Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [183]
modified version of the Asch studies. Sandra Blakeslee, “What Other People Say May Change What You See,” the New York Times, June 28, 2005.
“As If Time Had Stood Still.” See the official website of Appenzellerland: http://www.appenzell.ch/en/pages/culture_customs/landsgemeinde.
(“there is nothing so unpleasant as a superintellectual woman.”) Edwin Newman, “Can 655,000 Swissmen Be Wrong?” the New York Times, Aug. 30, 1959.
(“they can influence their men and are happy with their condition.”) Banaszak, 124. The quotation is from “one [prosuffrage] activist in a rural canton.”
the right-wing gadfly Ann Coulter (FN). George Gurley, “Coulter Culture,” the New York Observer, Oct. 2, 2007.
religious fundamentalists generally don’t read Darwin. Gilovich, 115.
“Try to do and say those things only.” Quoted in Elizabeth Kolbert, “Place Settings: Emily Post, At Home,” the New Yorker, Oct. 20, 2008. Gilovich also makes the point that Post discouraged confrontational conversations (p. 119), although he quotes different examples. (“The tactful person keeps his prejudices to himself” and “Certain subjects, even though you are very sure of the ground upon which you are standing, had best be shunned; such, for example, as the criticism of a religious creed or disagreement with another’s political conviction.”)
“shutting up about what you believe.” “Penn Jillette, Telling It Like It Is, with Teller,” AskMen.com, undated.
it’s impossible to change other people’s minds. One common exception to our reluctance to challenge other people’s beliefs concerns children. Most of us are more willing to challenge children’s questionable beliefs and share with them our own, different, perspective than we are with adults. This is partly because we feel more moral and intellectual responsibility toward children than we do toward grownups, but it is also because we feel more optimistic that our intervention will make a difference. With adults, we generally assume that there is nothing we can say that they haven’t heard before—whereas, with kids, we can hope that they have not yet been exposed to all the available evidence. In other words, when it comes to children, we stick to the first of the three assumptions I introduced in Chapter Five: we are likely to assume (not without reason) that they are ignorant, but we are usually far more reluctant than we are with adults to conclude that they are idiotic or evil.
an “unwanted reform.” Banaszak, 125. The other quotation in this same paragraph is from p. 211.
groupthink. Irving Lester Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973). The definition appears on p. 9. For his advice on how to avoid groupthink, see especially Chapter Nine.
“vigorous debate inside the White House.” Jake Tapper, “Barack Obama Unveils National Security Team, Taps Former Rival Hillary Clinton for State,” ABC News, Dec. 2008.
unanimous guilty verdict in a death penalty case. See e.g., Ivan L. Tillem, The Jewish Directory and Almanac, Vol. 1 (Pacific Press, 1984), 221.
“The laboratory is a latecomer on the human scene.” Jastrow, 12.
“we don’t want him in our house.” Morarjee, “Abdul Rahman’s Family Values.”
“should be killed.” Barker, “Afghan Man Faces Death for Being a Christian.”
lysenkoism (FN). See e.g., Martin Gardner, “Lysenkoism,” Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Dover Books, 1957), 140–151.
the emperor has no clothes. Sunstein has made this point as well; see pp. 26–27.
“He will have to be executed.” Shahzad, “Losing Faith in Afghanistan.”
CHAPTER 8 THE ALLURE OF CERTAINTY
“an inviolable attachment to liberty.” Both the quotation itself and the history of the zealots more generally comes from Flavius Josephus, The Works of Josephus: Containing Twenty Books of the Jewish Antiquities, Seven Books of the Jewish War, and the Life of Josephus (J. Grigg, 1825). The quotation appears