Don't Give Up on Facts

07-02-2022 • arclein

What is uncontroversial is that people are more likely to believe news content that supports their political view of the world. For some, this alone counts as evidence of partisan bias affecting reasoning. Pennycook and Rand note, however, that other influences can explain this. For example, whether we accept new information depends on the beliefs that we already have. When we encounter some new information that violates what we already believe, we have stricter criteria for accepting it. This is not bias?"it's a sensible thing to do. A widely accepted formal structure of reasoning used in artificial intelligence is Bayesian reasoning, which explicitly incorporates influences of "priors"?"the prior beliefs you have?"when evaluating the truth of new information. So when somebody disbelieves something true, or believes a piece of fake news, it might not be their reasoning that is impaired. Their reasoning might be functioning as it should, but because of their prior beliefs, the