May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It

Dan Kahan’s explanation is the cultural cognition hypothesis. People respond to a message based not on the evidence behind it but on the cultural identity it signifies.

Knowing that criticism will come your way drives you to make your idea as strong as possible beforehand. Researchers will do all they can to pick holes in their own paper before sending it to a discussant. This practice is known as a premortem. In a post-mortem, a decision has flopped and you try to figure out why. In a pre-mortem, you imagine that

The President blamed their hubris – ‘Those sons of bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work’ – and repeatedly told his wife, ‘Oh my God, the bunch of advisors that we inherited!’ But he saved the greatest blame for himself. The advisors were just that – merely advisors – and the ultimate decision was his. He’d b

agree with the cure. Another study co-authored by Kahan found that right-wing participants were more willing to accept that climate change is a serious threat if the remedy is geoengineering – launching solar reflectors, injecting aerosol particulates into the stratosphere and capturing carbon to store it in deep geological formations – rather than

The researchers found that Democrats prepared better for the meeting, as measured by a more comprehensive essay, when they were contradicted by a Republican rather than a fellow Democrat; for Republicans, it was the same (but with the parties switched). These results suggest that social diversity prompts us to work harder to address disagreement. I

A final micro-process is to ask those with strong opinions to articulate them in detail. Having to explain something precisely can make people realize they don’t know it as well as they thought, opening them up to different views. Yale psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil demonstrated this with a study.13 They took topics such as how a toi

Amazon thus practises the silent start : it releases the pre-reading only at the beginning of the meeting, and everyone spends half an hour reading it quietly.|| That way, juniors won’t know their superiors’ views, so what they share are genuinely their own opinions.

to create more informed, smarter-thinking societies, public messaging needs to disentangle evidence from identity.

But what matters is diversity and inclusion – creating the conditions for diverse colleagues to share their different viewpoints. Without inclusion, an organization will never fully realize the benefits of its diversity.