The Effects of Belief Whack-a-Mole on Autism

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Ditto explained that this same game of belief whack-a-mole appears when we try to dissuade people from misconceptions and bias when discussing politics. He said motivated reasoning dances on this tightrope of adaptiveness in the sense that if we only believed what we wanted to believe, that would be adaptively problematic. Ditto: "There's a lot of things that I'd like to believe, and some of those might get me in trouble"

If you try to correct someone who you know is wrong, you run the risk of alarming their brains to a sort-of existential, epistemic threat, and if you do that, when that person expends effortful thinking to escape, that effort can strengthen their beliefs instead of weakening them.

In this episode you'll hear from three experts who explain why trying to correct misinformation can end up causing more harm than good.

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