things that were in front of me. I feel like there's a deep assumption in me that whatever is in front of you, there's something interesting about it. I trust that there's something there to see."

Of her parents, she says: "I think it's also significant that they left me alone a lot. They were not helicopter parents. So it allowed me to get really, really absorbed in what I was doing." She was often "making little systems, and just not being interrupted. That's still kind of my favourite feeling."

Thirty-odd years later, Odell has moved a few miles away to Oakland, where she lives in a large apartment block with her boyfriend and where she still pays close, obsessive attention to the objects around her. Now she tries to make sense of them. "Something is true of all my work, whether it's art or writing," she says. "I feel like I'm always trying to do the same thing, which is: just move someone, because I think for someone to feel like they've been touched or moved is a way through that crust that everyone grows to just get through the day. Except in these moments when... something happens, or you experience a work of art, or have a conversation that pierces that crust."

We'll get to her art in a moment, but first I want to have a conversation about clock time which, Odell believes, drives us mad and makes us grow the crust, the armour, to get us through the day. Odell's starting point is that clock time, which has nothing to do with sun, moon, tides or seasons, is infinitely fungible. Even though - in fact, because - it is not real, you can divide it into tiny pieces which, in our extreme market economy, can be bought and sold. But a hierarchy inevitably develops - some skills are more valuable in a given economy than others, meaning that one person's time is worth more than another's. To explain this to me, Odell cites the opening scene of Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times. The crucial part is "the extreme contrast between the very relaxed boss in his very quiet office taking his supplements, and then a hard cut to the factory floor" - where Chaplin, who can't keep up with the factory's machines, keeps bashing into people and is sucked into the bowels of the factory. Later, to increase his efficiency, Chaplin's boss hooks him up to a force-feeding machine, which goes haywire and attacks Chaplin, bashing him in the face over and over with a corn cob. "I consider the corn cob malfunction one of the funniest movie moments I have ever seen," writes Odell in Saving Time.

Odell finds it helpful to use two ancient Greek words for time, chronos and kairos

We discuss the speeded-up world we live in - instant coffee, microwaves, lifts that elevate 30 times faster than they did when they were first invented, banks that employ trading bots to buy and sell stocks in thousandths of a second. Time is money and we are all traders of our time, even when we get AI machines to do it for us. But in a world of fast cars, fast food, fast lifts and apps on our phones that can tell us the quickest route from A to B, we feel more rushed than ever. Odell, who taught art and design at Stanford, says: "One thing that used to happen a lot was that I would be rushing to my class and I'd have all my bags and papers and stuff, and I'd be very stressed out about what I was going to do in class, and then I would be arrested, I would stop because I could see some bird, the Stanford campus has a lot of birds, and migratory birds, and I used to say, when I would describe those moments, that time stopped. To me, that is a moment of love - I am completely taken over by love and curiosity. But I thought about it later, and it was like, you know, it's not that time stopped - it's just that one timeline stopped. The timeline of me rushing to class, and thinking that I should have prepared more. That stopped. But, especially in the case of a migratory bird, I was actually seeing a different kind of time. That bird is only there part of the year - and when you see it, you have to think about where it's been and where it's going, which could be incredibly far away. One signal gets weaker and then the other one gets stronger."

When Odell was a child, she tells me, her mother read her a story about a boy and a ball of thread. "It was from a book that my mom got from a garage sale, which she still has. A witch visits this young boy, who is impatient by nature, and gives him a ball of thread. She tells him that if he pulls the thread, time will go faster and she warns him not to pull it too much, because it only goes in one direction. Like time."

Of course, the boy keeps pulling the thread - he always wants to get to the next stage of his life. "He pulls it when he wants to go home from school, but then he also pulls it because he wants to marry his sweetheart. So he's pulling it and pulling it - and then he's an old man." Then, lesson learned, the witch gives him another chance. "The moral for me," says Odell, "as a children's story, is that you only get one life. For me, it ended up more as a story about the fact that time only goes forward. As a child, time stretches out forever in front of you. I think I was deeply terrified by that story."

I always like things that make your boundaries a little bit blurry

Odell finds it helpful to use two ancient Greek words, chronos, which signifies the time that marches forward relentlessly, and kairos, which can mean "transcendental moment". However long or short your life is, numbered in years, might matter less than the number of transcendental moments you get to experience. Like when you see an amazing bird and everything else falls away - the bundle of papers you're holding, the fact that you're in a rush, the class you're about to take. Or like falling in love? "Yes," says Odell. "I've always been interested in ego-effacing things. Something that makes your boundary a little bit blurry. Some people would describe that feeling as love. Like when you see something that's so beautiful that you almost think that you're outside yourself. Or when you feel so strongly towards someone, or you feel so much empathy that you feel you don't quite exist, like, separately from them. These are all things that soften the boundary around the individual. Which is why it so often seems to not make sense."

Falling in love is not about productivity, says Odell. It's not about personal gain: "There's something about falling in love that doesn't make any sense."

When you fall in love, you are out of time. You are beyond the realm of chronos, and into the realm of kairos. How else can you achieve this state? You can commune with nature. Or you can be moved by art. Odell says this happened to her at a John Cage concert. "Not only did it change how I heard sounds within the performance itself, I walked outside and I felt like I had a hearing aid, like I could hear everything in the city, almost as if for the first time. I'd lived there for years at that point. And I don't think I've ever heard anything the same way again. I feel my hearing has permanently changed."

A transcendental moment. Kairos. As an artist, Odell seeks these moments. In one of her projects, she collected hundreds of pictures of objects from Google Earth - for instance, swimming pools and sewage plants - and arranged them in circles, to be painted on the wall of a vast Google data centre in Oklahoma. Sort of like Damien Hirst on a vast scale. In another work she created a self-portrait made out of photographs of trash called Garbage Selfie. In 2015, she was artist in residence at the San Francisco dump. She spent a year sifting through garbage. "I was given lots of time and space, uninterrupted, just to go into this pile of trash and pull things out, and spend basically as long as I wanted to, trying to explain the existence of these objects, what they were made out of. It mattered to me that it was trash. I wasn't picking things out of the garbage that were beautiful or vintage." A deep connection with objects lost to time. "It was one of the happiest times of my life," she says.
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell is published by Vintage at £20. Buy it for £17.60 at guardianbookshop.com

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Clock watching: meet the artist who thinks time is ruining our lives

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enny Odell, the artist and writer, appears on my screen. She's 35 years old, with long dark hair, a fringe, and big glasses with dark frames. She's in her kitchen in Oakland, California. She loves nature and for a while she taught art and design at Stanford.

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A Vox article, which looks at a census that was designed to investigate the way we all perceive the world differently. 

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A Vox article, which looks at a census that was designed to investigate the way we all perceive the world differently. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does perception work, according to Anil Seth? How has he set out to study ‘perceptual diversity’? Why does Seth believe that understanding that we all construct our own versions of reality will “cultivate a bit of useful humility”? What are the potential applications of the study he is carrying out? Overall, how fundamental to our understanding of the world is perceptual diversity?

KEY TERMS Perceptual diversity, Construct our realities, Inner universes, Humility, Cultures

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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This story is part of a group of stories called

Finding the best ways to do good.

For something as intimate to our lives as perception - how we experience ourselves and the world - we know remarkably little about all the ways it can differ from person to person. Some people, for instance, have aphantasia, which means they experience no mental imagery, while others have no inner monologue in their heads, just silence. Studying what scientists now call "perceptual diversity" is part of an increasingly mainstream effort to learn more about consciousness itself.

