Data Vis or: Why you don't believe in facts, and how to fix it
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Rost, Lisa Charlotte
In the 18th century, we believed that a society should be based on reason. In the 19th century, we started to collect that reason in form of data. Now we are in the 21st century, where we proudly look at the enormous mountain of data we gathered. "Impressive," our old ancestors say. "Your society must be really reasonable." And we stare back at them, and then we look away, ashamed.
 Hello, everyone. I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Are my slides up there? They want to talk about a very special person. You. That's you. That's also me. It's everyone of us. We're all standing on the ground of hard facts. It's like the bone in that hard thing. They are more like concepts with different levels of certainty. For example, we don't know that climate change is real, but we know that 97% of climate experts agree that humans are responsible for causing global warming. When we accept these facts, we start to believe in them. Beliefs are super important. Beliefs make us marry people. Beliefs make us find companies and do research projects and go to church. Beliefs are also very important for ethical discussions. Because we need to agree on what's happening before we can decide what we should do. But it feels like lots of people these days don't go to the second step. Lots of people these days seem to believe other facts than us. It almost seems like they're setting on another crown of truth. They have another reality. That's of course not the case. They have the same reality as we do. This is a big question I want to answer and I was really curious about that. Why do they believe in things that are not true? I have a personal interest in that. My daily job is to point to the facts. I'm visualising data and designing information. I'm often taking data from the census or from scientific studies and say, look. Look at these. Let's have a good discussion based on these facts. And I'm then publishing these data on different media. These are some media I've worked with. So today I want to answer that question. How can I be a better data visualisation? Because I have a problem if people don't believe the facts that I'm showing to them. And I want to answer these questions in three parts. First I want to explain where false beliefs actually come from. Then I want to go on and explain why it's so hard to get rid of them. And then we might explore how to believe more true things. So the answer to the first question where do false beliefs come from is obvious. Of course you all know it. It's fake news. All right. Fake news is a thing we've all talked about a lot. But I actually think that sharing constructed information, constructed realities on social media is more like a symptom of the whole problem and not the cause. I would argue that one of the main causes of why we believe false things is actually tribalisation. We are all social animals. Like humans are extremely social people. And social support is more important for us than believing in anything that's like super far away, like climate change. We first want to make sure that people understand who we are. Like we want to define ourselves. And beliefs and information can be a marker of identity. Define literally means to limit and to bound. And that's what we want to do. We draw boundaries around our identity. This is especially important when it comes to show whose team we are on. Like we want to make sure that people see that we are good members of the tribe. Like for our family, of our Facebook group, of our Twitter feed, of our online forum. We want to make sure that people understand that we are still on their team. And we've seen it a lot in the US election last year. I'm pretty sure you know these two pictures. The Washington Post did an experiment where they showed Trump supporters these two pictures. The left one is from Trump's integration in 2017 and the right one is from Obama's integration in 2009. And then they asked their readers, they asked these Trump supporters on which photo are more people. Where do you see more people on the left or on the right? And lots of Trump supporters actually said that on the left photo at Trump's integration are more people. And that's not because their perception is flawed or because they just can't see it. It's because this information doesn't matter to them besides showing whose team they are on. They want to make sure that, yeah, people know whose team they are on. It's not about truth versus lie. It's about their team versus our team. And it's not just showing whose team you're on, but also showing who you can trust. Trust is actually sadly a big, big part of why the two parties are more and more separate from each other. So we can see that this is happening in the government. Here we can see all members of the US House of Representatives between 1959 and 2011. And each note, each dot is one member in their party colors. And the closer the dots are, yeah, closer to each other, the more they agree on votes. And you can see how it separates more and more over the year. People don't agree on votes anymore with people outside of their party. But it gets even a little bit more sad if you look outside of the government. You can see that Republicans have an