The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

I have over 75 highlights from this book. The author does a great job of storytelling and approaching an idea from multiple sides. What I like about this book is the way Will dives into why people believe what they do.

Every one of these people, convinced they are right. None of them convincing the other.

Kate Fox in her book Watching the English. ‘The basic fact has been proved time and time again. As a result of dissonance, they say, ‘most people, when directly confronted with proof that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously.’

But perhaps the most breathtaking trick of all is in how exposure to the opposing side of any argument often makes us even more biased towards our own beliefs.

Thomas Gilovich writes in How We Know What Isn’t So, ‘Exposure to a mixed body of evidence made both sides even more convinced of the fundamental soundness of their original beliefs.’

Psychologist David Perkins conducted a simple study in which he asked a range of participants to think of as many for-and-against reasons as they could for a number of socio-political issues. Naturally, people tended to come up with far more points that backed up their own opinions than ran counter to them – and the better-educated people with the higher IQs came up with the most ways to conclude that their positions were correct. The surprise came when he discovered that their higher levels of intelligence only enabled them to think of arguments for why they might be right. Remarkably, the superior minds were no better at imagining why they might be wrong than those of weaker intelligence.

Here is the Link to the Amazon book.