Among the new wave of researchers who are trying to unravel the mystery of consciousness in the lab is Anil Seth. Seth is the co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and the author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. His viral TED talk in 2017 popularized the idea of consciousness as a " controlled hallucination," which suggests that our perceptions are less like looking through a transparent window on the outside world and more like watching an internally constructed movie. When sensory data from the outside world contradicts our brain's movie, it updates the film.

Now Seth is behind another project that aims to "paint a multidimensional portrait of this hidden terrain of inner diversity," he told me. By studying the subtle ways perception can vary, we can understand the many different ways our brains construct our realities. That's why in 2022, Seth and his colleagues in collaboration with the creative studio Collective Act launched the Perception Census, the largest psychological study of its kind. It aims to help bridge the divide between philosophy and science by providing experimental evidence for questions, such as how our individual minds differ, that have long been out of reach.

The online survey gives participants a series of tasks, brain teasers, and interactive illusions that each probe a different aspect of perception, such as vision, sound, rhythm, how you experience the passage of time, and even how your imagination works. It's already reached over 20,000 participants. "Just as biodiversity is important for the health of an ecosystem," Seth told me, perceptual diversity "is something that enriches society."

I spoke to Seth about what the perception census is, why perceptual diversity matters, and how this all relates to the growing field of consciousness studies.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What got you interested in a project like the Perception Census?
My research and [that of] many others has led to this view that what we perceive is not a direct readout of what's there. It's an active construction in which the brain plays an essential role. Because of the way perception works, it seems to us that we see the world and hear the world as it is - it doesn't seem like it's a brain-based construction. Unless you interrogate that, it's very hard to understand that somebody might actually be having a different experience, even if they're in the same shared objective reality.

And, of course, we all have slightly different brains. So we're all going to inhabit different inner universes, and not a lot is known about that. With this idea of perceptual diversity, what we're trying to do is bring back into the light this idea that, in fact, we all differ, and the differences don't have to be very large to exist.
Is this the first time anyone has systematically studied the different ways we experience the world?
It's definitely not the first time. There's a long tradition of looking for individual differences. But what's distinctive about what we're doing is the scale, breadth, and reach.

[The Perception Census] has about 100 different things that people can do, each probing different aspects. That scale hasn't been attempted before. That allows us to look at what the patterns are, and whether there are underlying factors that explain how different aspects of perception correlate.
Beyond intrinsic interest in learning more about consciousness, what could we do with a richer understanding of perceptual diversity?
One goal of the census is awareness-raising because people are remarkably surprised when they realize that people can have different inner experiences. But they're also surprised just by all the under-the-hood complexity involved in this everyday miracle of just experiencing the world.

I also think it can cultivate a bit of useful humility about our own perceptions and beliefs. If we really had this understanding that the way I see things is not the way they are, then it's easier to understand that somebody else might see something differently. In a world of increasing polarization and fragmentation, understanding that we differ, and how we differ, can build platforms for empathy and communication.

When it comes to mental health, neurodiversity is a well-established community with lots of important lobbying efforts that have done great work. But it tends to be associated with specific conditions and reinforces this normative, neurotypical view for people who aren't neurodivergent in that way. What I'm hoping is that the census can reinforce the recognition of diversity in the normative, neurotypical range.
How do you imagine this kind of research could evolve in the future?
We can start to drill down. For instance, if we find some interesting aspects of perceptual diversity that stand out, or some factor that seems to predict diversity in different dimensions, then we might bring people into the lab. We can do more fine-grained controlled experiments, using things like brain imaging. We might begin to look at the biological mechanisms that are responsible for this diversity. We can't do that in a large-scale survey.

Then we could also zoom out. There are limitations on what we've been doing. We're only looking at people who speak English. We're not really sampling across cultures as much as we would ideally like. Also just for very boring ethics reasons, we're only looking at people 18 and over, so another whole range is what's going on with the development of perceptual diversity; that can be new terrain, too.

And we've got 100 tasks, but that's a small subset of the possible things we might want to ask. One of the things we were worried about was that we're asking quite a lot of people to spend their precious attentional moments on something, so we have to make it rewarding for them. And it turns out, we have 20,000 people already, and one comment we received was that "this is what the internet is made for."
In your book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, you write that advances in the science of consciousness are "inaugurating a transformation in psychiatry from treating symptoms to addressing causes." I'm curious how you think these kinds of advances might help support this transformation.
Many different things can catalyze that move. The census is, in itself, not telling us much about mechanisms. But it's laying out the territory. By seeing what correlates with what, that will give us some indication of whether there are dials in the brain, if you like, that you can turn, and they change perception in different ways, or maybe if you turn it too far, you get something that can transmogrify into mental illness.
If you'd like to help chart the terrain of perceptual diversity, you can Will you support Vox's explanatory journalism? take the Perception Census here.
So you need to know the lay of the land in order to understand the kinds of mechanisms we're looking for that may go awry in mental health disorders. More generally, consciousness research is making advances here.

Whether it's psychedelics or computational psychiatry, there are increasingly detailed mechanistic proposals for why people have the psychiatric symptoms they do. The key thing that consciousness research brings to that is a focus on their experiences, rather than the behavioral symptoms of psychiatric and mental health disorders.

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we're trying to do at Vox, there are a couple reasons that we can't rely only on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on.

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we're not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world - not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that's an important part of building a more equal society. We can't do that if we have a paywall.

That's why we also turn to you, our readers, to help us keep Vox free. If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today?

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A key to consciousness could lie in "perceptual diversity"

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Every brain experiences reality differently. This census might help us understand why - and what it means.

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A Conversation article, looking at how cognitive biases and brain biology prevent us from changing our minds, even when the facts contradict our beliefs.

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A Conversation article, looking at how cognitive biases and brain biology prevent us from changing our minds, even when the facts contradict our beliefs.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What does it say about the way in which we form our worldviews? What is belief perseverance and confirmation bias, and what do they indicate about the difficulties of changing people’s minds? How is our brain ‘hard-wired’ to reinforce our beliefs and opinions? Overall, can we overcome the effects of belief perseverance and confirmation bias and remain genuinely open-minded?

KEY TERMS Appealing assertion, Opinion, Fallacy, Worldview, New evidence, Belief perseverance, Backfire effect, Confirmation bias, Repetition, Truthful, Non-confrontational

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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" Facts First" is the tagline of a CNN branding campaign which contends that " once facts are established, opinions can be formed." The problem is that while it sounds logical, this appealing assertion is a fallacy not supported by research.

Cognitive psychology and neuroscience studies have found that the exact opposite is often true when it comes to politics: People form opinions based on emotions, such as fear, contempt and anger, rather than relying on facts. New facts often do not change people's minds.

I study human development, public health and behavior change. In my work, I see firsthand how hard it is to change someone's mind and behaviors when they encounter new information that runs counter to their beliefs.

Your worldview, including beliefs and opinions, starts to form during childhood as you're socialized within a particular cultural context. It gets reinforced over time by the social groups you keep, the media you consume, even how your brain functions. It influences how you think of yourself and how you interact with the world.

For many people, a challenge to their worldview feels like an attack on their personal identity and can cause them to harden their position. Here's some of the research that explains why it's natural to resist changing your mind - and how you can get better at making these shifts.

Rejecting what contradicts your beliefs

In an ideal world, rational people who encounter new evidence that contradicts their beliefs would evaluate the facts and change their views accordingly. But that's generally not how things go in the real world.

