Chapter 4 of Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe is titled “What to Believe.” You could retitle it “Let’s get Bayesian.” The author basically outlines the reality that people do “plausibility checking” on new information, matching it up to their prior beliefs, and updating based on the credibility of the source or the persuasiveness of the information.
But first, I need to mention that he talks about the “backfire effect”. This is basically the counter-intuitive finding that when presenting disconfirming evidence your beliefs actually get stronger. I first encountered this in 2003 in In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. But the public is more familiar with Nyhan et al. and its relevance to political science. That is, arguments that should falsify a position only make people more convinced in that position. I’ve heard that this is probably highly overstated, and Not Born Yesterday gets in that. In a replication study of the backfire effect, it turns out that only 1 out of 30 cases replicated. Though there is probably something there, it’s not nearly as big of a deal as psychologists were making out in the 2000’s.
And that’s good. In chapter 4 the author points out that new information that makes your worldview more coherent is immediately absorbed and understood. Additionally, when people are given time to reason or discuss, topics then they tend to converge on a more accurate perspective. The major lesson of this chapter seems to be that though there are instances of biased reasoning or irrationality, on the whole people actually do move toward true beliefs when given the chance and when they make an effort.
Of course, there are cases when collective intuition can lead one astray. The author gives Creationism as an example. Basically, these are cases where the issues are abstruse, and normal humans are flying blind.
So how realistic is the society depicted *Chung Kuo* by David Wingrove?