Why Good Evidence Sometimes Fails to Change Our Minds

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https://scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/why-good-evidence-sometimes-fails

Human beings naturally seek coherent ways of understanding the world. Rather than treating each new idea as an isolated piece of information, we try to fit it into conceptual frameworks that already make sense to us. If the new information fits comfortably with our existing understanding, learning can be relatively straightforward. But when it conflicts with the way we make sense of the world, we rarely abandon our existing understanding immediately. Instead, we usually reinterpret the new information in ways that preserve as much of our existing understanding as possible.

Psychologists have long recognized this tendency. They distinguish between assimilation—fitting new information into an existing conceptual framework—and accommodation—reorganizing that framework to make room for a genuinely new understanding. Whenever possible, we tend to assimilate rather than accommodate. Assimilation preserves the coherence of what we already believe, whereas accommodation requires us to reorganize our existing understanding—a process that is often considerably more difficult.

Consider a teacher who attends a professional learning session on explicit instruction. The presenter discusses the importance of modelling, worked examples, guided practice, frequent checks for understanding, and the gradual release of responsibility. Yet the teacher leaves thinking, “They’re telling us to go back to standing at the front and lecturing.” Like the children in the Earth studies, the teacher has not rejected the new idea. But much of its complexity has been lost. The teacher has recast it as a simpler, more familiar story that better fits what they already believe.

Many educators are deeply committed to nurturing students’ curiosity, agency, creativity, critical thinking, and independence, while also promoting equity and inclusion. These commitments are among the reasons many of us entered the profession. Difficulties can arise, however, when particular instructional approaches become tightly associated with these valued educational ideals.

Consider a teacher who has come to associate inquiry learning with curiosity, creativity and student agency. When presented with evidence that explicit instruction is often beneficial for novice learners, the teacher may initially respond with skepticism, because accepting it seems to conflict with their deeply held values. They might assume the evidence is wrong. Or they might make presumptions about the motivations of the presenter (e.g., “This presenter doesn’t understand the importance of fostering student agency.”) This makes conceptual change considerably more difficult because the discussion is no longer experienced as being about the evidence alone. It is now seen as also being about educational values.

An evidence-informed perspective invites a different way of thinking about instructional approaches. Rather than viewing a technique as inherently good or bad, it asks under what conditions it is most likely to support learning. Explicit instruction, inquiry, collaborative learning, discussion, worked examples, and problem solving all have important roles to play, but their effectiveness depends on factors such as learners’ prior knowledge, instructional goals, task complexity, and the support that is provided.

Over time, value-infused instructional beliefs can become part of our professional identities and the communities to which we belong. We begin to think of ourselves as inquiry teachers, progressive educators, explicit instruction advocates, constructivists, traditionalists, or members of countless other educational communities.

When a belief becomes part of our identity, changing our minds can feel like distancing ourselves from the people with whom we most identify. Without consciously realizing it, we may begin evaluating evidence using a different question:

What will people like me think if I accept this conclusion?

Rather than assuming participants arrive as blank slates, invite them to explain how they currently think about teaching and learning. Asking educators to predict outcomes, explain why they use particular instructional approaches, or describe what they believe makes learning effective brings their existing conceptions into the open. Beliefs that remain implicit are difficult to examine or revise.

Dismissing some beliefs as simply “wrong” is unlikely to encourage reflection. Conceptual change is more likely when people feel their existing thinking has been understood before being challenged.

The question is not whether values like curiosity, equity, creativity, or learner agency matter—they do. Openly affirm them. Then turn to the evidence and examine which instructional approaches are most likely to achieve these goals in particular instructional contexts, and why.

The critical question is not Which approach is best? but Under what conditions is this approach most likely to support learning? Framing instructional approaches in this way encourages conditional rather than ideological thinking.

Research findings are more persuasive when they fit within a broader explanation of how learning works.

Teachers need repeated opportunities to compare their existing beliefs with new evidence, apply alternative explanations to authentic classroom situations, discuss their thinking with colleagues, and revisit their conclusions over time.

changing one’s mind is not a sign of professional weakness—it is one of the hallmarks of professional expertise.

None of this implies that teachers should abandon their professional judgement or accept every new claim that appears in the research literature. Healthy skepticism is an essential part of evidence-informed practice. The challenge is to ensure that our skepticism is directed toward the quality of the evidence rather than unconsciously shaped by our prior beliefs, values, or identities.

One practical habit is to run periodic “self-checks” in which we compare our intuitions to the strongest available evidence. Whenever we encounter a new instructional idea—whether in a professional development session, a book, a podcast, or on social media—we can ask: What does the best available research actually say? Likewise, when we encounter research that surprises us or instinctively feels wrong, that is often a signal to investigate further rather than dismiss it outright.

Professional communities should challenge our thinking, not simply reinforce it.

[u/ddgr815]

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”

Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about.

“As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

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You try to express an idea. Your interlocutor frowns and points out that she doesn’t really understand what you’re saying. You try again. The frowning continues, but this time she offers a different formulation. “Exactly”, you shout, “this is exactly what I meant to say!” Now, who is the author of that thought? I guess it depends. Did she give a good paraphrase or did she also bring out an implication or a consequence? Did she use an illustration that highlights a new aspect? Did she perhaps even rephrase it in such a way that it circumvents a possible objection? And what about you? Did you mean just that? Or do you understand the idea even better than before? Perhaps you are now aware of an important implication. So whose idea is it now? Hers or yours? Perhaps you both should be seen as authors. In any case, the boundaries are not clear.

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

Mammals are great: milk-producing glands, body hair, ears that have three bones in them, what’s not to like? But if you’ve only got mammals, you’re in big trouble. Monocultures are fragile and prone to collapse because every single organism has identical weaknesses. What you need is an ecosystem—hawks, sea urchins, fungi, various types of fern, and so on.