Partly to blame is a cognitive bias that can kick in when people encounter evidence that runs counter to their beliefs. Instead of reevaluating what they've believed up until now, people tend to reject the incompatible evidence. Psychologists call this phenomenon belief perseverance. Everyone can fall prey to this ingrained way of thinking.

Being presented with facts - whether via the news, social media or one-on-one conversations - that suggest their current beliefs are wrong causes people to feel threatened. This reaction is particularly strong when the beliefs in question are aligned with your political and personal identities. It can feel like an attack on you if one of your strongly held beliefs is challenged.

Confronting facts that don't line up with your worldview may trigger a " backfire effect," which can end up strengthening your original position and beliefs, particularly with politically charged issues. Researchers have identified this phenomenon in a number of studies, including ones about opinions toward climate change mitigation policies and attitudes toward childhood vaccinations.

Focusing on what confirms your beliefs

There's another cognitive bias that can get in the way of changing your mind, called confirmation bias. It's the natural tendency to seek out information or interpret things in a way that supports your existing beliefs. Interacting with like-minded people and media reinforces confirmation bias. The problem with confirmation bias is that it can lead to errors in judgment because it keeps you from looking at a situation objectively from multiple angles.

A 2016 Gallup poll provides a great example of this bias. In just one two-week period spanning the 2016 election, both Republicans and Democrats drastically changed their opinions about the state of the economy - in opposite directions.

But nothing was new with the economy. What had changed was that a new political leader from a different party had been elected. The election outcome changed survey respondents' interpretation of how the economy was doing - a confirmation bias led Republicans to rate it much higher now that their guy would be in charge; Democrats the opposite.

Brain's hard-wiring doesn't help

Cognitive biases are predictable patterns in the way people think that can keep you from objectively weighing evidence and changing your mind. Some of the basic ways your brain works can also work against you on this front.

Your brain is hard-wired to protect you - which can lead to reinforcing your opinions and beliefs, even when they're misguided. Winning a debate or an argument triggers a flood of hormones, including dopamine and adrenaline. In your brain, they contribute to the feeling of pleasure you get during sex, eating, roller-coaster rides - and yes, winning an argument. That rush makes you feel good, maybe even invulnerable. It's a feeling many people want to have more often.

Moreover, in situations of high stress or distrust, your body releases another hormone, cortisol. It can hijack your advanced thought processes, reason and logic - what psychologists call the executive functions of your brain. Your brain's amygdala becomes more active, which controls your innate fight-or-flight reaction when you feel under threat.

In the context of communication, people tend to raise their voice, push back and stop listening when these chemicals are coursing through their bodies. Once you're in that mindset, it's hard to hear another viewpoint. The desire to be right combined with the brain's protective mechanisms make it that much harder to change opinions and beliefs, even in the presence of new information.

You can train yourself to keep an open mind

In spite of the cognitive biases and brain biology that make it hard to change minds, there are ways to short-circuit these natural habits.

Work to keep an open mind. Allow yourself to learn new things. Search out perspectives from multiple sides of an issue. Try to form, and modify, your opinions based on evidence that is accurate, objective and verified.

Don't let yourself be swayed by outliers. For example, give more weight to the numerous doctors and public health officials who describe the preponderance of evidence that vaccines are safe and effective than what you give to one fringe doctor on a podcast who suggests the opposite.

Be wary of repetition, as repeated statements are often perceived as more truthful than new information, no matter how false the claim may be. Social media manipulators and politicians know this all too well.

Presenting things in a nonconfrontational way allows people to evaluate new information without feeling attacked. Insulting others and suggesting someone is ignorant or misinformed, no matter how misguided their beliefs may be, will cause the people you are trying to influence to reject your argument. Instead, try asking questions that lead the person to question what they believe. While opinions may not ultimately change, the chance of success is greater.

Recognize we all have these tendencies and respectfully listen to other opinions. Take a deep breath and pause when you feel your body ramping up for a fight. Remember, it's OK to be wrong at times. Life can be a process of growth.

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Cognitive biases and brain biology help explain why facts don't change minds

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Here are some reasons for the natural human tendency to avoid or reject new information that runs counter to what you already know - and some tips on how to do better.

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A New Humanist interview with Michael Shermer, in which he discusses the nature of truth and belief, and the difference between the two. 

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A New Humanist interview with Michael Shermer, in which he discusses the nature of truth and belief, and the difference between the two. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What responsibilities do we all have in order to protect the truth?

KEY TERMS  Replacement hypothesis, Spirituality, Rational, Mythically true or psychologically true or religiously true or politically true, Conspiracy theories, Motivated reasoning, De-biasing

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Religion, Human sciences

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A Big Think video, in which a wide range of thinkers offer their thoughts on how we’re wired to think in terms of ‘us vs. them’. 

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A Big Think video, in which a wide range of thinkers offer their thoughts on how we’re wired to think in terms of ‘us vs. them’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a great collection of short videos by some very influential and engaging thinkers, any one of which stands up well on its own. Get students to understand ‘tribalistic’ and ‘us and them’, and ask them what the implications can be of seeing the world (and other people) in this way. Then ask whether there is a solution to the associated problems. Is Beau Lotto right in saying that we have to identify our assumptions, and question them, in order to become objective knowers?

KEY TERMS Tribalistic, Us and them, Manipulated, Recategorize, Creating perceptions, Questioning assumptions

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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The science behind ‘us vs. them’ | Dan Shapiro, Robert Sapolsky & more | Big Think

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A Big Think video, featuring a TOK regular Paul Bloom, who reiterates why he is ‘against empathy’. 

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A Big Think video, featuring a TOK regular Paul Bloom, who reiterates why he is ‘against empathy’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Should empathy be the basis of moral judgements?

KEY TERMS Moral guide, Moral capacities, Distinct, Rational compassion, Reconfigure

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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PAUL BLOOM: I'm against empathy. I'm not against empathy for everything, I think empathy is a lot of fun when you're watching a movie, empathy for a fictional character. I think empathy is an important part of all sorts of exciting activities, but I'm against empathy as a moral guide. I think we could do better. The sense of empathy I'm most interested in is when you, in a sense, put yourself in another person's shoes and feel what they feel. Psychologists call this 'Emotional empathy.' A lot of people think this is core to being a good person.

A few years ago, I wrote a book called "Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion," and I argued this form of empathy, though it might seem wonderful, is actually a very poor moral guide. Who do you feel empathy for? Who do you most naturally put yourself in the shoes of? Well, we know the answer to this from study after study, after study- we naturally feel empathy for people who look like us, who speak our language, who we feel are safe, and because of that, empathy is, of all of the human feelings, perhaps the most biased and parochial. When you put a book out with a title "Against Empathy," you gotta expect a certain amount of blow back, and a lot of people responded to me with their own experiences and their own arguments, sometimes people agreed with me, sometimes they argued against me.

So one argument against the purpose of my book is: Although empathy could have negative effects, could be biased, could provoke us into violence, could cause all sorts of trouble, it also could have good effects, and I concede this in my book. And so some people have said, "Look, if you add it all up, the positive benefits of empathy outweigh the negative." I'm not always convinced about that sort of math, but even if it were true, we have moral capacities that are better than empathy. Another objection is that empathy, whatever you think of its role when it comes to war and charity and broad, moral decisions, is a necessary part of an intimate relationship. One philosopher in a critique of me said, "If my wife comes in and she's mad at somebody at work- it's all well and good for me to say, 'I love you very much and I understand where you're coming from,' but isn't what she wants me to share her anger, get angry with her?" And my response to that is, 'It's kind of right.' I don't deny that.

