Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts: Here’s Why Its so Hard to Change Someone’s Mind

16 September, 201917 September, 2019Marissa

A few weeks ago, I was in a conversation with someone who quoted Ben Shapiro saying, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” The tension between facts and feelings is a topic that’s been coming up quite a bit in discussions recently for me, as I’ve talked with people who are frustrated by how many people today ignore scientific research related to several issues that I don’t want to get into right now. My reason for bringing this up is that listening to these comments prompted a related thought.

Feelings don’t care about your facts.

You can have all the research in the world to back you up but when feelings are involved people (as a whole) just don’t care. You can’t root out deeply help opinions by inundating people with logical reasoning. It’s like if you’ve ever spilled cooking oil on your clothes and then tried to scrub it out with water. The facts just run right off because they doesn’t mesh with what we already hold true.

“As a result of the well-documented confirmation bias, we tend to undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them. We filter out inconvenient truths and arguments on the opposing side. As a result, our opinions solidify, and it becomes increasingly harder to disrupt established patterns of thinking.” — “Facts Don’t Change People’s Minds. Here’s What Does” by Ozan Varol

At its most simple, “Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. When people would like a certain idea or concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true.” Once we get an idea in our heads, we tend to hold on tight to information that supports it and ignore or reject anything that would threaten this idea. These tightly-held ideas can be anything from a political view, to an understanding of how the world works, to a belief about yourself (“What Is Confirmation Bias?” by Shahram Heshmat Ph.D.).

It’s Not Just “Them”

We tend to think that we’re right and other people who disagree with us are wrong. We can easily see confirmation bias at work in others, and many of us are more than happy to point that problem out and offer correction.

This isn’t just a problem with other people, though. It’s a problem with you and me too. We all have confirmation bias about the things we believe. We all filter-out opposing information and gravitate toward the things that agree with us. No matter how rational and fact based we think we are, we’re also influenced by confirmation bias. If we want to understand why it’s so hard to change people’s minds we need to recognize what’s happening in ourselves as well as in them. Read more →

Taking Responsibility for Our Own Feelings and Learning to Talk about Complicated Issues in Today’s Society

26 August, 201926 August, 2019Marissa

I love getting into deep, complicated discussions with people. For example, what are the political and social implications of the fact that people who score high in the personality trait Conscientiousness tend to identify as conservative and those who score high in Openness tending to identify as liberal? Or what does it mean to “live your truth” and can one do that as a Christian while still accepting God’s truth as the absolute moral authority?

Talking about those sorts of things (or even just listening) makes me come alive. This is one reason I love podcasts that deep-dive into complicated topics. Two of the most recent were “The Heart of the Abortion Debate” from Crossway Podcast and “Radical Self-Discovery with Jator Pierre” from the Awaken With JP Sears Show. On this latter one, they opened with talking about “this interesting, tight-knitted, hyper-constricted PC culture” and the question, “Why the hell do you think we’re so PC here in 2019?”

This latter question went in a curious direction that I’ve been pondering for more than a week now. Because PC topics are so emotionally charged, “many of us become emotionally blinded and we don’t bring in a lot of logic,” to quote Jator Pierre. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most of us don’t know how to take responsibility for how we feel or how to effectively communicate and share in a back-and-forth dialogue.

Taking Away Voices

Wikipedia says the term political correctness “is used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society.” It sounds good in theory, but in practice it has turned into a culture where certain people try to silence any ideas or words that offed them without caring how that might affect others outside the PC-protected groups. Instead of seeing words as vehicles to communicate different viewpoints and facilitate dialogue, they see words as violent and react defensively.

