According to a survey by the University of California, one's own beliefs regarding prejudice have important value.
People tend to listen to others who say things that one would like to believe. At the same time, people who say things that one would rather not believe to be true are ignored. As a result, like-minded people tend to be biased toward others when exchanging opinions with each other, University of California, Santa Barbara. Details were published in the “Journal of the European Economic Association”.
Prejudices: “Motivated Beliefs”
It would be reasonable to assume that people make decisions based only on evidence and experience. However, previous studies had already shown that decision-makers have “motivated beliefs”. They believe things partly because they wish they were true. Motivated beliefs and the reasoning that lead to them can lead to serious prejudices, the researchers say.
It has already been suggested that motivated beliefs could explain the spread of misinformation in online forums. Such beliefs could also explain stock market performance. There is a large amount of objective information about financial marketplaces, yet decision-making groups and sponsorship can lead to bubbles and financial instability.
Experiments in the laboratory with IQ
The researchers examined in the laboratory whether such biases in beliefs increased when people shared them with each other. Participants were assigned to pairs based on their performance on an IQ test. Both therefore had values that were above or below average. These people then exchanged beliefs about an assumption that both wanted to be true, namely that they were in the high IQ group.
The test shows that people with a negative attitude towards their membership in the group with a high IQ became significantly more optimistic if their counterpart also had a more positive attitude. An optimistic person is less likely to change their beliefs when faced with a more pessimistic counterpart. This effect is particularly pronounced among people in the low IQ group. This leads to serious biases here.
The study results suggest that bias amplification occurs because people attribute greater informational value to social signals, which reinforces their pre-existing motivation to believe something. At the halfway point of the experiment, participants received unbiased information about which IQ group they were in. This proved to be very effective in eliminating the biases created by the initial exchange of information. Providing unbiased and reliable sources of information could reduce motivated beliefs within echo chambers and financial markets.
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