How Not to be Ignorant About the World

This is a very interesting TED talk on  how people see or rather don't see the world correctly. My daughter clued me in on this study after her thesis advisor gave a talk about this research. It's fascinating why people did so poorly in answering questions about the state of the world. The participants did even worse than if you sampled a group of chimpanzees (random answers).

I'll go ahead and give the spoilers since this isn't the latest superhero movie. We are ignorant because of:

1. Personal Bias
2. Outdated Facts
3. Media Bias

Combine that with an intuition that has been trained on the above, then it makes sense why we would be so off.

What intrigues me is how we as Christians can fall prey to this especially when we are called to be people of truth in what we believe and what we disseminate. Ignorance is one thing, but choosing to be ignorant and not making an effort to learn the truth is another. The 9th commandment comes to mind and what we learned in Sunday school when we studied The Mortification of Sin. Namely, reluctance/refusal to exam our biases and pursue the truth because we may not like the result or because of intellectual laziness. Are these sins to be mortified?