Is That a Bear in the Woods?

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If you feel some something happens in the world that gies you a negative emotion. Some anxiety starts to come up. It could be for really good reasons, but it could also be because you have some sort of prejudice ore some sort of political bias. You can radicalize yourself by snipping your connections away from people who don't share at the attitudes being expressed in that community. The fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death. And if your reputationis on the line, if the ship is going down, you'll put your reputation in the lifeboat and you'll ou'l let your body got to the bottom of the ocean.

To the Founding Fathers it was free libraries. To the 19th century rationalist philosophers it was a system of public schools. Today it's access to the internet. Since its beginnings, Americans have believed that if facts and information were available to all, a democratic utopia would prevail. But missing from these well-intentioned efforts, says author and journalist David McRaney, is the awareness that people's opinions are unrelated to their knowledge and intelligence. In fact, he explains, the better educated we become, the better we are at rationalizing what we already believe. Listen as the author of How Minds Change speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why it's so hard to change someone's mind, the best way to make it happen (if you absolutely must), and why teens are hard-wired not to take good advice from older people even if they are actually wiser.