Teachers,
An op-ed from the NYTimes confirms the view that reason is not a tool of truth-seeking, but rather one of argumentation. Even 'facts' get disregarded: "You might expect that people’s views would soften and that divisions between groups would get smaller. That is not what usually happens. On the contrary, people’s original beliefs tend to harden and the original divisions typically get bigger. Balanced presentations can fuel unbalanced views ... What explains this? The answer is called “biased assimilation,” which means that people assimilate new information in a selective fashion. When people get information that supports what they initially thought, they give it considerable weight. When they get information that undermines their initial beliefs, they tend to dismiss it."
Biased assimilation acts to filter out what we neither expect nor want to hear. Unfortunately, the 'wanting' occurs well below the level of cognitive awareness; we may not realize how selective our perceptive and cognitive processes are.
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