There are cases where what we look for in a relationship with others is that sort of shared feeling. You're mad, you want me to be mad too. My critical response is there's all sorts of cases where that's not what we want. My favorite example here is anxiety. I go to my partner and I'm very anxious, I'm stressed out. Do I want her to start sharing my feeling of anxiety? To look at me and say, "Oh my God, it's horrible. Yeah, it's horrible." No! I want her to be calm. I want her to say, "I love you. Calm down. Let me tell you how to think about it differently." Sometimes what we want from people isn't a mirror of us, it's rather, another intelligent, caring, loving person responding to us as a distinct being, and working to make our life better. And I think, sometimes, empathy is exactly what we do not want.

Now, if I'm gonna say this, I have to come up with something that will replace empathy, I'm not saying we should give up on morality. So my book is called "Against Empathy," but the subtitle of my book is "The Case for Rational Compassion," and therein lies the substitute, I think. And the substitute is two parts: One is rationality. If I'm going to help somebody, I have to know what's the best way to help them, sometimes what might seem to be the best way to help them simply makes things worse. Sometimes figuring out what to do to make the world a better place is an extraordinarily difficult task, too big for one brain, and we do our best when, as communities, we work together to think about that. So that's rationality. Rationality itself is great at pursuing ends, but it doesn't provide ends, it doesn't provide goals.

What you need is compassion- you need to care. So what I argue in the book is that our best decisions, our fairest, our most equitable ones, are done through a combination of a rational judgment of how does one make the world a better place plus compassion, love, caring. But not the sort of love and caring that requires you to put yourself in another person's shoes. Even if empathy is, on balance, has a positive effect, compassion does better. If we could reconfigure our moral attitudes to be less biased, less parochial, more with our head and less with our heart, we would do better.

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PAUL BLOOM: I'm against empathy. I'm not against empathy for everything, I think empathy is a lot of fun when you're watching a movie, empathy for a fictional character. I think empathy is an important part of all sorts of exciting activities, but I'm against empathy as a moral guide.

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A Big Think article, analyzing how our sense of self is defined by mirrors and video calls, and why this undermines our self-awareness.

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A Big Think article, analyzing how our sense of self is defined by mirrors and video calls, and why this undermines our self-awareness.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Focus on the ideas half-way down the article (“Mirror, mirror on the wall…”) To what extent does our sense of self depend on mirrors? How should we look at ourselves, according to psychologist Tara Well, and why? Why are we often unhappy with images of ourselves, when other people think they are flattering? Overall, what are the implications of seeing ourselves in an inverted way in terms of the way we develop our self-awareness?

KEY TERMS Sense of self, Superstition, Introspection, “True” representation, Misinterpret

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Technology

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Though we use mirrors to see ourselves clearly, their history is filled with mystery and marvel - as though we are gazing through a "glass darkly," so to speak. Though we take mirrors for granted, it may be no exaggeration to claim that the humble mirror could be the single biggest technological invention that forever altered our sense of self.

Catoptromancy

Historians cannot know for certain when humans became enchanted with their own reflection, though the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus would suggest that we have gazed upon ourselves for quite some time. Indeed, as early as 6200 BCE at Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, weapon-savvy Stone Age people were crafting their first man-made mirrors by polishing obsidian, a volcanic rock. Women from the farming town were buried with these small mirrors in hand, according to records from the discovery in the 1960s at an archaeological site.

Similar artifacts have been traced to El-Badari in Egypt, dating back to 4500 BCE, made of selenite, a whitish crystal, and framed with wood. Then came metal mirrors, during the Copper Age, as skilled craftspeople in Mesopotamia forged ores into reflective surfaces, starting in 4000 BCE. The Etruscans and Greeks followed suit, refining their mirrors from thin disks of thoroughly polished, convex bronze.

Since then, these makeshift looking glasses quickly became objects of wonder for something well beyond what could already be seen with the eyes. Atop of gazing at oneself, mirrors were soon shrouded with a veil of mystery and magic, because they were hard to make sense of - and humans like to fill those gaps in knowledge with stories of the wonderful.

All over the world, independently, examples of societies doing catoptromancy - the psychic art of divination through mirrors - began to emerge. (When the evil witch from Snow White asked her mirror for answers about her future and destiny, infamously uttering the words, "Mirror, mirror on the wall," she was practicing catoptromancy.) Mirrors soon became ceremonial objects as well as portals into the paranormal and mediums for seeking help from the gods. Generations of superstition led people to believe that mirrors could make your wishes come true, or steal your soul.

Glass mirrors

It took a while to discover that mirrors could be made of glass too, and glass mirrors provide a much more faithful reflection than a shiny piece of rock. On the island of Murano, Italy, Venetian artisans of the 13th century shaped gorgeous, gleaming, glass mirrors, giving all of Europe something to envy. Since then, around the time of the Renaissance, mirrors took on the more familiar role that we know today.

The mirror became the ultimate physical tool for introspection and learning about oneself, including one's role in society, because it allows a person to scrutinize their own face, with its expressions, shapes, and character signs, according to Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, historian and author of The Mirror: A History. She tells Big Think that, while digging through old inventories for her research, she noticed that mirrors were particularly popular with the middle class because it allowed them to mimic the upper classes in both appearance and demeanor. However, the upper class had little use for mirrors, because their noble origin was enough for them to know "I am who I am!" Melchior-Bonnet says.

From there, knowing oneself became a crucial theme of the Renaissance and the times to come, and the mirror became a tool to do so. But, according to Melchior-Bonnet, the psychological fallout of this phenomenon has been difficult to pin down.

Mirror, mirror on the wall: Who am I?

Humans, already at the age of two, are able to recognize themselves in a mirror, perhaps a crucial moment in a person's development of a sense of self. But how much of our sense of self would be changed if we hadn't ever seen a truthful reflection of ourselves? That is a question that philosophers, both ancient and contemporary, have pondered, Mark Pendergrast, author of Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair With Reflection tells Big Think.

Obviously, blind people don't need a mirror to have a sense of self, and neither did ancient or Indigenous peoples who lacked the technology. But surely, being able to look at oneself in the mirror has some sort of psychological impact, says Pendergrast. How much impact, though, is hard to know, because it is difficult to separate the mirror from the self.

"A lot of the Shuar kids that I work with, they were fascinated with their own reflection," Dorsa Amir, a UC-Berkeley evolutionary anthropologist, tells Big Think. "They just really wanted to see what they looked like, because it was such a novelty, and it's hard for us to simulate what that actually feels like." Amir recounts that when she first went to do field work with indigenous tribes and she didn't bring a mirror, not seeing her reflection for weeks at a time led to a feeling of disconnection from herself.

"There are a lot of these basic instincts and urges that have always existed. Like wondering how other people perceive you. That's just like a fundamental human thought, right?" Amir says.

Amir notes that with the advent of video meetings, a lot of users look at themselves when they speak on a call. Yet, prior to now, it would have been very strange to know exactly what you looked like while talking to somebody else. Surely, this has led to changes in our behavior during meetings. "All these technological innovations are really intensifying all of these base urges. It's hard to overstate how intensely they have 'poured gasoline on' all of these things," Amir adds.

Indeed, just like the middle class of the Renaissance, we use mirrors (or Zoom) to see what other people see when they look at us, Tara Well, a psychologist at Barnard College and author of Mirror Meditation, tells Big Think. This can become problematic if we obsess on our own image and the often unrealistic beauty standards set by society. The key is to avoid seeing yourself as an object and to use the mirror to get a deeper appreciation of your sense of self, Well says. We should look at ourselves as if we are looking at a friend.

