Study Finds People Are Consistently and Confidently Wrong About Those With Opposing Views
upstart writes:
Study finds people are consistently and confidently wrong about those with opposing views:
Despite being highly confident that they can understand the minds of people with opposing viewpoints, the assumptions humans make about others are often wrong, according to new research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London, in partnership with the University of Oxford.
"Poorer representation of minds underpins less accurate mental state inference for out-groups" was published in Scientific Reports. The research explores the psychology behind why people come to the wrong conclusions about others, and suggests how society could start to change that.
In all, 256 participants were recruited from the U.S. and split evenly between those with left- and right-leaning political views. They were presented with various political statements (e.g. Immigrants are beneficial to society) and asked to rate on a 5-point scale how much they agreed with it (i.e. strongly agree to strongly disagree).
For each statement, the participant would then be presented with someone else's response to the same statement. If the two shared a similar opinion, they were deemed "in-group" to one another. If the two held different opinions, they were deemed "out-group" to each other.
The participant was then asked to predict the other person's response on a second statement (e.g. all women should have access to legal abortion), and to state their confidence in their answer, from "Not at all' to "Extremely."
Participants could then choose to receive up to five more of the other person's responses to different statements to help the participant build up a better idea-or "representation"-of the other person's mind. After receiving any further information, participants could update their initial prediction and reclarify their confidence on their final answer.
Analysis of the data found that, even though participants were prepared to seek out as much-and often more-information about someone they disagreed with, their predictions were consistently incorrect, even after receiving further information about them.
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