“Not many of us are taught how to communicate, how to share, how to dialogue, how to hear, how to reflect, and how to notice when we’re emotionally charged to be able to take maybe a step back for a second or two to feel what’s coming up, to notice what’s coming up, and then to continue on with a dialogue. Most of us go into a defended posture, in my experience, and then go on the attack.” — Jator Pierre

It also has the side-effect of encouraging the offended person blame others for how they feel. We’re heading toward a culture where people think they have a right to avoid being offended by someone else. What they don’t realize or care about is that their refusal to hear offensive things leads to them hurting and/or shutting down others who don’t agree with them. Instead of bringing people together the PC movement creates further polarization and enmity. Read more →

Seeing Every Side In Every Situation

27 March, 201726 March, 2017Marissa

INFJ and INTJ personality types are known for being able to see multiple sides to a given situation. Both these types lead with a mental process called Introverted Intuition (Ni). Personality Hacker nickames this process “Perspectives.” It functions as an advanced pattern recognition process that analyzes what’s going on inside the human mind. But it’s not just focused on an individual’s take on how the world works. To quote Personality Hacker’s Antonia Dodge, “users of Introverted Intuition aren’t married to their own perspectives. They can take a meta-perspective and understand the ways in which we’re the same and different on a cerebral level.”

So what does this look like in real life? Let’s take politics as an example.

Politics (yup, we’re going there)

Seeing Every Side In Every Situation: INFJ and INTJ Perspectives | marissabaker.wordpress.com — Photo credit: David Grandmougin via StockSnap

Most of the people I’m around in real life are strong conservatives, but I’m also in contact with quite a few liberals online. I get to see arguments, news articles, and personal perspectives from both sides of the ideological divide.

I see people who were vocalizing hate for Obama up in arms about how the liberals are treating Trump. I see people who told conservatives to get over it and be happy with Obama as their duly elected president protesting Trump in droves. I’ve seen conservative news articles vilifying Obama for his expensive vacations replaced by liberal news articles condemning Trump for the exact same thing. It just goes on and on and and both sides seem completely blind to the fact that they’re reacting in such similar ways.

My Introverted Intuition lets me notice patterns like this. More than that, I can understand people on both sides without really feeling like I identify 100% with either (except on a very few individual issues). And that makes it hard to discuss politics with most of the people who want to talk about politics. If you’re trying to find some middle ground and encourage others to step outside their own perspectives, you might find both sides fighting you as strongly as they’d been fighting each other.

The Few, The Frustrated, The Misunderstood

There aren’t all that many people operating with Ni as their dominant mental process. According to the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, combined they only make up 3 to 7 % of the total population. Our minds don’t work the same way as most other people. That’s one reason we often feel misunderstood. On top of that, our ability to climb inside other peoples’ perspectives gives us insight into others’ minds that not many people can match in return or even fully understand (though some ENFJs and ENTJs who’ve developed their auxiliary Ni, and maybe some ISTPs and ISFPs who use tertiary Ni, might come close).

Our rather unique way of looking at the world can make us feel lonely and frustrated. We might feel like we don’t fit in with certain groups because we can also understand the perspective of the people they disagree with. We might have people reject us because we can only agree with them 75% instead of 100%. We might hide our true opinions or the questions we think about from the people we care for so they won’t feel like we’re attacking them.

Most Ni dominant types are curious about how the world works. They want to ask questions to see where other people stand and understand different viewpoints. We like to throw out “what if …?” questions and see what happens. We’ll also play “devil’s advocate” in arguments to refine our thoughts on a given topic and help the person we’re talking with refine their’s. Other people can misinterpret these things as threatening to their own convictions or as an attempt to sabotage the status quo.

Another Perspective: Ni As A Superpower

I actually love this side of my INFJ personality. At least, I do now. When I was younger, I felt odd because I didn’t feel as firmly convicted about most issues as the people around me seemed. I felt that sharing my questions and voicing alternate opinions wasn’t encouraged. But my second quarter of college, I met a professor who actually encouraged me to write my questionings and unpopular viewpoints into my essays even when I completely disagreed with him. And he, and others, kept doing that for the next four years.