increasing unfavorable attitude towards a democratic party. It's up from 21% to 58%. And it's the same with Democrats towards Republicans. From 70% in 1994 to 55% in 2016. Republicans marry Democrats less than they did 20 years ago. It's like, yeah, we have a divide that's going more and more. They don't trust each other anymore. Fun fact, it doesn't matter if you understand what you believe. And it's actually the point I want to make. Like, these things, like climate change, et cetera, the government, there is so far away that it doesn't matter if you understand it. It's really just there to show your tribalization, to show your team. For example, do you understand how climate change works? Actually, like, exactly. Like, can you explain it? What's happening there? Maybe some of you can. I can't. Like, I really can't. But I know that people are on my tribes, like in my Facebook groups, et cetera. Like, we all agree that climate change exists. And we know that somebody who doesn't agree with us is not on our tribe. He's not on our team. The third point I want to talk about is our fallacies. Fallacies, I mean, there are so many. You could fill another book or another talk with that. And I just want to point out one, which is generalizing from anecdotal evidence. It means that you take one instant. For example, it's so cold outside in May, so that means climate change doesn't exist. You take one point and generalize it and apply it to all instances. Okay. So, okay, we got these false beliefs. They're planted inside of us. But if somebody comes around and says, Lisa, you believe in X, that's not right. You should believe something else. And of course, I will say, okay, sure. Right? That's not how it's happening. We are not changing our beliefs. We don't want to, basically. And that's also because of this tribalization thing. We really clench to our beliefs because they are connected to, like, our upbringing, our religion, our education, our tribes around us. That means when we doubt that one belief, we're doubting everything around it, like everything that is connected to us. That's really not what we want. And we don't need to, basically. There is enough proof out there, enough evidence in our tribes we get confirmed on an almost, like, daily basis that what we believe is totally true. We all believe in it, so it must be true. And there's enough proof out there for sure. If you just Google your belief, you will see that there's so much evidence. Like, why should you stop believing that? The Internet is really good for confirming your beliefs. Then there's the problem of confirmation bias and motivated skepticism. You might have heard of confirmation bias before. It means that when you confirm that information that actually confirm your belief, you remember them better, you question them less, and you don't ignore them as much as you ignore the information that opposes your belief. And motivated skepticism works the other way around. It means that if you see information that opposes your belief, you apply more skepticism than you would normally do. You're more skeptical, you remember it less, and you need to really be pointed on it to actually see it. I will show you one example here. So this is a website that talks about the reason why we should vaccinate our kids. And there's somebody who, like, agrees and has to believe that, yeah, it is good to vaccinate our kids. I'm reading this and I'm thinking like, yeah, generally health-ish, international studies, sure, it makes a lot of sense. Like, there are so many studies done on the topic. And there's this one study, published in the journal, clinical infectious diseases, found that individuals vaccinated for the flu are 550% less likely to have respiratory problems. Yeah, I guess it makes sense, too. If you don't have the flu, you don't have respiratory problems. I agree with all of that. The problem with this is, this is not the actual text. This is the actual text. It's an article that argues against vaccinating our kids. And when I read this, I have a totally different approach to it. Like, international studies, yeah, why? I know what the kind of studies these ones are. They're definitely not peer reviewed. And like this journal, clinical infectious diseases, I don't know, man. This is like, you know, I'm sure this paper, like this journal has a really bad image in the research community. And like naturalnews.com, I will never trust any of the articles again. And if anyone of my Facebook friends are ever mentioning this, like, I will totally upfront them immediately. We have a different approach to information based on if they confirm or disagree with our beliefs. And more information also means stronger belief. The more we are exposed to this information that either oppose or confirm our beliefs, the more we believe what we believe. It also works in both directions, apparently. So when we further believe, when we further fact from our friends also, we might think, okay, that's interesting. And then we hear more information about it. And we're like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And all this information nourish our belief. We invest in nourishing our belief. And it grows and grows. And it's the same the other way around. First, we might start with thinking, that's not what I've heard. You know, this is like a little bit