Why do we believe things that aren't true? | Philip Fernbach | TEDxMileHigh

Understand it! (Laughter) Let's think about how we talk about a complex dilemma like healthcare. If I were a liberal, I would say the Affordable Care Act is a great, good law. If you were a conservative, you would say, “The law is destroying America,” but more often than not, the number of disagreements over political privilege is worth more than the number of repetitions of statements you hear from someone else. Not being experts, we cannot explain a dilemma like this. When we express our beliefs, we are only guiding our communities towards knowledge. This is what we do. Knowledge is neither in my mind nor in yours.

Knowledge is shared, and therefore, the

things

that really matter to you are also shared. Now, the point is not that these people are stupid. That's

true

, we are all ignorant, but it is not something we should be ashamed of. The world is so complicated for anyone that we don't understand much about it. But what makes us special is that we manage to overcome this complexity by sharing knowledge. The ignorance of an individual among us can reveal a collective genius. Ignorance is a characteristic of the human mind, not a defect, but we don't have to be sure about

things

we don't understand.

Of course, we have to act on dilemmas without knowing everything about them, and if we had serious sources of experience in our societies and a culture that values ​​truth, we would have a greater number of facts. But when we look at life from the point of view that we, as individuals, have to understand everything, it leads us to see the world in a superficial and strange way. "My way is perfect, yours is stupid or evil." In reality, most dilemmas are complex and most people have good intentions. Well, the bad news: we can't get rid of all false beliefs.

It is a superficial way of thinking. We can practice greater intellectual humility to open our minds to the possibility that some false beliefs persist in our societies. We have a great opportunity to improve the quality of our conversations by recognizing the limits of our ability to understand and appreciating the idea that what we

believe

depends on those around us. Thank you. (applause)