Non-reversing mirrors

The image we see in the mirror is, of course, not a "true" representation of ourselves - but an image in reverse. Our brain has gotten used to that, which is why studies show that people prefer their mirror image to their "picture image" - a psychological phenomenon perhaps caused by the "mere exposure effect," the finding that we like things that are more familiar. "This is why your friends may love a photo of you, but you don't think it's flattering at all," Well says. "Your friends are used to seeing your 'true' image, and you are used to seeing your mirror image."

Some scholars argue that the flipped image we see in a mirror has caused us to misinterpret ourselves all throughout history. Instead, a non-reversing mirror gives back the image of what you look like to other people, not the "flipped," reflected version.

"Our minds are different on the left and the right, and as we think and feel different things, and then express them to others, our eyes and face will convey that information asymmetrically," says John Walter, the thinker and inventor behind True Mirror. "The problem is that in mirrors, that information is swapped. It can be close, but the interpretation of that information is going to be faulty... the thoughts and emotions that we have are not matched by what we are seeing."

One cannot help but wonder whether Narcissus still would have drowned had he known that he didn't actually look like what he saw in the reflection.

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Mirrors are the single biggest invention to forever change our perception of self

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Looking at ourselves in a mirror - or on a video call - shapes our sense of self. But what you see is not what others see.

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You can use the stories to develop a clearer understanding of this element of TOK, see how TOK concepts manifest in the real world, and gather examples to support arguments in the essay and exhibition.

We've arranged these stories in a way that relates to our 5 Big Question framework for TOK, which is our favoured way of structuring the course. There are other ways to structure TOK, such as the Classic structure.

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A Big Think video, in which Donald Hoffman argues that the key to successful arguments is ensuring that everyone is using terms clearly and understandably.

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A Big Think video, in which Donald Hoffman argues that the key to successful arguments is ensuring that everyone is using terms clearly and understandably.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Donald Hoffman is a thinker we draw on at the beginning of the BQ framework, and his ideas on the construction of reality are fantastically useful. In this video, what does he say about the importance of using clear (and agreed-upon) terms and concepts? Is this the solution to all conflicts about knowledge? Is this a realistic proposal - and can it be applied more in some areas of knowledge than others?

KEY TERMS Dogmatism

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Language, Religion, Natural sciences

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Why clear definitions are key to intelligent discussions

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Being precise about our ideas doesn’t just allow us to have better conversations, it’s also an incisive way to learn.

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A Conversation article, exploring the concept of ‘personhood’, which it argues is at the heart of the abortion debate. 

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A Conversation article, exploring the concept of ‘personhood’, which it argues is at the heart of the abortion debate. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How should ethical questions be justified?

KEY TERMS Personhood, Hotly contested, Full moral value, Defining death, Right, Hypothetical example, Shifting the conversation

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences, Natural sciences, Religion

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Debate about abortion is often a debate about rights - but whose? AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Controversy over abortion reached a fever pitch on May 2, 2022, when the leaked draft of a U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion was published by Politico. If the draft's key points are reflected in the final ruling, this would strike down Roe v. Wade, a landmark decision that nearly 50 years ago established the right to choose an abortion.

Current constitutional law grants a right to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable - in other words, until there is a reasonable probability it could survive outside the womb with care. Today, this typically occurs between the 22nd and 24th weeks of pregnancy.

The ruling in Roe v. Wade was grounded on the idea that the U.S. Constitution protects privacy, stemming from the 14th Amendment. However, the draft majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, argues Roe v. Wade should be overturned because the Constitution makes no mention of abortion.

While a final ruling is not expected before June 2022, the decision will not put to rest controversy over abortion. Why does the legalization of abortion continue to be hotly contested, nearly a half century after Roe v. Wade? This question is of great interest to me, as a philosopher and bioethicist, since I study philosophical problems that lie just beneath the surface of contemporary controversies like abortion.

Defining personhood

One underlying ethical concern is, "What is a person?" How people answer this question shapes how they think about a developing human being. When philosophers talk about "personhood," they are referring to something or someone having exceptionally high moral status, often described as having a right to life, an inherent dignity, or mattering for one's own sake. Non-persons may have lesser rights or value, but lack the full moral value associated with persons.

To be a person means having strong moral claims against others. For instance, persons have a claim to be treated fairly and a claim not to be interfered with. A healthy adult human being is often considered the clearest example of a person. Yet, most philosophers distinguish being a person from being human, pointing out that no one disputes the fetus's species, but many disagree about the fetus's personhood.

In current law, fetal viability is often used to mark the beginning of personhood. However, viability varies based on people's access to intensive medical care. It also changes as medicine and technology advance.

Some state laws restricting abortion identify the presence of a "fetal heartbeat" as morally significant and use this as a basis for personhood. However, many living things have beating hearts, and they are not all considered persons. And as physicians point out, though they may use the term "fetal heartbeat" in conversations with patients, the fetus does not yet have a functioning heart that generates sound during early development.

Defining the limits of personhood is especially dicey due to its far-reaching consequences. Personhood carries implications for how we treat animals, ecosystems and anencephalic infants, who are born with their cerebral cortex and large parts of their skull missing. It also shapes the rights of people who will be born in the future, people with disabilities and individuals in a persistent vegetative state. Debates over personhood have recently extended to robots.

Personhood is also important for issues at the end of life, such as disputes over defining death. Physicians have disagreed with families over whether to declare a patient dead or continue to offer medical interventions. Philosophers have debated whether a person's death occurs as soon as "higher" brain activity ceases - activity associated consciousness and cognition - or only after all brain activity ends.

When personhood begins

In short, there are plenty of reasons to figure out what personhood requires. Doing so demands wrestling with at least three common opposing views.

The first holds that fetuses qualify as persons from the moment of conception. Supporters say that from conception on, the developing fetus has " a future like ours," and abortion takes that future away. A variation on this theme is that at conception, a fetus has the full genetic code and therefore the potential to become a person, and this potential qualifies the fetus as a person.

A second view regards personhood as arising at some point after conception and prior to birth. Some people reason that a human being's moral status is not all-or-nothing, but, like human development, a matter of degree. Others say that what matters is consciousness and other cognitive capacities, thought to develop late in the second trimester.

Finally, a third view maintains that personhood begins at birth or shortly thereafter, because this is when an infant first acquires a sense of themselves and an interest in their own continued existence. Another source of support for the third view is Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant's claim that what makes human beings morally special is their rationality and capacity to be autonomous.

Conflicts between persons

Which view about personhood is right? If a society can't agree about personhood, another strategy would be to imagine that one's opponent's view is right, and consider the implications.

Suppose, for example, that fetuses are persons. Since pregnant people are too, how should conflicts between them be settled? Suppose a pregnant person's life were in jeopardy: whose right to life prevails? Some hold that under these conditions, abortion is justified by appealing to self-defense, but others say killing in self-defense is not justified if the threat is "innocent," without intention of doing harm.

Even when a pregnant person's life is not in danger, some philosophers argue that a fetus's right to life would not automatically override a pregnant person's right to live their life as they wish. In a famous article, ethicist Judith Jarvis Thomson used the hypothetical example of someone extremely ill, who could only be saved by actor Henry Fonda touching their brow. Must Fonda attend to them? She argued no: a right to life is not usually understood as a claim to whatever one needs to stay alive. Instead, it requires not having one's life unjustly ended.

When weighing rights, it is important to consider the toll exacted when people wishing to terminate a pregnancy are prevented from doing so. A decade-long study showed people in this situation suffered adverse health effects; were less likely to have money for basic living expenses like food, housing and transportation; and were more likely to remain with violent partners. Since the risk of dying from childbirth is much greater than the risk of dying from legal abortion, a ban on abortion is projected to increase maternal mortality.

