{"id":36959,"date":"2024-03-21T16:18:11","date_gmt":"2024-03-21T23:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=36959"},"modified":"2024-03-21T16:18:11","modified_gmt":"2024-03-21T23:18:11","slug":"i-was-wrong-about-this-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/i-was-wrong-about-this-one\/","title":{"rendered":"I was Wrong about this one"},"content":{"rendered":"

I bristled when I started reading Why We\u2019re Wrong About Nearly Everything<\/em> by Bobby Duffy this week. After reading the first several chapters, my reaction was that it was just another book confirming what we already read, things aren\u2019t always what they seem. I thought his reference to Kahneman\u2019s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow<\/em> was too superficial.[1]<\/a> In addition, Duffy\u2019s example of Solomon Asch\u2019s line experiment[2]<\/a> was also in Tim Harford\u2019s book.[3]<\/a> I was not expecting anything new to come from the current reading. However, the more I read, the more I realized my opinion was a rush judgement and that it was my personal bias talking based not on his thesis of his book but in the examples, he chose to explain his research: danger, sex, food, money, safety, and politics. Those were tools to make his points. Yet, these are, also, topics that stir strong emotions.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, I learned that as a public policy professor and researcher, Duffy was well positioned to give a new perspective on the why people think the way they do about those topics. He offered two main classifications: How we think and what we are told.[4]<\/a> I want to focus on what we are told. Today it is easy to blame social media or political rhetoric as the cause of discord. They may play a part. But there is more to it. Sometimes we are told things as children or young adults that are internalized, making it hard to believe otherwise. When I was in high school and thinking about college, the guidance counselor told me he did not think I was college material so he would not spend any time helping me consider colleges. Although I was in the top 10 percent of a class of 1000 and got high marks, my SAT scores were borderline. Thankfully, I had a chemistry teacher who invited me to join him and three other students on a school visit. I ultimately attended that school. As a young person to be the first in my family to go away to college, if the words of the guidance counselor were the only voice I heard, my education would have taken a different trajectory. When Duffy talked about confirmation bias where we look for things that confirm what we already believe, I wonder what would have happened if the voice of the school guidance counselor was the only voice I had heard. Duffy\u2019s theory is that what we are told impacts how we approach different topics. We listen for facts that confirm what we already believe, called confirmation bias.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

Duffy points out that there are other reasons that cause inaccurate thinking. He says that misconceptions or delusions can be caused by faulty knowledge, relying on fast thinking, or missing how our emotions shape what think. We think that things we find impressive must be true. No, the Great Wall of China cannot be seen from outer space.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

Another area that causes people to make poor decisions is pluralistic ignorance. This stems from someone having a wrong idea about how another person or group might think about a given topic. That wrong view might prompt a person to make a wrong decision they do not even like based on the perception of how peers might react. Duffy used Princeton University drinking habits as an example. Drinking had become excessive to the point that the school decided that beer kegs would not be permitted at parties. When independently interviewed, many student responded that they drank because they thought others enjoyed it and they wanted to conform to avoid alienation. Interestingly, the wrong information was held by multiple students all sharing a fear.[7]<\/a> \u00a0I think pluralistic ignorance can lead to herding. Duffy talked about herding instinct when he explained the impact peer pressure had on the Asch experiment where subjects were asked to answer a question but during the process, actors would enter the area and pretend to select wrong answers. Even when the test subject appeared to not think the actors chose the correct answer, the subject selected the answer that corresponded to the one chosen by the actors approximately 33% of the time. The reason for this herding instinct is that long ago, survival was dependent on staying within the protection of the herd.[8]<\/a> We still do it today.<\/p>\n

All three authors Duffy, Harford and Kahneman give examples of next steps that are useful. Harford has a whole book with strategies from being curious, ensuring transparency, to keeping an open mind.[9]<\/a> Kahneman taught about our fast and slow ways of thinking.[10]<\/a> However, the section that impacted me most were the examples Duffy used that can be replicated in different settings, especially the communication campaign for This Girl Can, to encourage physical activity for women and girls that Sport England created. The campaign focused on positivity using personal stories and visuals of real people participating is something that looked fun. People caught the energy and wanted to be part of it. Even just reading about it, I could imagine the excitement of seeing girls having fun on a soccer pitch or groups of women walking a track with friends. The campaign was successful for many reasons but importantly, people caught the energy and positivity[11]<\/a><\/p>\n

This example gives me hope that civilizations do not have to be doomed to fiery speeches and demonization. People can change their thoughts and perceptions if we take an approach that creates a desire to be a part of something good. If it can work with physical activity, I believe more is possible.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Bobby Duffy, Why We\u2019re Wrong About Nearly Everything, A Theory of Human Misunderstanding,<\/em> (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2018), 4.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Duffy, 33.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up,<\/em> (Great Britain: Bridge Street Press, 2021), 144.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Duffy, 9.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Duffy, 60.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Duffy, 4.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Duffy, 66-67.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Duffy, 32-33.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Harford.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, <\/em>(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), <\/em>13.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Duffy, 64-65.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I bristled when I started reading Why We\u2019re Wrong About Nearly Everything by Bobby Duffy this week. After reading the first several chapters, my reaction was that it was just another book confirming what we already read, things aren\u2019t always what they seem. I thought his reference to Kahneman\u2019s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":211,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2640,2007],"class_list":["post-36959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-duffy","tag-dlgp","cohort-dlgp03"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/211"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36959"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36960,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36959\/revisions\/36960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}