You See What Ya' Wanna' See And You Hear What Ya' Wanna' Hear

New research just in!  People pay no attention to facts that challenge their preconceived ideas.  That's a ground shaker isn't it?

The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale has made this discovery.  It basically boils down to this.  Give people access to the facts about any issue and they then filter them through their cultural belief system, basically picking and choosing the facts they will accept to bolster their own belief system.

Give rugged individualists facts about climate change and tell them that the solution to global warming is to regulate industrial pollution and many then reject the climate science. But when you tell them that more nuclear power will fix the problem, says social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, "they said, you know, it turns out global warming is a serious problem. It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," Braman says.

The same can be said for the second group called "communitarians."  When given the same information about climate change, they say that industry needs to be regulated.  When told that nuclear power can help, they reject that.

Braman adds, "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms."

"Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values," says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project.

From vaccines to nanotechnology to climate change to gay parenting to whatever, we have our minds made up going in and nothing's going to change them, especially nothing as relevant as pesky little facts.

Here's a link to an article in Nature that delves a little deeper into this troubling situation.