Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

The art of changing your mind

[Getty Images] 
issue 23 April 2022

Some years ago there was a study at Harvard that tried to find out what people did when they held an incorrect opinion. Not an opinion of the kind that the era happens to deem incorrect, but one that is actually, provably not the case. The study looked at what happened when that factually incorrect view was introduced to the evidence that it was wrong.

We might hope that the results would be clear: man holding wrong view meets the right view, immediately throws up his hands and asks himself how he could have been such a dolt. Alas, as anyone who has ever been married will know, people do not always concede wrongly held views as swiftly as that. And so the Harvard study showed. When people with an incorrect view were introduced to the correct view, a vast proportion doubled down on their wrong opinion and thenceforth refused to budge.

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