Daniel Kahneman - You believe in arguments that fit your beliefs

Why do people so rarely change their minds on important matters?
Why do people think that they are reasonable and think that those who disagree with them are not reasonable?
How and why do people think they know things?
In everyday language there are really two conditions for using the word know. One is the absence of doubt and the other is that the proposition in which you believe must be true. We can't say that he knows something that's wrong. But in fact subjectively the only thing that matters is the absence of doubt. Therefore we talk about subjective knowledge, because it doesn't matter if the proposition in which you believe is true or not. There is no subjective difference between true and false beliefs and there are many false beliefs. We think we know many things that in fact are not the case.
There are many different ways of knowing things. People who are deeply religious and not particularly scientific know things (know in terms of absence of doubt = subjective knowledge) and there is no psychological difference between the way they know things and the way that we consumers of science know things. The reason you believe in most of the things that you believe is that you have been told that by people you trust and exactly the same is true for religious people.
Subjective knowledge is to be explained by how are our beliefs produced without doubt. Reasoning comes with logical coherence. That's the type of coherence that's associated with operations of reasoning. So if you believe that if a is true, then B must be true and if you believe that a is true, then you also believe that B is true. But our mind actually really works with a different notion of coherence, which is associated and emotional coherence. Where ideas are coherent not because one follows from the other logically but because they fit. Daniel Kahneman gives an example of idea that doesn't fit. The idea that Adolf Hitler really liked children and dogs and he was extremely nice to children. We feel real discomfort when we hear that. Something gets very uncomfortable in the processing because we get a picture that we haven't managed to make coherent. Another example Daniel Kahneman gives is a famous experiment by Paul Rosen in which you show people a glass of orange juice, and you give them a sticker and you ask them to write the word cyanide on the sticker and to stick the sticker on the orange juice and then you invite them to drink the orange juice and they don't want to. That is because of fit. They know perfectly well that the orange juice is not dangerous, they just don't feel like doing it. The way that our mind achieves the coherence is in part by suppressing ambiguity. When ambiguous stimuli are presented, we tend to perceive one interpretation and not to perceive another. This is called priming. We become conscious of only one interpretation. It is chosen automatically, but it is chosen intelligently in context. Daniel Kahneman also gives his favourite example of priming from his personal experience. It's about how he thought that his wife said something else, because it fitted the context. It did not occur to him that the facts were different and it did not occur to him that she simply had said something else.
When we encounter arguments, we think that we have beliefs because of arguments, but in fact it works the other way around. We believe in arguments because we believe their conclusions. The beliefs and the opinions come first and then we believe in arguments that are psychologically coherent or cohesive with the conclusions we believe in. To demonstrate that Daniel Kahneman give an example in which students are asked if this is a valid argument: "All roses are flowers, some flowers fade quickly, therefore some roses fade quickly." It's not. It is entirely possible that all the flowers that fade quickly are not roses. 80% of students at good University said this argument is valid. The reason that they said the argument is valid is because the conclusion is true. The conclusion governs the beliefs in the arguments. People generally reason backwards. When we believe in a conclusion, we believe in the argument. But we do not believe what we believe primarily because of the reasons that come to our mind, we believe what we believe primarily because we have been told to believe these things by people that we believe and trust. That realization is actually quite difficult, because subjectively that's not the way it feels.

This audio clip was taken and edited from the following video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMvJhR-WQfw

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