dubious. But the more we hear about it, the more we think, okay, this is outrageous and it's flawed and I will never believe them again. That's the theory, at least. It's called the backfire effect. And you might have heard of it. The backfire effect is actually not that scientifically proven. Like the last idea of when you hear opposing ideas, you believe cause as a defense mechanism. So you might want to be a little bit careful with that idea. If you find any paper, also let me know. I'm very curious. But not just more information makes our belief stronger, but also more intelligent. I'm sure lots of you are super intelligent in this room. If you are super intelligent and more intelligent than other people, you have more extreme beliefs than other people in both directions. Like it doesn't matter if it's true or false. They're just more extreme. The idea here is that you actually can make up evidence and can make up arguments for your own beliefs. The last point I want to talk about why it's so hard to graduate of beliefs is close-mindedness. It's just a personality trait, basically. There are some people who are close-minded and there are some people who are open-minded. There are people who are better at exchanging beliefs and switching them out. And there are people who clench to them and don't want to let them out, basically. Okay. And then the last part of my talk, I want to believe, I want to talk about how to believe more two things. Like all these problems, how can we work against them? And this is also the part where I finally will mention some data visualization. I think it was part of the headline of my talk. Okay. First approach, brute force, convincing someone. It almost always comes from a place of love. We want people to believe the facts, right? And so it's like, okay, you believe X, that's not true, you should believe Y. The problem is it doesn't really, like, it's not really efficient and it's not really kind, so maybe let's not do that. What we can do instead is asking them a question. We can try to make them see the truth themselves. We can, for example, ask why do you believe that? How did you come to that conclusion? What would be the consequence of the things you believe? A data visualization that does that well, I think, is Bloomberg's what's really warming the world. What they did is they showed all the possible reasons that climate deniers think are true about why climate change exists. So what is really warming the world? Is it the sun? Is it sun activity? It's not. Or is it greenhouse gases? They show very many reasons for it. And then in the end, they show that, yeah, I'm sorry, you're wrong, it's really greenhouse gases. Second reason, second approach, avoid globalization. That might actually work the best, especially if we assume that tribalization is one of the main reasons for false beliefs in the first place. And here, there are different ideas. First get to know people with other opinions. And just listen to them. Don't try to convince them. Just listen to them and try to understand why do they believe the things they believe? Like what are the rational reasons for their beliefs? In the best case, you can also build empathy for them and discover the hidden truths, like these tribalization reasons, for example, that we've talked about, what are their beliefs connected to. Zeit Online is doing something like that right now. I think they have a call on their website where they ask people to sign up, to meet somebody who, to meet different minded people, basically, on one afternoon in June. Changing our attitude. There are also a few approaches here. First, understanding that people are not their beliefs. That's not how it is. And if we make sure that we understand that, like, for us, but also communicate it to other people, it is more likely that we will convince people of information. This also speaks against this tribalization idea. You are not what you believe. And neither are your team. Neither is the team you are on. But it gets really interesting if you try to get people into the truth-seeking mode. There's a really interesting paper called Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing that talks about that individuals can use their reason for two ends to form beliefs that convince who they are, and we've seen that with the tribalization idea, and to form beliefs that are consistent with the best available scientific evidence. And that's what we want. We want people to get into this rational mode where we make them seek out the truth. So we've seen that before. That says that if you're more intelligent, you have more extreme beliefs. But the piece of hope here is, the good news here is that if you make people more curious, if you get people more into this truth-seeking mode, then people actually get to the more true facts and believe them more. You can see that conservative Republicans, for example, don't really believe that global warming is due mostly to human activities that are just burning fossil fuels if they're more intelligent. But if they're more curious, they do tend to think that. And a really nice example we've seen recently is from the New York Times, which is you twirl it. Here you're supposed to question your own beliefs, to understand what do you actually think how the world works. They don't give you the answers. They ask you