Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [185]
And many of us are such people. For statistics on the changing support for the Iraq War, see the Gallup polls conducted from just before the invasion through to the present day: http://www.gallup.com/poll/1633/Iraq.aspx#4.
“the most repugnant option in government.” Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (Ballantine Books, 1985), 383.
we…associate them—inaccurately, but indissolubly—with weakness. It’s a short step from associating doubt with weakness to associating it with womanliness. Hamlet’s problem, says Boswell, is that “he endeavors to stir up his languid mind to a manly boldness, but in vain.” John Kerry, too, was charged with insufficient manly boldness—with being effete, effeminate, and, in the immortal phrase of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a “girlyman.” Somewhat strangely, this charge of being a girlyman is also linked to the charge of being a thinking man—that is, to excessive intellectualism. (I say “strangely” because of the equally enduring stereotype that women can’t hold their own in the intellectual domain.) Coleridge accuses Hamlet of “enormous intellectual activity, and a consequent aversion to real action.” And the writer Ariel Dorfman wondered, in an Oct. 22, 2004 editorial for the Los Angeles Times, if people saw Kerry’s “complexity [of thought] as excessive effeminate suppleness.” Nor was it an accident that Kerry’s intellectualism was popularly signaled by his fluency in French—among a certain sector of Americans, that most castrated of languages. It would seem that our desire for certainty in our leadership unites the misogynist strain and the anti-intellectual strain of American politics.
the Daily Show. The episode in question, #13127, “The Stupid Vote,” aired on Oct. 7, 2008.
“The flight attendant comes down the aisle.” David Sedaris, “Undecided,” the New Yorker, Oct. 27, 2008.
“we must be fully committed.” Rollo May, The Courage To Create (W. W. Norton and Co., 1994), 20. The second quotation in this paragraph is from p. 21. In both cases, the italics are his.
cognitive dissonance (FN). Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schacter, When Prophecy Fails (Torchbooks, 1994).
CHAPTER 9 BEING WRONG
The quotations from Anita Wilson and from the psychoanalyst Irna Gadd are from my interviews with each of them.
Greg Markus. Marcus, G. B, “Stability and Change in Political Attitudes: Observe, Recall, and ‘Explain.’” Political Behavior, Vol. 8 (1986): 21–44. The subjects’ tendency to conflate their current beliefs with their past beliefs was so strong that an equation set up to predict how people would answer the “what did you use to believe?” question relied almost entirely on the 1982 answers and almost not at all on the 1973 ones. (See also “Biases of Retrospection,” Robyn M. Dawes, Institute for Psychological Therapies, Vol. 3. No. 1 (1991)). As a side note, Marcus’s study also shed some interesting light on our beliefs about believing. The subjects he chose consisted of 1,669 high school students and at least one of each student’s parents. In keeping with the widespread belief that older adults change less than teenagers and young adults, the parent group was more likely than the student group to think that their beliefs in 1972 resembled their beliefs in 1982—but in fact, the beliefs of the older adults had shifted more than that of their children.
Philip Tetlock. Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton University Press, 2006), 138.
“What scientists never do.” Kuhn, 77.
we almost never find ourselves between theories. Our reluctance to abandon one belief until we have another one in hand can be demonstrated empirically. In an experiment conducted in 1988, the psychologists David Klahr and Kevin Dunbar introduced subjects to a novel electronic device—a “robot tank” controlled via a keypad mounted on top of it. The subjects were told what every key meant except one labeled “RPT” they were then asked to figure out for themselves what this key did, and to narrate their thought process