Never did the one neighbor understand the other
We need to understand why we often have trouble agreeing on what is true (what some have labeled science denialism). Social science has taught us that human cognition is innately, and inescapably, a process of interpreting the hard data about our world – its sights and sound and smells and facts and ideas - through subjective affective filters that help us turn those facts into the judgments and choices and behaviors that help us survive. The brain’s imperative, after all, is not to reason. Its job is survival, and subjective cognitive biases and instincts have developed to help us make sense of information in the pursuit of safety, not so that we might come to know “THE universal absolute truth.” This subjective cognition is built-in, subconscious, beyond free will, and unavoidably leads to different interpretations of the same facts. (…)
Our subjective system of cognition can be dangerous. It can produce perceptions that conflict with the evidence, what I call The Perception Gap.