first. And here they want you to twirl the percent of children who attended college based on the income percentile of their parents. And you can twirl it and then see not just how the reality looks like, but also how other people thought the world works out there basically. And I really like that a lot, these quizzes and games that make you win when you have the most true answer and get you into this truth-seeking mode. It's also important to show the complexity of truth. Most data visualization out there, I think, I would assume are barred charts. There are two problems with bar charts. First, all the data looks the same. And second, there are no real bar charts in the world. Bar charts simplify the world extremely. And I mean, it makes sense, data visualization. People are supposed to simplify the world. That's our job too. But I do like approaches like the one from Akurat more and more that actually show the complexity of the truth. The medium is the message here. The form shows how the data actually looks like. Very complex, very entangled. Planting doubt is also something that I think the Züte Zeitung and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung did really well in the articles that explained what the polls for the Bundestagswahl, for the election in Germany and September actually showing. That is, of course, due to all the doubt that the polls in the US election like planted inside of us. But I think it's really necessary. The New York Times actually did that two months before the US election. They planted doubt with showing that four different pollsters came to totally different conclusions when they got the same data. This is also connected to showing uncertainty well. Like this, which is the New York Times election newsletter, is not showing uncertainty well. This on the other hand is. This is like this shittery version. You might have remembered that from the New York Times US election. It shows the confidence and shows what we don't know basically. And the last point I want to talk about is showing our skin in the game. This is this long text again from this amazing paper called Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing, which basically says, if you ask a Republican farmer if he believes in climate change, it's very likely that he will say no until this belief gets important to succeeding as a farmer, to actually get to his goal. Like you can see that here. They have an end succeeding as farmers that can be satisfied only with that form of information processing. I think that's super interesting. If people have a goal and evolved in the outcome of the information and of their beliefs, they think differently about things. So it's really easy to have these beliefs about like pizza gate and water fraud, which is like super far away and has nothing to do with your personal life. But it's really, really hard to have that same belief if you're surrounded by the outcome. So for example, if it's raining in the morning, it's a really bad idea to have that belief that it's not raining because the feedback is that you get wet. So you better have a good belief here. But it's not the same with like again, pizza gate or water fraud. Lots of data visualization is actually doing a little bit something similar. They're like showing the effect of things that happened in the past or that are rules or laws. For example, this graphic by the next time that shows if you're receiving a marriage penalty or bonus when it comes to Texas, it shows the effect of data out there for you. And the same is of course true for like watering results. Here, for example, from the Berlin Among post. But really being evolved, really seeing the outcome and really like knowing that you can change something is another level, I would say. I really like Brad Victor's, what can the technologies do about climate change? Because first of all, it shows you that you can do something. There's a lot of climate change helplessness, I think, in the world. And studies have actually shown that if you, if we believe that we can do something personally to help stop stylish change, only then are we more likely to make a difference that works against the climate change helpnesses. So these are the things I wanted to talk about. Where false beliefs come from, but it's so hard to get rid of them and how to believe more true things. And believe me, this is not all like there is in each block. There could be so many more causes and reasons and examples. I just wanted to point out the most interesting and important ones. But what are we doing now with this knowledge? It seems like beliefs are like, whoa, they're like super tricky. Like, I don't know, should we have them anymore? Like maybe we should just like try to be super careful with our beliefs and keep them small and tiny and not believe too much. But I disagree with the idea. I would say if you can choose between having small beliefs and big beliefs, we'd rather want big beliefs. Because beliefs make us act, again, beliefs are really important for our actions. And I would have wanted us to act, not to act. But if you can decide between having beliefs which are a metal or flexible as a gummy bear, I would have wanted a gummy bear. Strong opinions loosely held. And strong beliefs loosely held, I think, is as important as something I want to live by. Because in the best case, we can then change our beliefs based on upcoming and new information very, very easily. Thank you so much.
