George Bernard Shaw famously said that “progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything,” and yet in our modern world, it seems people’s opinions are becoming more and more entrenched, even in the face of seemingly blatant evidence to the contrary.

A recent study from UC Berkeley explored whether feedback or hard evidence were more influential in forging our opinions, and especially in forging the belief that our opinions are right.  The study found that feedback from others was far more influential in convincing us of our beliefs than hard evidence was.

“If you think you know a lot about something, even though you don’t, you’re less likely to be curious enough to explore the topic further, and will fail to learn how little you know,” the authors explain.

The authors believe this cognitive delusion can unfold in all manner of ways, both in our work and personal lives, with the likes of social media echo chambers a good example of how we can fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we do.

“If you use a crazy theory to make a correct prediction a couple of times, you can get stuck in that belief and may not be as interested in gathering more information,” they continue.

Influencing learning

What is it that tends to underpin this confidence?  Is it hard, cold facts about the subject matter, or is it the feedback we receive from those around us?  The researchers recruited several hundred adults and asked them to examine various combinations of colored shapes on the computer.  The volunteers were asked to identify which of the shapes were ‘daxxy’ shapes, which of course is a made up object invented by the researchers for this experiment.

The volunteers were not given any clues regarding the shape or characteristics of a daxxy, so they were largely forced to blindly guess which of the 24 shapes it might be.  After each guess they were given feedback, and after each guess they were asked to report how confident they were in their answer.

The results revealed that people consistently seemed to base their own confidence on their last few guesses in the game rather than the full range of information they’d collected throughout the experiment.

“What we found interesting is that they could get the first 19 guesses in a row wrong, but if they got the last five right, they felt very confident,” the researchers say. “It’s not that they weren’t paying attention, they were learning what a Daxxy was, but they weren’t using most of what they learned to inform their certainty.”

A much better solution is to obviously take in all the information you have available to you so that you arrive at a more balanced output.

“If your goal is to arrive at the truth, the strategy of using your most recent feedback, rather than all of the data you’ve accumulated, is not a great tactic,” the authors conclude.