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.

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

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

The whole point of presenting at a conference is that you can only take an idea so far by yourself. There’s no stigma in receiving negative comments – they’re simply expected. If a discussant were ever entirely positive, it would have so little credibility that the audience would think you had incriminating photos of him.

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.

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 better a car’s brakes, the more you can push on the accelerator.

scaffolding.

Formal procedures include: