Defaulting to information that agrees with your word view is a natural human bias.
In general, perhaps, but in the face of conflicting facts?
Everyone has their own set of facts. That’s the basis for their world view. Doesn’t mean those facts are pertinent to the question at hand but upsetting their entire worldview is not something people allow easily.
And that’s human nature. We’re a social species. We belong to tribes and depend on our tribe for survival. If we could drop our worldview like a load of dirty laundry then we’d be walking away from our tribes and dying.
Ask anyone who has had profound political disagreements with their family. It’s enormously painful. While you can drop a position here or there in an election, it’s not at easy to drop your family.
Everyone has their own set of facts.
If you mean their own configuration of facts, I agree. If you mean “things they believe”, I disagree that those are “facts”.
Perhaps I was being too vague but the key to my point is this:
Doesn’t mean those facts are pertinent to the question at hand
What I’m talking about is facts about people’s situation in life. Their friends, their family, their community. It’s well-known that many people will believe the medical advice of a close family member over that of a doctor. Does this mean that they (through family connections) have access to some secret medical knowledge?
No.
What it means is that a person’s instincts to trust their family and close friends — members of their tribe — make it difficult for them to accept contradictory information from their doctor (a stranger). You can extend this issue to almost any domain of expertise (apart from those in which the person in question has had formal training). This is why conspiracies, myths, and other falsehoods can be so difficult to dispel from the outside of communities: the people who believe these things are not going to take the word of strangers who try to contradict their friends and family.
And so what I mean about people having different facts is this: their relationships and communities are different. Their whole worldview depends on their ability to trust the people they’re closest to. So when it comes to the question of whether to believe a falsehood (myth/conspiracy/scandal) or to reject it and in so doing reject their own community (with catastrophic results for their life), it should not be a surprise that they choose to believe a falsehood.