The constitutional right to abortion will likely soon be settled. If the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, this will raise yet more ethical questions - about fairness, for example, considering, that people living in poverty and members of minority groups would be among those most affected, and that a majority of Americans support abortion rights.

Only by shifting the conversation from politics and law to ethics will Americans start to reckon with what truly matters in abortion debates.

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What is 'personhood'? The ethics question that needs a closer look in abortion debates

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Controversy over abortion reached a fever pitch on May 2, 2022, when the leaked draft of a U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion was published by Politico. If the draft's key points are reflected in the final ruling, this would strike down Roe v.

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A Big Think article, exploring the experiments that led to the discovery of three cognitive biases.   

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A Big Think article, exploring the experiments that led to the discovery of three cognitive biases.   

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why do most people, regardless of intelligence, fail to examine their hypotheses critically?

KEY TERMS Cognitive biases, Rational decision making, Interpret, Mental shortcuts, Uncertainty, Creativity and critical thinking, False positive

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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Excerpted from THE VOLTAGE EFFECT: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale by John A. List. Copyright © 2022 by John A. List. Published by Currency, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved

In 1974, the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published an academic paper titled "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases." If you ever need a counterexample to the argument that good ideas will fail to catch on without good branding, this is it. In spite of the article's unsexy title-par for the course in academia-Kahneman and Tversky essentially launched a new field with its publication: the study of cognitive biases. With a series of ingenious experiments, they uncovered a constellation of hidden weaknesses in human judgment that steer us away from rational decision-making.

Cognitive biases are distinct from computational errors and other errors that result from misinformation. Mistakes that people make due to misinformation can be corrected by simply providing more accurate information, but cognitive biases are "hardwired" in the brain, which makes them difficult to change and impervious to correction, since the mind's faulty interpretation of accurate information is precisely the problem. Kahneman and Tversky's landmark collaboration has since been chronicled in multiple books-for instance, Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, and Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project -and some of the cognitive biases they studied have even found their way into the cultural lexicon. One of these is called confirmation bias, and it helps to explain why innocent yet avoidable false positives frequently occur.

In the most basic sense, confirmation bias prevents us from seeing possibilities that might challenge our assumptions, and it leads us to gather, interpret, and recall information in a way that conforms to our previously existing beliefs. The reason we have this trapdoor in our thinking is that when individuals are presented with information, their brains are already filled with vast quantities of previously obtained information, social context, and history that project meaning onto the new information. Because we have limited brainpower to process all of this, we use mental shortcuts to make quick, often gutlevel decisions. One such mental shortcut is to essentially filter out or ignore the information that is inconsistent with our expectations or assumptions. This is because science has taught us that reconciling new, contradictory information requires more mental energy than processing new information that is consistent with what's already in our heads, and our brains prefer the easier route.

This tendency might appear counter to our own interests, but in the context of our species's long-ago Darwinian history, confirmation bias makes perfect sense. Our brain evolved to reduce uncertainty and streamline our responses. For our ancestors, a shadow might have meant a predator, so if they assumed it was one and started running, this assumption could save their lives. If they stopped to gather more information and really think about it, they might have ended up as dinner.

While confirmation bias was useful for our species in the distant past and continues to be helpful in certain scenarios, for endeavors that require deep analysis and slow deliberation-like testing an innovative idea we hope to scale-it can be troublesome. It can hamper creativity and critical thinking, which are the pillars of both innovation and high-quality work. It can cause doctors to make lazy diagnoses and pursue the wrong treatment. It can drive policymakers, business leaders, administrators, and investors to pour massive amounts of resources into the wrong initiative or venture. And when it comes to interpreting information, whether in business or science, it can produce false positives.

The British psychologist Peter Wason's classic Rule Discovery Test from the 1960s illustrates confirmation bias in action. He gave subjects three numbers and asked them to come up with the rule that applied to the selection of those numbers. Given the sequence 2, 4, 6, for example, they typically formed a hypothesis that the rule was even numbers. Then the participants would present other sequences of even numbers, and researchers would tell them whether or not those numbers conformed to the rule. Through this process, participants were tasked with determining whether their hypothesis was correct. After several correct tries the participants believed that they had discovered the rule. But in fact they hadn't, because the rule was much simpler: increasing numbers.

The most interesting aspect of this study (and the many others like it) is that almost all subjects only tested number sequences that conformed to their personal hypothesis, and very few tried a number sequence that might disprove their hypothesis. Wason's experiment demonstrated that most people, regardless of intelligence, fail to examine their hypotheses critically. Instead, they try only to confirm them by "fast thinking," using quick heuristics, or mental shortcuts.

Another mental shortcut that has a knack for producing false positives is bandwagon bias. Also known as "herding" or "cascades," the bandwagon effect arises from social influences on our mental processes. Like confirmation biases, bandwagon bias interferes with our ability to accurately recall and evaluate information. But in this case, we are under the unconscious sway of the views and behaviors of others-the social side of decision-making. In 1951, the pioneering social psychologist Solomon Asch developed a now-famous laboratory experiment that can help us understand this kind of groupthink. He recruited students to participate in what they thought was a vision experiment. These students joined several other supposed participants-who were in fact experimental confederates, or scientists masquerading as participants-in a classroom.

Everyone in the room was shown a picture with three lines of varying lengths, in which one line was very obviously longer than others. Each person in the room was asked to state out loud which was the longest line. After the early confederates all identified the wrong line, more than a third of the participants, on average, went along with the clearly incorrect answer; over the course of twelve trials a whopping 75 percent went along with the obviously wrong answer in at least one instance. In contrast, when no confederates were present to tempt them to hop on their bandwagon, virtually all subjects chose the correct answer-demonstrating just how easily our independent judgment can be subsumed by our desire to "fit in" or be "one of the pack." Not only is this a disturbing blow to one's self-image as a freethinking individual, it also has unsettling implications for the science of scaling.

If you look at the bandwagon effect from the perspective of marketers, whose mandate is to create demand for products at scale, this quirk of the human mind is a godsend: the desire to conform that drives so many of our thoughts and actions can be converted into dollar signs. Indeed, there are mountains of research showing how the bandwagon effect shapes consumer choices, such as the clothing we buy (ever wonder why different colors and styles come into fashion every year?), the toys children ask their parents for (remember Tickle Me Elmo? For your sake I hope you don't), and the sports teams we root for and whose apparel we purchase (the top-selling basketball jerseys in the United States historically correspond to the star players of teams that make it to the NBA finals in any given year). The bandwagon effect-or social contagion, as it is sometimes called- can even influence our political leanings, and thus electoral results. While this is all well and good for marketers and strategists hired to nudge people toward certain choices over others, for those creating and launching innovations to benefit society, it can create false positives and lead to the scaling of bad ideas.

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Three cognitive biases that allow bad ideas to scale

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"The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale" John A. List explores the common characteristics of scalable idea.

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A Conversation article looking at how names and labels can help to shape the way we perceive people and things.

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A Conversation article looking at how names and labels can help to shape the way we perceive people and things.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE To what extent do labels and names create ‘motivated seeing’ in knowers?

KEY TERMS Sound symbolism, Names

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Language

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"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

There has always been an interest in how the name of a thing affects our interpretation of it. Does it matter what something or someone is called? Imagine that you are going to meet either "Anne" or "Kate" (or "Owen" or "Kirk"). Would you expect different kinds of people, based on their names? Who would you expect to be kinder? Who would you expect to be more outgoing?

