People will only pay attention to new information when they want to

DOI:10.1093 / jeea / jvab035

Explanation

In the conclusion of this study, the researchers showed that "we tend to listen to people who tell us what we want to believe and ignore those who tell us what we don't want to believe. The result is that like-minded people tend to be prejudiced against each other when they exchange beliefs with each other.

In general, people's thinking when making decisions is based solely on evidence and experience, but past research studies have shown that decision makers have "motivated beliefs," meaning that they are motivated to make decisions based on evidence and experience.

This means that people believe things for the reason that they want those things to be true, and they do.

And motivated beliefs can create serious biases.

The researchers used a laboratory experiment to investigate whether such belief biases become more severe when people exchange these beliefs with one another. Participants were paired up based on their IQ test scores, so that either both members' scores were above the median, or both scores were below the median. Then the subjects decided to exchange beliefs about the proposition that they both wanted to believe to be true.

The experiment revealed that people who were pessimistic about belonging to the high IQ group tended to become significantly more optimistic when matched with a more optimistic counterpart, but observed that an optimistic person was not likely to change his beliefs if matched with a more pessimistic counterpart.

These results suggest that people in environments that produce particularly severe biases are particularly powerful when they belong to a low IQ group.