 Hello, everyone. I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Are my slides up there?  They want to talk about a very special person. You. That's you. That's also me. It's everyone  of us. We're all standing on the ground of hard facts. It's like the bone in that hard  thing. They are more like concepts with different levels of certainty. For example, we don't  know that climate change is real, but we know that 97% of climate experts agree that humans  are responsible for causing global warming. When we accept these facts, we start to believe  in them. Beliefs are super important. Beliefs make us marry people. Beliefs make us find  companies and do research projects and go to church. Beliefs are also very important  for ethical discussions. Because we need to agree on what's happening before we can decide  what we should do. But it feels like lots of people these days don't go to the second  step. Lots of people these days seem to believe other facts than us. It almost seems like  they're setting on another crown of truth. They have another reality. That's of course  not the case. They have the same reality as we do. This is a big question I want to answer  and I was really curious about that. Why do they believe in things that are not true?  I have a personal interest in that. My daily job is to point to the facts. I'm visualising  data and designing information. I'm often taking data from the census or from scientific  studies and say, look. Look at these. Let's have a good discussion based on these facts.  And I'm then publishing these data on different media. These are some media I've worked with.  So today I want to answer that question. How can I be a better data visualisation? Because  I have a problem if people don't believe the facts that I'm showing to them. And I want  to answer these questions in three parts. First I want to explain where false beliefs  actually come from. Then I want to go on and explain why it's so hard to get rid of them.  And then we might explore how to believe more true things. So the answer to the first question  where do false beliefs come from is obvious. Of course you all know it. It's fake news.  All right. Fake news is a thing we've all talked about a lot. But I actually think that  sharing constructed information, constructed realities on social media is more like a symptom  of the whole problem and not the cause. I would argue that one of the main causes of  why we believe false things is actually tribalisation. We are all social animals. Like humans are  extremely social people. And social support is more important for us than believing in  anything that's like super far away, like climate change. We first want to make sure  that people understand who we are. Like we want to define ourselves. And beliefs and  information can be a marker of identity. Define literally means to limit and to bound. And  that's what we want to do. We draw boundaries around our identity. This is especially important  when it comes to show whose team we are on. Like we want to make sure that people see  that we are good members of the tribe. Like for our family, of our Facebook group, of  our Twitter feed, of our online forum. We want to make sure that people understand that  we are still on their team. And we've seen it a lot in the US election last year. I'm  pretty sure you know these two pictures. The Washington Post did an experiment where they  showed Trump supporters these two pictures. The left one is from Trump's integration in  2017 and the right one is from Obama's integration in 2009. And then they asked their readers,  they asked these Trump supporters on which photo are more people. Where do you see more  people on the left or on the right? And lots of Trump supporters actually said that on  the left photo at Trump's integration are more people. And that's not because their  perception is flawed or because they just can't see it. It's because this information  doesn't matter to them besides showing whose team they are on. They want to make sure that,  yeah, people know whose team they are on. It's not about truth versus lie. It's about  their team versus our team. And it's not just showing whose team you're on, but also showing  who you can trust. Trust is actually sadly a big, big part of why the two parties are  more and more separate from each other. So we can see that this is happening in the government.  Here we can see all members of the US House of Representatives between 1959 and 2011.  And each note, each dot is one member in their party colors. And the closer the dots are,  yeah, closer to each other, the more they agree on votes. And you can see how it separates  more and more over the year. People don't agree on votes anymore with people outside of their  party. But it gets even a little bit more sad if you look outside of the government.  You can see that Republicans have an increasing unfavorable attitude towards a democratic  party. It's up from 21% to 58%. And it's the same with Democrats towards Republicans.  