Across three recent experiments conducted with our colleagues from the University of Calgary - Joshua Bourdage and Kristen Deschamps - we found that people with softer-sounding names like "Anne" or "Owen" were expected to be more agreeable, emotional and hardworking; while people with harder-sounding names like "Kate" or "Kirk" were expected to be more outgoing.

Why might the name of a person suggest different kinds of personality? Over the past century or so, research on sound symbolism has demonstrated that people will associate certain language sounds with particular properties. For example, the two words: "maluma" and "takete" were first used in 1929 by linguist researchers. How would you pair them with the two shapes below?

If you're like 90 per cent of the people studied worldwide, you probably paired "maluma" with the round shape, and "takete" with the jagged shape. Something about the sounds in these words (or maybe even how they feel as you say them) makes them seem to go along better with the round or the jagged shape. There have also been demonstrations of certain language sounds seeming like better fits for shapes of certain sizes, colours and even those travelling at certain speeds.

In our research, we asked the question: what about the sounds in a person's name? Will they also lead to certain expectations about the person? Beyond associations with visual properties like shape or size, could the sounds in names also be associated with different personalities?

People with abrupt-sounding names are seen as extroverted

We compared names containing what are called sonorant consonants (e.g. /m/ or /l/) to those containing "voiceless stop consonants" (e.g. /k/ or /t/). Sonorants are characterized by a more smooth and continuous sound, while voiceless stops are more abrupt.

Compare the consonants in "Mom, I'm online now!" to "Pop's kite! It cracked!" These are very different kinds of sounds, and so we asked if names containing these different sounds would be associated with different personalities.

Some examples of names we used include: Kate, Tia, Etta for the voiceless stop names and Anne, Noelle, Laurel for sonorant ones. For men, voiceless stop names included Kirk, Kurt and Tate and sonorant ones were: Owen, Noel and Lou.

We looked at the six personality factors from the HEXACO model of personality: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness (how hardworking and organized a person is) and Openness (to experience). In our first two experiments, participants were asked how much they expected people with either sonorants or voiceless stops in their names to have these different personalities.

In general, we found that participants expected people with names like "Anne" or "Owen" to be high in Agreeableness, Emotionality and Conscientiousness. Conversely, they expected people with names like "Kate" or "Kirk" to be high in Extroversion.

72 made-up names - and how they get judged

In a follow up experiment, we were curious how much this had to do with the names themselves versus the sounds that they contained. For example, maybe participants were just thinking of Captain Kirk when they judged that "Kirk" is highly extroverted.

So, we found uncommon or made up names that still contained sonorants or voiceless stops, but that participants wouldn't associate with existing people. Examples of sonorant names are: Ammel, Nilo and Leonne and examples of voiceless stop names we used were: Triss, Seka and Treek.

We found the same effects once again. Also, if you are ever looking for an original name for a baby, we have 72 ready to go! And we know what kinds of personalities people will associate with them!

A few ideas: Lona was rated as being very agreeable and shy. Kipus was rated as being very extroverted, but not so agreeable.

At this point we were curious - as you the reader probably are too - to know if these associations are reflected in the real world. Are people with sonorants in their names actually kinder than people with voiceless stops in their names?

This sounds outlandish, but there is recent work showing that individuals might change their appearance over time to look like their names. Might it also work for their personalities?

No truth to the judgment

To find out, we tested over a thousand people, collecting information about their personalities and their names. We found that the answer was a resounding "no." None of the associations that we observed in our experiments existed in the real world. There was no evidence that "Annes" are actually kinder than "Kates," or that "Kurts" are more outgoing than "Owens."

But our other experiments show that people might think they are (if all they know about someone is their name).

This again suggests that the effect comes from the sounds of the names and is not inferred from the personalities of real people. So what is it about the sound in "Anne" that makes it seem especially kind? The maluma/takete effect is often explained by a sort of metaphorical extension of the qualities of the sounds or feelings of the words to the shapes. "Maluma" feels softer than "takete" as you say it, and it also involves less abrupt changes in sound.

This matches the smooth outline of the round shape we showed you earlier when we asked you to choose which shape best matches which sound. Some researchers have suggested that something similar may be happening when sound is matched with personality. Maybe the smoothness of sonorants metaphorically matches an agreeable personality, while the quick changes in voiceless stops match the energetic nature of an extroverted personality. We'll need more research to know for sure.

This work helps to answer the age-old question posed by Shakespeare: what's in a name? Our results suggest that names carry information that affects what we expect someone to be like in terms of their personality.

It seems that if "Rose" were to go by another name, she may not seem as sweet.

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Baby naming time? Here's how people judge what's in a name

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"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet There has always been an interest in how the name of a thing affects our interpretation of it. Does it matter what something or someone is called?

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A Big Think video, which considers the extent to which new knowledge is created via asking the right questions. 

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A Big Think video, which considers the extent to which new knowledge is created via asking the right questions. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What role does asking questions play in the creation of new knowledge?

KEY TERMS Questions as answers, Curiosity, Innovation

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Technology

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WARREN BERGER: The idea that questions are becoming more valuable than answers, it seems kind of counterintuitive, but it's actually an idea that's being really embraced these days in Silicon Valley and other areas and other centers of innovation. And the reason why is if you look at a lot of the innovations and breakthroughs today and you trace them back as I did in my research to their origin, a lot of times what you find at the root of it all is a great question, a beautiful question. A great definition I saw for questioning is that questioning enables us to organize our thinking around what we don't know. So, in a time when so much knowledge is all around us, answers are at our fingertips, we really need great questions in order to be able to know what to do with all that information and find out way to the next answer.

HOPE JAHREN: The real joy for me is that I can take things that are already familiar to you and by sharing the story of how I've learned to look at them you can see those things you've been seeing a little differently. So I talk about curiosity driven research as questions that we try to answer. why is that tree growing successfully in that place, but never in that place? That's a curiosity question. It's the kind of question a little kid could come up with. Why don't we have those trees at our house? Now, buried in the answer might be something that could give us better fruit someday that we can sell in the marketplace and feed hungry people with. But that result, that application to growing food for people is buried several steps below that answer. My part of that is to look at that first answer. What is that tree? What does it do? Why is it there? And we call that the curiosity driven piece because that answer will be basically turned over to other experts who know how that might play out into something that is important for the marketplace. But there's no substitute for that first step, for that little kid question.

BERGER: The research. A four-year-old girl is asking as much as 300 questions a day and when kids go into school you see this steady decline that happens as they go through the grade levels to the point where questioning in schools by junior high school is almost at zero. There are a lot of reasons why questioning declines as we get older, but one of the key issues is that in schools we really value the answers and there is almost no value placed on asking a good question. In fact, the teachers now are so stressed to teach to the test and to cover so much material that they really can't even entertain a lot of questions even if they want to. So it becomes a real problem in our school system, in our education system. I think people are starting to address it, try to deal with it. In my research I found a number of teachers, schools that are trying to place more emphasis on questioning.

JONATHON KEATS: I often start any project by asking a naïve question. So naïve that most likely you ask these sorts of questions when you were a child, but at a certain age you learn that these were not appropriate. Or even if you ask them to yourself you never really followed through to try to see what would happen if you were to do something that was kind of patently absurd. But we can still for our own sake, the back of our mind, ask those sorts of questions and let them play out. We can fully develop them and even if it's only in our own mind that we are fully developing them that process can take us to something that is more concrete, something that is more actionable in an adult responsible world that we don't really need to say we came to it through that naïve question.

