The Weakness of Data

Your brain, like most people’s, is programmed to get a kick out of information. This makes our current digital era an explosive celebration for your mind. While the agricultural age gave us easier access to nutrition, and the industrial age dramatically increased our quality of life, no other era provided as much stimulation for our brains as the information age. It is as if, finally, the human brain has succeeded in building its own amusement park, complete with thrill rides, which are perfectly customized . . . for itself.

Consider the numbers: there are 3 billion Internet users worldwide; every day we produce approximately 2.5 billion gigabytes of data, perform 4 billion Google searches, and watch 10 billion YouTube videos. In the short time it took you to read the last sentence, approximately 530,243 new Google searches were executed and 1,184,390 YouTube videos played around the globe.3

It would seem that the digital revolution should come in handy when we are trying to alter people’s beliefs. If people love information, what better way to influence their beliefs and actions than to offer data? With big data at our fingertips and powerful computers at our disposal, we can run analyses to expand our knowledge and then share the resulting facts and figures. Seems straightforward, right?

That is, until you attempt to present your carefully collected data and thoughtfully constructed conclusions to the person you are hoping to influence. At that moment, you quickly realize that data is often not the answer when it comes to changing minds.

This epiphany came as a terrible blow to the scientist in me. As a cognitive neuroscientist, I work at the intersection between psychology and neuroscience. Like most scientists, I love data. Some people collect precious rocks; others collect first-edition books, stamps, shoes, vintage cars, or china dolls. I collect data. My computers hold hundreds of folders with thousands of files, each containing rows and rows of numbers. Every number represents an observation: a person’s response to a decision problem or their reaction to another human; other numbers indicate the activity in a person’s brain or the density of their neuronal fibers. Numbers on their own are useless. The reason I love data is that those rows and rows of numbers can be transformed into something beautiful: meaningful graphs, which, every so often, reveal an exciting new insight into what makes you and me, Homo sapiens, tick.

So, you can imagine my dismay when I learned that all those numbers, from numerous experiments and observations, pointed to the fact that people are not in fact driven by facts, or figures, or data. It is not that people are stupid; nor are we ridiculously stubborn. It is that the accessibility to lots of data, analytic tools, and powerful computers is the product of the last few decades, while the brains we are attempting to influence are the product of millions of decades. As it turns out, while we adore data, the currency by which our brains assess said data and make decisions is very different from the currency many of us believe our brains should use. The problem with an approach that prioritizes information and logic is that it ignores the core of what makes you and me human: our motives, our fears, our hopes and desires. As we will see, this presents a serious problem; it means that data has only a limited capacity to alter the strong opinions of others. Established beliefs can be extremely resistant to change, even when scientific evidence is provided to undermine those beliefs.