Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

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Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
Elizabeth Kolbert’s entire career has been engrossed in writing articles. She is one of the greatest writers in New Yorker. In 2017, she decided to write an article known as “Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds." The article aimed to illustrate how human reasoning capacity and judgment are informed by sociability, myside, and confirmation biases rather than the actual underlying facts. According to Williams (2016, p. 3), human beings tend to be illogical creatures, unlike programmed artificial intelligence or robots because people attach their beliefs and emotions to their reason, which, in effect, distorts their judgment.
In this article, Elizabeth Kolbert uses various experiments from Stanford University to convince readers on how human beings are difficult to change their minds even after they are presented with hard facts. Kolbert begins her article by citing reputable sources with impressive statistics and facts, which are then accompanied by emotional appeals (Varol, p. 2). Nonetheless, her attempt to appeal to the audience’s emotions weakens her argument and credibility towards the end of the article. This paper seeks to analyze different rhetorical devices such as logos, pathos, and ethos used by Elizabeth Kolbert in her article.
Throughout her article, Kolbert uses many credible sources that affirm her appeal and credibility to ethos, which further strengthens her arguments. Some of the sources include "The Enigma of Reason," a book written by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, cognitive scientists, "The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone" by Steven Sloman, and Philip Fernbach as well as other research experiments from Stanford University (Williams, p. 7). Referencing these sources boosts Kolbert's credibility and further confirms that she has conducted thorough and extensive homework where she obtained her statistics and facts and expert opinions that support her position.
Moreover, Kolbert uses ethos in her article by skillfully quoting from “The Enigma of Reason” by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. The duo claims that “Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves” (Kolbert, p. 4). Kolbert adds that habits of mind which are deemed goofy, weird, or what intellectualists consider plain dumb, prove to be shrewd from the perspective of a social interactionist. In this context, ethos plays a profound role that shape and inform people's reasons. Kolbert further claims that ethos forms the fundamental basis upon which confirmation bias is built (John, p. 3). This concept thrives on the tendency of people to agree with the information which concurs or supports what they believe in but rejects anything that does not conform to their social norms.
Besides Kolbert's appeal to ethos, she also uses profound charms to logos, which are further supported by many statistics and facts as well as logical development and progression of arguments. She reiterates studies in “The Knowledge Illusion,” “The Enigma of Reason,” and “Denying to the Grave," which all underscore the rhetorical notion that providing a...