Some time after that is when I started getting interested in studying Myers-Briggs types, so I discovered this ability to adopt a meta-perspective is a natural part of my personality. Studying personality types also helped me understand why so many people see intuitive idea generation as threatening. Once I understood that, I could start phrasing my shared thoughts in a way that appealed to other personality types more.

One of the great strengths of the Ni types is that we bring alternative perspectives to the table and we can learn to present these perspectives in a way that appeals to the different personalities. We have a gift that can help build bridges between people on intellectual and emotional levels. And that’s a pretty cool superpower.

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It Doesn’t Matter Who’s President. What Matters Is How You Act

21 November, 20163 February, 2021Marissa

So the election happened a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately, one of the two candidates won. We all knew it was going to happen. Most of us wouldn’t have been all that happy either way. There are plenty of people who would have been scared and upset with either outcome. And of course there are some on both sides who’d have been dancing for joy when their candidate won because they honestly thought they’d be a good president.

My title is a bit misleading, I suppose. It does matter who the president is because that impacts the future course of our nation, how other nations see us, and the policy that affects every day life for many people. But now that Donald Trump is president, we have to live with it. He won fairly according to the rules set up in our country. If Hillary Clinton had won, I’d be writing pretty much the exact same thing.

click to read article, "It Doesn't Matter Who's President. What Matters Is How You Act" | marissabaker.wordpress.com — Photo Credit: “DSC_0844” by Vicky, CC BY via Flickr

But though it does matter who’s president, it is shocking to see how many people are taking their candidate’s loss as a personal affront and the way they’re vilifying other Americans who disagreed with them. If you supported Trump, you’re therefore a racist misogynist who hates Muslims and women. If you supported Clinton, you’re therefore an air-head liberal not in touch with reality and careless of society’s moral decline. And on and on we go, painting people we don’t know with broad bush strokes according to how we view the candidate they supported.

That has to stop. We are not our political parties. We don’t always vote for someone because we agree with all their actions or every view they hold. (Just in case you’re wondering, I voted 3rd party because I couldn’t in good conscience choose either Clinton or Trump. My alternate plan was not voting at all.) Some people who voted for Trump did so because they preferred his policies even though they couldn’t stand his personal morals and don’t share the bigoted views that have been associated with his campaign. Some people who voted for Clinton did so because they thought she was the less-terrifying option or agreed with her policies, not because they wanted a female president at any cost or permission to slaughter babies.

But if you go out and use Trump’s election as an excuse to harass a young black woman walking at her college or suggest a Muslim woman hang herself with her headscarf, then you become exactly the type of bigot that scares non-Trump supporters. And if you sit in your dorm room sobbing until you vomit or march around shouting that he’s not your president because you didn’t get your way in the election, you become the self-entitled liberal that disgusts non-Clinton supporters.

How you and I choose to act in response to the election results has become so much more important than who won and who lost. If we want to hold our country and the new president to a higher standard, we must first start by holding ourselves to a higher standard. Don’t want to live in a country where people are harassed for how they look, think, or worship? Then don’t go around harassing people who disagree with you and stand up against such harassments whenever you can. Dislike the idea of someone being thrown out of your country for speaking their mind or living life how they choose? Don’t threaten someone else’s liberties of expression and belief.

It’s become startlingly obvious to people throughout America that there are plenty of Americans who don’t agree with us. Yet we still have to live together. We need to find a way to disagree without attacking each other. We need to figure out how to work together for a more united society while still respecting others’ differences. And we need to give our new president a chance to live up to his promises to “bind the wounds of division,” “work together and unify our great country,” and “deal fairly with everyone, with everyone — all people and all other nations” as we “seek common ground, not hostility; partnership, not conflict.”

Whether or not you believe him is moot at this point. Encourage him to actually do it instead of pretending he’s not president. And meanwhile, remember to be the change you want to see in the world. Or, to quote Gandhi more directly, “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” Instead of adapting to the growing culture of hate, let’s dig deep inside ourselves and stand for goodness.

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