From 70% in 1994 to 55% in 2016. Republicans marry Democrats less than they did 20 years  ago. It's like, yeah, we have a divide that's going more and more. They don't trust each  other anymore. Fun fact, it doesn't matter if you understand what you believe. And it's  actually the point I want to make. Like, these things, like climate change, et cetera, the  government, there is so far away that it doesn't matter if you understand it. It's really just  there to show your tribalization, to show your team. For example, do you understand  how climate change works? Actually, like, exactly. Like, can you explain it? What's  happening there? Maybe some of you can. I can't. Like, I really can't. But I know that  people are on my tribes, like in my Facebook groups, et cetera. Like, we all agree that  climate change exists. And we know that somebody who doesn't agree with us is not on our tribe.  He's not on our team. The third point I want to talk about is our fallacies. Fallacies,  I mean, there are so many. You could fill another book or another talk with that. And  I just want to point out one, which is generalizing from anecdotal evidence. It means that you  take one instant. For example, it's so cold outside in May, so that means climate change  doesn't exist. You take one point and generalize it and apply it to all instances. Okay. So,  okay, we got these false beliefs. They're planted inside of us. But if somebody comes  around and says, Lisa, you believe in X, that's not right. You should believe something else.  And of course, I will say, okay, sure. Right? That's not how it's happening. We are not  changing our beliefs. We don't want to, basically. And that's also because of this tribalization  thing. We really clench to our beliefs because they are connected to, like, our upbringing,  our religion, our education, our tribes around us. That means when we doubt that one belief,  we're doubting everything around it, like everything that is connected to us. That's  really not what we want. And we don't need to, basically. There is enough proof out there,  enough evidence in our tribes we get confirmed on an almost, like, daily basis that what  we believe is totally true. We all believe in it, so it must be true. And there's enough  proof out there for sure. If you just Google your belief, you will see that there's so  much evidence. Like, why should you stop believing that? The Internet is really good for confirming  your beliefs. Then there's the problem of confirmation bias and motivated skepticism.  You might have heard of confirmation bias before. It means that when you confirm that  information that actually confirm your belief, you remember them better, you question them  less, and you don't ignore them as much as you ignore the information that opposes your  belief. And motivated skepticism works the other way around. It means that if you see  information that opposes your belief, you apply more skepticism than you would normally  do. You're more skeptical, you remember it less, and you need to really be pointed on  it to actually see it. I will show you one example here. So this is a website that talks  about the reason why we should vaccinate our kids. And there's somebody who, like, agrees  and has to believe that, yeah, it is good to vaccinate our kids. I'm reading this and  I'm thinking like, yeah, generally health-ish, international studies, sure, it makes a lot  of sense. Like, there are so many studies done on the topic. And there's this one study,  published in the journal, clinical infectious diseases, found that individuals vaccinated  for the flu are 550% less likely to have respiratory problems. Yeah, I guess it makes sense, too.  If you don't have the flu, you don't have respiratory problems. I agree with all of  that. The problem with this is, this is not the actual text. This is the actual text.  It's an article that argues against vaccinating our kids. And when I read this, I have a totally  different approach to it. Like, international studies, yeah, why? I know what the kind of  studies these ones are. They're definitely not peer reviewed. And like this journal,  clinical infectious diseases, I don't know, man. This is like, you know, I'm sure this  paper, like this journal has a really bad image in the research community. And like  naturalnews.com, I will never trust any of the articles again. And if anyone of my Facebook  friends are ever mentioning this, like, I will totally upfront them immediately. We have  a different approach to information based on if they confirm or disagree with our beliefs.  And more information also means stronger belief. The more we are exposed to this information  that either oppose or confirm our beliefs, the more we believe what we believe. It also  works in both directions, apparently. So when we further believe, when we further fact  from our friends also, we might think, okay, that's interesting. And then we hear more  information about it. And we're like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And all this information  nourish our belief. We invest in nourishing our belief. And it grows and grows. And it's  the same the other way around. First, we might start with thinking, that's not what I've  heard. You know, this is like a little bit dubious. But the more we hear about it, the  more we think, okay, this is outrageous and it's flawed and I will never believe them  again. That's the theory, at least. It's called the backfire effect. And you might have heard  of it. The backfire effect is actually not that scientifically