The funny thing is that as embarrassing as these situations are, they’re also pretty human.
According to a study published 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 arrive at a reasonable conclusion with very little information,” said Angus Fletcher, a professor of English at Ohio State University, and one of the co-authors of the study.
Fletcher, along with two psychology researchers, set out to measure how we make judgments about situations or people based on our confidence in the information we have — even if it’s just a fraction of the full picture.
To do that, the academics recruited nearly 1,300 people with an average age of about 40. Everyone read a fictional story about a school running out of water because its local aquifer was drying up.
About 500 people read a version that favored the school merging with another school, presenting three arguments supporting the move and one neutral point.
Another 500 people read a version with three arguments in favor of staying separate, plus the same neutral point.
The final 300 people, the control group, read a balanced story that included all seven arguments — three pro-merge, three pro-separate, and the neutral one.
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After reading, the researchers asked the participants about their opinions on what the school should do and how confident they were that they had all the information they needed to make that judgment.
The answers revealed that a majority of people were much more likely to agree with the argument — either in favor of merging or staying separate — they had read, and that they were often confident they had enough information to have that opinion.
People in the groups who had read only one point of view were also more likely to say they were more confident in their opinion than those in the control group who had read both arguments.
The key, however, is what we do when we’re presented with another point of view.
Half of the participants in each group were then asked to read the opposing side’s information, which contradicted the piece they had previously read.
Although people were confident in their opinions when they had read only arguments in favor of one solution, when presented with all the facts, they were often willing to change their minds. They also reported feeling 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 received information that contradicted those judgments, but it turns out if they learned something that seemed plausible to them, they were willing to totally change their minds,” Fletcher said, adding that the experiment supports the idea that people fail to contemplate whether they have all of the information about a situation.
But our willingness to change our minds is limited. The researchers noted that the findings may not apply to pre-established political beliefs.
Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, compared these findings to the “invisible gorilla” study, which illustrated the psychological phenomenon of “inattentional blindness,” in which a person fails to notice something obvious while focused on something else.
There seems to be a cognitive tendency not to realize that the information we have is inadequate.
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