This is an interesting question because it has several dimensions. While those who are most likely to change their opinions in the face of disconfirming evidence are drawn from the ranks of the most intelligent, the ability to change an opinion when confronted with new evidence is relatively rare–even among the very gifted. We humans seek validation and confirmation in the opinions we currently hold. In The Intelligence Trap, (a term coined by Edward de Bono ) David Robson observes that people of high intelligence are used to trusting their own judgment over others and are accustomed to being right most of the time. However, this makes them more vulnerable to making huge mistakes when outside their area of expertise. People like Linus Pauling, who made unsubstantiated claims for vitamin C is one example, and physicist Paul Frampton who fell for an internet love scam is another. John Meriwether, and the Nobel laureates, Merton and Scholes who founded LTCM are additional examples.
Dan Kahan of Yale University has coined the term “politically motivated reasoning” to describe a common situation in which people of higher than average intelligence apply their intelligence to rationalize their beliefs. (Kahneman and Tversky, in their experiments revealing innate perceptual biases, used the term “confirmation bias” to describe this natural tendency.) Kahan argues that people of superior intellect often use their cognitive advantage to further reinforce their current beliefs rather than to revisit and challenge them.
The media have discovered the importance of confirmation bias in marketing their news. CNN and MSNBC have picked their demographic and provide news that appeals to a particular ideology, while FOX styles their news to cater to a different demographic. New data mining techniques that enable a network to determine who is watching a television program or visiting an internet site yield “analytics”–statistics that profile the audience and enable them to craft material to satisfy that demographic. They understand confirmation bias and that people tune into television stations or internet sites that support a narrative supporting their current beliefs. But how did confirmation bias become such an important part of human perception when it would seem to make us more vulnerable to error and reduce our survival capability as a species?
In The Descent of Man, Darwin describes how a propensity for cooperation may have provided an advantage in inter-tribal contests for survival.5
When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other … The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows chiefly from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. … Selfish and contentious people will not cohere and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe rich in the above qualities would spread and be victorious over other tribes.
We are members of a species that evolved and survived through our ability to form tribes where loyalty toward those within our tribe (and loyalty to a shared tribal belief) gave us power and the dehumanization of those outside our tribe enabled us to eradicate competitors. As Darwin observed, this was a survival advantage at the tribal level. In recent millennia, our basic nature has not changed and the need for tribal loyalty is so ingrained, that we absorb the beliefs of our tribe and that becomes the basis of our opinions, almost independent of whatever evidence there is to the contrary. In other words, changing our opinions is somewhat disloyal to the tribes to which we belong. This encourages the virtue signaling and unrelenting commitment to a particular ideology that prevailed in the religious wars of previous centuries and is evident today in the polarization of society.
For those who perceive themselves to be especially gifted, the prospect of being wrong is more threatening to their self-worth than in those whose self-image is less dependent on being right. Great minds often become inextricably trapped in dedication to an unsubstantiated belief. This is what Max Planck meant when he said, “Science advances one funeral at a time.” Indeed, many highly intelligent people are mired in confirmation bias, while a larger portion of the less intelligent are unaware that there could be any evidence that might disconfirm their beliefs.