proven. Like the last  idea of when you hear opposing ideas, you believe cause as a defense mechanism. So you  might want to be a little bit careful with that idea. If you find any paper, also let  me know. I'm very curious. But not just more information makes our belief stronger, but  also more intelligent. I'm sure lots of you are super intelligent in this room. If you  are super intelligent and more intelligent than other people, you have more extreme beliefs  than other people in both directions. Like it doesn't matter if it's true or false. They're  just more extreme. The idea here is that you actually can make up evidence and can make  up arguments for your own beliefs. The last point I want to talk about why it's so hard  to graduate of beliefs is close-mindedness. It's just a personality trait, basically.  There are some people who are close-minded and there are some people who are open-minded.  There are people who are better at exchanging beliefs and switching them out. And there  are people who clench to them and don't want to let them out, basically.  Okay. And then the last part of my talk, I want to believe, I want to talk about how  to believe more two things. Like all these problems, how can we work against them? And  this is also the part where I finally will mention some data visualization. I think it  was part of the headline of my talk. Okay. First approach, brute force, convincing someone.  It almost always comes from a place of love. We want people to believe the facts, right?  And so it's like, okay, you believe X, that's not true, you should believe Y. The problem  is it doesn't really, like, it's not really efficient and it's not really kind, so maybe  let's not do that. What we can do instead is asking them a question. We can try to make  them see the truth themselves. We can, for example, ask why do you believe that? How  did you come to that conclusion? What would be the consequence of the things you believe?  A data visualization that does that well, I think, is Bloomberg's what's really warming  the world. What they did is they showed all the possible reasons that climate deniers  think are true about why climate change exists. So what is really warming the world? Is it  the sun? Is it sun activity? It's not. Or is it greenhouse gases? They show very many  reasons for it. And then in the end, they show that, yeah, I'm sorry, you're wrong,  it's really greenhouse gases. Second reason, second approach, avoid globalization. That  might actually work the best, especially if we assume that tribalization is one of the  main reasons for false beliefs in the first place. And here, there are different ideas.  First get to know people with other opinions. And just listen to them. Don't try to convince  them. Just listen to them and try to understand why do they believe the things they believe?  Like what are the rational reasons for their beliefs? In the best case, you can also build  empathy for them and discover the hidden truths, like these tribalization reasons, for example,  that we've talked about, what are their beliefs connected to.  Zeit Online is doing something like that right now. I think they have a call on their website  where they ask people to sign up, to meet somebody who, to meet different minded people,  basically, on one afternoon in June. Changing our attitude. There are also a few approaches  here. First, understanding that people are not their beliefs. That's not how it is. And  if we make sure that we understand that, like, for us, but also communicate it to other people,  it is more likely that we will convince people of information. This also speaks against this  tribalization idea. You are not what you believe. And neither are your team. Neither is the  team you are on. But it gets really interesting if you try to get people into the truth-seeking  mode. There's a really interesting paper called Science Curiosity and Political Information  Processing that talks about that individuals can use their reason for two ends to form  beliefs that convince who they are, and we've seen that with the tribalization idea, and  to form beliefs that are consistent with the best available scientific evidence. And that's  what we want. We want people to get into this rational mode where we make them seek out  the truth. So we've seen that before. That says that if you're more intelligent, you  have more extreme beliefs. But the piece of hope here is, the good news here is that if  you make people more curious, if you get people more into this truth-seeking mode, then people  actually get to the more true facts and believe them more. You can see that conservative Republicans,  for example, don't really believe that global warming is due mostly to human activities  that are just burning fossil fuels if they're more intelligent. But if they're more curious,  they do tend to think that. And a really nice example we've seen recently is from the New  York Times, which is you twirl it. Here you're supposed to question your own beliefs, to understand  what do you actually think how the world works. They don't give you the answers. They ask  you first. And here they want you to twirl the percent of children who attended college  based on the income percentile of their parents. And you can twirl it and then see not just  how the reality looks like, but also how other people thought the world works out there basically.  