Why People Won’t Change Their Minds on Covid-19
Our brains block out contradictory facts without us even realizing it, new research reveals
People love to consume information that supports their views and ignore facts that don’t. Scientific experiments have confirmed this “confirmation bias” over and over. You might be confident that you don’t do this, that it’s a problem only for those other people, the inflexible type. You’d be wrong, new research shows. And you might be surprised to learn that in some cases, you probably don’t even consciously realize that your brain is blocking contradictory information on your behalf.
Confirmation bias can get in the way of mutual understanding on politics, religion, and just about any controversial topic you can imagine, including whether to wear facemasks during a deadly pandemic or how quickly to “get back to normal” after an economic shutdown.
Meanwhile, an infodemic of Covid-19 myths and misinformation is being planted by obscure special-interest websites that pose as legitimate news sources, then shared by other posers (there are at least 132 such websites, according to the watchdog NewsGuard). These articles and memes play right into our existing biases, says Thomas Davenport, PhD, a professor of information technology and management at Babson College.
