We Are All Confident Idiots⁠↗

The most difficult misconceptions to dispel, of course, are those that reflect sacrosanct beliefs. And the truth is that often these notions can’t be changed. Calling a sacrosanct belief into question calls the entire self into question, and people will actively defend views they hold dear. This kind of threat to a core belief, however, can sometimes be alleviated by giving people the chance to shore up their identity elsewhere. Researchers have found that asking people to describe aspects of themselves that make them proud, or report on values they hold dear, can make any incoming threat seem, well, less threatening.

Sometimes, too, researchers have found that sacrosanct beliefs themselves can be harnessed to persuade a subject to reconsider a set of facts with less prejudice. For example, conservatives tend not to endorse policies that preserve the environment as much as liberals do. But conservatives do care about issues that involve “purity” in thought, deed, and reality. Casting environmental protection as a chance to preserve the purity of the Earth causes conservatives to favor those policies much more, as research by Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer of Stanford University suggests.

For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls “considering the opposite.” To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure. And lastly: Seek advice. Other people may have their own misbeliefs, but a discussion can often be sufficient to rid a serious person of his or her most egregious misconceptions.