And I really like that a lot, these quizzes and games that make you win when you have  the most true answer and get you into this truth-seeking mode. It's also important to  show the complexity of truth. Most data visualization out there, I think, I would assume are barred  charts. There are two problems with bar charts. First, all the data looks the same. And second,  there are no real bar charts in the world. Bar charts simplify the world extremely. And  I mean, it makes sense, data visualization. People are supposed to simplify the world.  That's our job too. But I do like approaches like the one from Akurat more and more that  actually show the complexity of the truth. The medium is the message here. The form shows  how the data actually looks like. Very complex, very entangled.  Planting doubt is also something that I think the Züte Zeitung and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung  did really well in the articles that explained what the polls for the Bundestagswahl, for  the election in Germany and September actually showing. That is, of course, due to all the  doubt that the polls in the US election like planted inside of us. But I think it's really  necessary. The New York Times actually did that two months before the US election. They  planted doubt with showing that four different pollsters came to totally different conclusions  when they got the same data. This is also connected to showing uncertainty well. Like  this, which is the New York Times election newsletter, is not showing uncertainty well.  This on the other hand is. This is like this shittery version. You might have remembered  that from the New York Times US election. It shows the confidence and shows what we  don't know basically. And the last point I want to talk about is showing  our skin in the game. This is this long text again from this amazing paper called Science  Curiosity and Political Information Processing, which basically says, if you ask a Republican  farmer if he believes in climate change, it's very likely that he will say no until this  belief gets important to succeeding as a farmer, to actually get to his goal. Like you can  see that here. They have an end succeeding as farmers that can be satisfied only with  that form of information processing. I think that's super interesting. If people have a  goal and evolved in the outcome of the information and of their beliefs, they think differently  about things. So it's really easy to have these beliefs about like pizza gate and water  fraud, which is like super far away and has nothing to do with your personal life. But  it's really, really hard to have that same belief if you're surrounded by the outcome.  So for example, if it's raining in the morning, it's a really bad idea to have that belief  that it's not raining because the feedback is that you get wet. So you better have a good  belief here. But it's not the same with like again, pizza gate or water fraud. Lots of  data visualization is actually doing a little bit something similar. They're like showing  the effect of things that happened in the past or that are rules or laws. For example,  this graphic by the next time that shows if you're receiving a marriage penalty or bonus  when it comes to Texas, it shows the effect of data out there for you. And the same is  of course true for like watering results. Here, for example, from the Berlin Among post.  But really being evolved, really seeing the outcome and really like knowing that you can  change something is another level, I would say. I really like Brad Victor's, what can  the technologies do about climate change? Because first of all, it shows you that you  can do something. There's a lot of climate change helplessness, I think, in the world.  And studies have actually shown that if you, if we believe that we can do something personally  to help stop stylish change, only then are we more likely to make a difference that works  against the climate change helpnesses. So these are the things I wanted to talk about.  Where false beliefs come from, but it's so hard to get rid of them and how to believe  more true things. And believe me, this is not all like there is in each block. There  could be so many more causes and reasons and examples. I just wanted to point out the most  interesting and important ones. But what are we doing now with this knowledge? It seems  like beliefs are like, whoa, they're like super tricky. Like, I don't know, should we  have them anymore? Like maybe we should just like try to be super careful with our beliefs  and keep them small and tiny and not believe too much. But I disagree with the idea. I  would say if you can choose between having small beliefs and big beliefs, we'd rather  want big beliefs. Because beliefs make us act, again, beliefs are really important for  our actions. And I would have wanted us to act, not to act. But if you can decide between  having beliefs which are a metal or flexible as a gummy bear, I would have wanted a gummy  bear. Strong opinions loosely held. And strong beliefs loosely held, I think, is as important  as something I want to live by. Because in the best case, we can then change our beliefs  based on upcoming and new information very, very easily. Thank you so much.
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