Alaskan Range: Mistakes Are....
...we all adore our preconceived notions. Yet another cited study looked at brain-scans of people watching politicians they agreed and disagreed with. Test subjects easily saw contradictions in statements made by people they opposed politically, but not in those they supported....
Columnist Greg Hill cites research which confirms that we hear what we want to hear.
Philip Ball describes in a new article from Nature.com titled "How Words Get the Message Across" how a new MIT study has revealed that linguists' thinking about the way words communicate has been wrong for decades. Back in the 1940s, George Kinglsy Zipf was a linguist and probability expert at Harvard, and his study of the frequency with which words are used led to Zipf's Law. This, as Ball puts it, claimed that "the length of a word was associated with how often it was used." In other words (ahem), the shorter the word, the more frequently it's used.
"Zipf believed," Ball writes, "that the relationship between word length and frequency of use stemmed from an impulse to minimize the time and effort needed for speaking and writing, as it means we use more short words than long ones." That made sense and was the consensus for sixty years, but an MIT team led by Stephen Piantadosi has found that "longer words tend to carry more information." In short, words get shorter when they're less informative. "Now," for example, can mean "in a bit" compared to "immediately," which implies more urgency.
Despite the vagaries in communication, haven't you wondered how otherwise bright people sometimes refuse to see the plain, compelling rectitude of your position? An article in the British Medical Journal cites several American studies that claim, "What we hear is often very different from what we are told." One experiment used four versions of an article about the cause of diabetes to look at how "people presented with balanced arguments place weight on those they already agree with." The four articles were identical except one said nothing about the causes, and the others blamed genes, personal lifestyle choices, and social determinants. Democrats and Independents tended to agree with social determinism, while that argument carried no weight with Republicans.
How can this be? Well, we all adore our preconceived notions. Yet another cited study looked at brain-scans of people watching politicians they agreed and disagreed with. Test subjects easily saw contradictions in statements made by people they opposed politically, but not in those they supported. Our brains refuse to see obvious flaws due to "a combination of switching off neurons associated with distress and switching on those associated with positive emotions. Perversely, the latter provided a 'positive reinforcement' for making biased decisions." In short, our brains reward us with nice little chemical boosts when we ignore flaws in opinions we cherish, thereby "giving new meaning to the term, 'political junkie.'"
This explains a lot of the politics in Texas, where legislative leaders have forwarded a budget that cuts state support of community libraries from $16.2 million to $119,000, reduces library resource sharing from $9.5 million to $582,000, and cuts the Texas State Library by 50 percent. Consequently, they'll lose $8 million in federal library support funding, and their libraries' services will be severely damaged or lost altogether, just as library services are needed more than ever by their cash-strapped constituents.
The Texas Legislature and Professor Zipf aren't the only mistaken people in our country. An American newspaper correction notice cited in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations read, "Instead of being arrested, as we stated, for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene lamp after her, the Reverend James P. Wellman died unmarried four years ago." And don't get me started about the adulterated paste called "oatmeal" by fast food merchants. Quaker Strawberries and Cream Instant Oatmeal, for instance, contains no strawberries, no cream, twelve times the sugar in Quaker Old Fashioned Oats, and half the fiber. There's no comparison to the delicious, chewy-crunchy natural oatmeal laced with Splenda and chopped almonds that I enjoy every morning, but I confess to once having purchased the Quaker goop in a pinch.
I've easily made as many clever mistakes as dumb ones, and at a disturbingly steady rate. So I take heart in the words of Carl Jung, who said "Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not."
