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FiftyTwo comments on Knox and Sollecito freed - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (114)
It is good news.
According to the BBC report there were loud crowds outside protesting that she was freed. Why they trust the first court case, but not a second case with equal/better access to evidence is worrying but worth thinking about.
Could one categorise it as anchoring to the original response?
Every effect has multiple causes (and every cause affects multiple things). You identify a relevant bias but there is no need to stop thinking about what others are also relevant if one determines this bias is.
Ok, I'll run with that.
Most obviously there is a general trend that people become less likely to make accurate deductions once they are emotionally invested in the decision (consider their reactions to the horrifying descriptions of the murder victim's condition). Another issue is framing, previously it was a question of 'Who committed this awful crime?' now it has been reframed as 'This awful criminal might go free.' As gwern mentioned the fact that they are foreign is a factor, local media are unlikely to be kind to them, and punishing them/avenging a local feeds into our in/outgroup biases. And finally, the large publicity of the case means that enough people have heard about it that a significant percentage of them will attach to one side of the case for some arbitrarily bizarre psychological reason of their own whatever the facts of the case.
What have I missed?
Meredith Kercher was a British exchange student, not an Italian citizen.
You're right, sorry. Same applies regarding the other possible suspects and the Italian prosecutors and police.
Voted up for prompt admission of error. This is something I really like about this site, by the way.
In addition, it could be that people see the foreign press's interest in the case, and their support for Knox, as an unfair influence on the case, and they are protesting the court being swayed by the media.
Interesting, but surely if they were making a principled point about media interference in general they wouldn't have booed the verdict? As the media interference had already happened the result was irrelevant.
Since the media was interfering in favor of the verdict that actually happened, the verdict is evidence that the court was swayed by the media. They may be (or believe they are) protesting the court's "caving to media pressure" or some such.
Yeah, that was kinda what I meant. Also, I wouldn't assume they're thinking particularly rationally!
Nor would I.
The simple answer is that it's hard to change your mind, since once a belief gets formed it tends to become entrenched in various ways. There's a sequence and an upcoming book about the specific ways in which that's true, but some which seem most relevant in this case are:
Confirmation bias. Once someone forms a belief, all the new evidence that they see gets interpreted in light of that belief so that consistent evidence seems solid & important and inconsistent evidence seems dubious. Even if someone's initial belief was based on the first verdict, by the time the contrary second verdict comes in they feel like there is all of this other evidence alongside the first verdict.
Thinking in narratives. Once someone forms a belief they come up with a story for why others disagree with them (e.g., they're just biased in favor of the sympathetic pretty American woman), and as long as new events can be fit into their storyline they aren't much of a challenge to the existing views embodied in that narrative.
Identity. Once someone identifies with one side of an issue, they'll associate that side with all sorts of wonderful values & virtues (e.g., standing up for the integrity of the Italian justice system against the meddling foreigners) and they'll see changing their mind as abandoning their side and failing to live up to its values & virtues.
A relevant difference between the two cases is the level of foreigners and interest.