Understanding convictions, your own included

We often feel we understand a public policy, until the moment we are asked to explain how it works. This gap has been measured, and it affects opinions themselves.

We spontaneously look for what confirms what we already think, and we examine more closely what contradicts us. This is not bad faith: it is a default way of working, observable even where one has nothing to defend.

We do not form our convictions alone in an empty room. Knowing who shares them modifies what we think, and even more what we agree to say.

Revising a position is not only intellectual work. It is an uncomfortable operation, whose mechanism has been documented since the 1950s.

We regularly overestimate the proportion of people who share our positions. This error of estimation has concrete effects on the way we debate.

Emotions are not parasites that come to disturb an otherwise clean piece of reasoning. They steer attention, and each steers it differently.

When we are wrong, circumstances explain it. When someone else is wrong, what explains it is what they are. This asymmetry has a name and direct political effects.

A famous experiment showed that a majority manifestly in error could change an otherwise obvious answer. The result is not anecdotal for public debate.

We readily tell ourselves as coherent people applying principles. Work on introspection suggests the order is often the reverse.

The idea that a contrary argument always reinforces convictions is very widespread. Recent work partly contradicts it, and that is rather good news.

Some questions provoke immediate resistance: one would like to answer both, or refuse to answer. That reaction is information, not a defect of the questionnaire.