BERGER: You have someone asking why isn't someone doing this? What if someone tried to do that? I found that questions are often at the root of innovation and that's why in Silicon Valley these days they're actually saying questions are the new answers. But at the same time it's important to note that questions aren't just important to innovators or tech people. They're a survival skill for all of us and that becomes even more true in a time of dynamic change. I mean we've got so much that we have to adapt to. We have to solve problems. We have to deal with change, uncertainty and questioning is the tool, or one of the primary tools that lets you do that.

TIM FERRISS: We are social creatures, hierarchical creatures and we don't want to shame ourselves, humiliate ourselves. But, recognizing that by zigging when everyone else is zagging with that particular context you can actually develop a superpower and that is asking dumb questions. This came up repeatedly when I was interviewing incredible performers, world class performers meaning investors, entrepreneurs, writers, you name it for "Tools of Titans", the new book. And asking dumb questions can take many forms. I'll give you a few examples. Malcolm Gladwell is very good at asking so-called dumb questions. He learned that from his father who is a mathematician, had no intellectual insecurities whatsoever. Just did not care about looking stupid. And he would constantly ask or he would first say I don't understand. Please explain that. I don't understand. Can you explain that. I don't understand. Can you explain that. And he might ask that ten times in a row.

If you look across all of the icons, titans, world class performers that I've interviewed in the wealthy section. If we're dividing them into healthy, wealthy and wise we look at the business side of things. One of the most common patterns that you spot is absurd questions and the power of the absurd question is really something that I've paid a lot of attention to in the last few years. Those types of questions I think are whether it's 10X thinking, 100X, however you frame that could also be a constraint. For instance, if you had to accomplish all of your work or grow your company 2X while working two hours a week. If you had a gun against your head, how would you attempt to do that. These type of absurd questions don't allow you to use your default frameworks for solutions. They don't allow you to use your base of current assumptions to come up with answers. It forces you to think laterally. It forces you to break some of the boundaries on the sphere of comfort that you've created for yourself and that is what makes them, I think, in a way so powerful. And these are not questions, by the way, I think are valuable if you ponder them for ten seconds and go hmm, yeah, maybe I would do this and then move on with your day. I think that journaling as an adjunct to asking these questions is very, very important. So I will sit down very often in the morning, one of my rituals also borrowed from a lot of these people is morning journaling of some type.

And I tend to use either Morning Pages, 5-Minute Journal or just a separate type of freehand sort of goal dissection. This would be a case where I would ask one of those questions and I would write freehand for say three to five pages and drink some tea as I'm doing it. And that is when you will not only come up with interesting ideas, and there might be 90 percent garbage but if you have 10 percent that leads you in an interesting direction that could completely revolutionize your business or your life if you take that seed and do something with it. And that's been the case for me for a very long time. The asking of dumb questions can certainly apply to exploring any topic or interviewing. So Alex Bloomberg who is cofounder of Gimlet Media which has a slew of gigantic podcast hits, just a factory for podcasts, blockbusters. He was the co-creator of Planet Money which is a very successful radio and podcast show. And, for instance, during the subprime economic crisis he asked the question that no one else seemed to be asking, but it was just sitting right in front of millions of people who couldn't quite figure out what the hell happened. And it was why would banks lend money to people who stand next to no chance of paying it back. And so very often the dumb question that is sitting right there that no one seems to be asking is the smartest question you can ask. Not only is it the smartest, most incisive, but if you want to ask it and you're reasonably smart, I guarantee you there are other people who want to ask it but are just embarrassed to do so. And in this case if you can override that embarrassment and be the one who asks dumb questions you can end up having bestselling books. You can end up having a huge blockbuster of a podcast or many. You could end up picking the next Uber. It is a superpower. In a world that is governed by shame and perhaps political correctness, more and more so people are not saying what's on their mind. They're not asking what's on their mind. And the questions here are the most powerful.

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People who have answers to tough questions are often considered the most intelligent, but what if the questions themselves are not the ones worth asking? Here's how asking dumb and naive questions could actually be a more valuable skill. This video is taught by Tim Ferriss, Hope Jahren, Warren Berger, and Jonathon Keats.

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A Guardian podcast examines the origin of the moon landing hoax story, and some of the reasons why people persist in believing in this conspiracy – despite it being a lot more far-fetched than the official truth.

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A Guardian podcast examines the origin of the moon landing hoax story, and some of the reasons why people persist in believing in this conspiracy – despite it being a lot more far-fetched than the official truth.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Students could perhaps explore one or two of the most common arguments against the moon landings being real, then listen to the podcast, and how easily these are debunked – leading them on to a consideration of why people insist on embracing them. Link this to a consideration of the role of social media, the current political climate around the world, and our mistrust of ‘experts’. Focus on the fundamental question asked by Richard Godwin (at around 17 minutes) is: “If you are prepared to swallow all that, what on earth is the basis of your belief in anything?” Is it harmless? Or does it feed into our belief of other more dangerous ideas, such as linking vaccinations to autism?

KEY TERMS Hoaxes, Conspiracy theories

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Politics, Human sciences, History

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It took 400,000 Nasa employees and contractors to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 - but only one man to spread the idea that it was all a hoax. His name was Bill Kaysing.

It began as "a hunch, an intuition", before turning into "a true conviction" - that the US lacked the technical prowess to make it to the moon (or, at least, to the moon and back). Richard Godwin tells Anushka Asthana how Kaysing's self-published 1976 pamphlet We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle sought to provide evidence for his conviction by means of grainy photocopies and ludicrous theories. Yet somehow he established a few perennials that are kept alive to this day in Hollywood movies and Fox News documentaries, Reddit forums and YouTube channels.

And: Geoff Andrews on his part in the Guardian's historic moon landings front page back in 1969 - and how he missed the famous quote

The Guardian is editorially independent. And we want to keep our journalism open and accessible to all. But we increasingly need our readers to fund our work.

Support The Guardian

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Why do so many people still believe the moon landings were a hoax? - podcast

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It took 400,000 Nasa employees and contractors to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 - but only one man to spread the idea that it was all a hoax. His name was Bill Kaysing.

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A Vox article, exploring the implications of the fact that we construct our own versions of reality. 

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A Vox article, exploring the implications of the fact that we construct our own versions of reality. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE These are great visual illusions, which your students can have fun with. But the question it poses is, why do we see them? The article is quite a long one - but it offers quite a lot of analysis on this. What do illusions tell us about our own biases? We’ve seen elsewhere that we live in a polarized world - if this begins with the way in which we perceive the world via our senses, is there any hope for us to overcome the negative implications of political, religious, and other forms of polarization?

KEY TERMS Visual illusions, Polarized world, Perception science, Bias, Social illusion

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Politics, Religion

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“Reality” is constructed by your brain. Here’s what that means, and why it matters.

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What the science of visual illusions can teach us about our polarized world.

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A Big Think video, looking at how to engage with ‘moral grandstanders’ during arguments.

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A Big Think video, looking at how to engage with ‘moral grandstanders’ during arguments.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does our agenda affect our ability to communicate knowledge effectively?

KEY TERMS Moral grandstanding, Self-promotion

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Language

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A Big Think video, looking at how the mind makes new ideas.

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A Big Think video, looking at how the mind makes new ideas.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Can we organise the way we produce new ideas into three categories?

KEY TERMS Innovation, Bending, breaking and blending, ‘Aha’ moments

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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How the mind makes new ideas: Bending, breaking, blending

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How does humanity arrive at great ideas? Simple: we take already great ideas and just arrive at even greater ideas.