There may be a psychological reason why some people are not just wrong in an argument, but confidently wrong.
According to a study published Wednesday in the journal Plos One, it comes down to believing you have all the information you need to form an opinion, even when you don’t.
“Our brains are overconfident that they can come to a reasonable conclusion with very little information,” said Angus Fletcher, a professor of English at Ohio State University, who co-authored the study.
Fletcher, together with two psychology researchers, wanted to measure how people judge situations or people based on their confidence in the information they have – even if this is not the whole story.
“People are very quick to judge,” he said.
The researchers recruited almost 1,300 people with an average age of about 40 years. Everyone read a fictional story about a school that was running out of water because the local aquifer was drying up.
About 500 people read a version of the story that advocated the school’s merger with another school, making three arguments in support of the move and one neutral point.
Another 500 people read a story with three arguments in favor of remaining separated, plus the same neutral point.
The final 300 people, the control group, read a balanced story that included all seven arguments: three in favor of merger, three in favor of separation and one neutral.
After reading, the researchers asked participants for their opinions about what the school should do and how confident they were that they had all the information they needed to make that judgment.
The surveys found that a majority of people were much more likely to agree with the argument – either pro-merger or pro-divorce – they had read, and were often confident they had enough information to form that opinion. People in the groups who had read only one position were also more likely to say they felt more confident in their opinions than those in the control group who had read both arguments.
Half of the participants in each group were then asked to read the opposing team’s information, which contradicted the article they had already read.
Although people felt confident in their opinions when they had only read arguments in favor of one solution, when given all the facts they were often willing to change their minds. They also reported that they then felt less confident in their ability to form an opinion on the topic.
“We thought that people would really stick to their original judgments even when they were given information that contradicted those judgments, but it turns out that when they learned something that seemed plausible to them, they were willing to completely change their minds, Fletcher said. that the research highlights the idea that people don’t think about whether they have all the information about a situation.
However, the researchers noted that the findings may not apply to situations where people have predetermined ideas about a situation, as is often the case in politics.
“People are more open-minded and willing to change their minds than we assume,” Fletcher said. But “the same flexibility does not apply to long-standing differences, such as political beliefs.”
Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, compared the findings to the “invisible gorilla” study, which illustrated the psychological phenomenon of “inattentional blindness,” when a person fails to realize something obvious because he or she is focused. otherwise.
“This study captures that with information,” Rogers said. “There seems to be a cognitive tendency not to realize that the information we have is inadequate.”
The study also parallels a psychological phenomenon called the “illusion of explanatory depth,” in which people underestimate what they know about a given subject, says Barry Schwartz, a psychologist and professor emeritus of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania .
The idea is that if you ask the average person if he knows how a toilet works, he will probably answer that he does. But when asked to explain how a toilet works, they quickly realize that they don’t know how a toilet works, just how to get it to work by pressing a lever.
“It’s not just that people are wrong. The problem is they are so confident in their mistake,” Schwartz said.
The antidote, he added, is “to be curious and humble.”
The fact that the people in the study who were later presented with new information were open to changing their minds, as long as the new information seemed plausible, was encouraging and surprising, the researchers and Schwartz agreed.
“This is reason to have a little bit of optimism that even if people think they know something, they are still open to having their minds changed by new evidence,” Schwartz said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
