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If you have ever been arguing with someone who is wrong but so confidently wrong that it breaks your brain, you are not alone. And on the flip side, if you have ever been blatantly wrong in an argument but so confident you were correct then fear not because it’s a common phenomenon that a new scientific study has shed light on.
Recently published in the journal Plos One by researchers Hunter Gehlbach, Carly D. Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, the study titled ‘The illusion of information adequacy’ had shed light on why people can be so confidently wrong in arguments and it’s actually quite a simple explanation.
The long and short of it is, when people are extremely confident but also extremely wrong in an argument it’s often because they lack all of the necessary information to be correct. The study’s introduction opens with a quote from Socrates which says “you don’t know what you don’t know” and that still holds true 2,400 years after Socrates’ life.
Laid out in a more scientific way, the study’s authors write “because individuals rarely pause to consider what information they may be missing, they assume that the cross-section of relevant information to which they are privy is sufficient to adequately understand the situation.”
In their study of 1,300 people, all of the participants were asked to read a fictional story about a school running out of water due to a nearby aquifer failing. Participants were then broken up into groups of 500, 500, and 300 with 500 reading a story presenting arguments in favor of the school merging with another, 500 reading a story in favor of the school remaining independent, and 300 in the control group where all of the arguments presented were balanced.
Understandably so, all of the participants were heavily influenced by the version of the story they were given. And their feedback on what the school should do was heavily based on the information they were given because it never occurred to them there was additional information out there they might not be privy to.
Interestingly, study author Angus Fletcher told NBC News that study participants were quick to go from being confidently wrong to changing their minds when presented with new information. He said “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.”
That latter part is important because it shows that even when people are confidently wrong they can quickly change their minds when presented with new information and aren’t stuck in their ways.
The far-reaching impact of this psychological phenomenon should be easy to see. When presented with all sides of the news (truly fair and balanced), policy makers and voters should be able to make better decisions in life.