On changing your mind
I ripped this from SomethingAwful's Debate and Discussion forum, but it originally came from Scott Adams' blog (maybe I'll find it and link it later):
One of the most potent forms of persuasion has to do with people’s innate need to be consistent. Studies show that people will ignore logic and information to be consistent. (In other words, we are moist robots.) According to the research, humans are hardwired for consistency over reason. You already knew that: People don’t switch political parties or religions easily. What you didn’t know is how quickly and easily a manipulator can lock someone into a position.
For example, researchers asked people to write essays in support of a random point of view they did not hold. Months later, when surveyed, the majority held the opinion they wrote about, regardless of the topic. Once a person commits an opinion to writing – even an opinion he does not hold – it soon becomes his actual opinion. Not every time, but MOST of the time. The people in these experiments weren’t exposed to new information before writing their contrived opinions. All they did was sit down and write an opinion they didn’t actually have, and months later it became their actual opinion. The experiment worked whether the volunteers were writing the pro or the con position on the random topic.
Most of the truly stupid things done in this world have to do with this consistency principle. For example, once you define yourself as a loyal citizen of Elbonia, you do whatever the King of Elbonia tells you to do, no matter how stupid that is. And your mind invents reasons as to why dying is a perfectly good life strategy.
This is particularly relevant today for me. I was listening to Boortz on the way to work for my company at a career fair at GA Tech (which was kind of a bust, but that's a subject for another post). An Army Ranger called up, practically crying, saying that he wanted to be able to finish his job, and that the Iraqis were performing admirably.
Now, I don't like Bush. I don't know if he could do anything to make me like him, probably for the reasons in the above quote. But I understood this guy on the radio. We do owe the Iraqis a stable country, because they had one before we got there, as oppressive as it was. As a generally liberal kind of guy, I believe that everyone has the right to live in peace and freedom.
So I can't support the Democrats in their "get the troops out now" position. I want better strategies. I think the current administration did a horrible job of thinking out the post-major-combat-operations phase of the war, but that doesn't matter anymore; we've got to stick it out now, unless it becomes plainly clear that we will never be able to pacify Iraq to acceptable levels.
I'm not sure how much of a shift in opinion this is for me, but it's certainly something that I wasn't willing to publicly say before. I reflexively rejected anything the Bush administration did, and that was immature.
On the other hand, I'm becoming more pro-universal-healthcare now. More about that later...I have to get back to work.
posted by Smiley at 3:47 PM
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