Have you ever seen (or participated in) an exchange in which two people with opposing views were convinced they were right and their opponents were wrong? Maybe they even cited studies that supported their respective sides. Looked at individually, it’s easy to see how each study supported one side over the other, but looked at together, two studies with opposing conclusions (for example, one that says exercise is good for your health and another that says exercise is bad for your health) can’t both be right. What’s going on here?
Understanding the answer requires letting go of a concept that most people probably believe: that humans make decisions based on reason, logic, and evidence. That may be true in certain instances, but, as put forth by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind, this is the exception rather than the rule. Haidt’s work revealed that humans make decisions based off irrational things such as emotion and then afterward look for reasons to justify their decisions. In the process, they tend to gravitate toward evidence that seems to support their point and avoid evidence that seems to contradict it. This explains why citing studies, facts, and figures in a debate are all ineffective in getting someone to change their position. In my own experience, that only works when the person I’m talking to is already leaning toward a particular position and the information I provide nudges them even closer to that position; it has consistently failed to move someone away from one position and toward the opposing position.
There is another phenomenon that contributes to this, and Eckhart Tolle examines it thoroughly in The Power of Now. In short, it is the tendency for people to make their views/ideology part of their identity. How often do you see someone say “I’m a liberal”, “I’m a conservative”, “I’m a libertarian”, or something along similar lines? No matter the ideology with which they identify, their identification with it makes it much harder for them to see outside of it. Someone who has identified with an ideology will have a hard time seeing the good things in other ideologies as well as the bad things in their own ideology. Additionally, they will have an easier time seeing those with the same ideology in a good light and those with a different ideology in a bad light. This is because they will, on a subconscious level, see attacks against their ideology as an attack against them, and that their very life is at stake because they can’t separate their ideology from their sense of self. That could explain why so many debates (even over unimportant issues) are filled with hostility; the participants subconsciously approach the debates as matters of life and death.
I’ve benefited greatly from spending most of this year putting those lessons to work in my life. It’s a lot easier to see the good in a variety of ideologies and the problems in my own since I’ve ceased making them part of my identity, I’m not nearly as dramatic as I used to be and I avoid drama as often as possible, I can have much better conversations with others about different subjects, I no longer see those who think differently than I do in a bad light, and I’m able to focus more on important things in my life instead of wasting time arguing over trivial matters. I’ve learned that humans see the world through different lenses or filters, and at this point I can see things from nearly anybody’s perspective if I so choose. This makes it much easier to empathize with others and remember that they more than likely want the best for everyone even if we don’t see eye-to-eye on how to make that happen. If this sounds interesting to you, I’d highly recommend reading the above books and seeing what they do for your life.