Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [74]
Of the four parts of our disagreement deficit, the first is the most self-explanatory. Since, as we have seen, communities often either form around or foster shared beliefs, they leave us overexposed to people who second our opinions. (Consider that, in 1959, when women’s suffrage was increasingly the global norm, opposition to it in Innerrhoden was running at upwards of 95 percent.) Inevitably, this constant and disproportionate affirmation of our own convictions makes them seem both more warranted and more widely held than they really are. This is our disagreement deficit, inverted: an agreement surplus.
The flip side of all that affirmation—and the second reason for our disagreement deficit—is that we are underexposed to sources that challenge our ideas. All of us believe in getting second opinions when it comes to medical issues, but when it comes to most other matters, we are perfectly content to stick with the opinion we already have. As Thomas Gilovich observed, religious fundamentalists generally don’t read Darwin in their free time. Likewise, most of us are supremely unmotivated to educate ourselves about beliefs with which we disagree.
This underexposure is easy to maintain, since most of us don’t spend much time with people whose belief systems differ dramatically from our own. Moreover, even when we do spend time with such people, we seldom discuss our differences. We talk about the weather, not about climate change; about our recent vacation, not our recent abortion. We can hardly be blamed for this behavior, since it is widely socially endorsed: I’m calling it part of our disagreement deficit, but most people just call it good manners. “Try to do and say those things only which will be agreeable to others,” advised Emily Post, that doyenne of American etiquette.
However apt this advice might be for socially awkward dinner guests, it does nothing to help alert us to possible flaws in our belief systems. For that, we’re better off taking some not-very-mannerly advice from a not-very-mannerly source: the magician and comedian Penn Jillette, who would have appalled the genteel Post, and who once dismissed most conventional etiquette as “bullshit” on his TV show of that name. In an interview for AskMen.com, Jillette attacked the notion that “shutting up about what you believe is showing tolerance to other people.” On the contrary, he said, “I believe shutting up about what you believe is a way to stay close-minded, a way not to be busted. If you have some crazy thought and keep it in your head, there is much less chance that someone will say, ‘what are you, fucking nuts?’” In other words, he argued, “One of the quickest ways to find out if you are wrong is to state what you believe.”
Jillette might be right, but it is Post and her many progeny in the politeness business who rule the day. Most of us hesitate to state our beliefs directly to those who disagree, and, conversely, to openly disagree with other people’s beliefs. A friend of mine—who is not known for her retiring personality when she is among her own—confessed to me that she has all but given up on confronting people with whom she disagrees. “No matter how important an issue is to me, and how scary it is to think that the vast majority of Americans disagree with me on it—even in those cases where my life could be much the worse because of that disagreement—I still, 99.9 percent of the time, don’t argue with people who disagree with me,” she said.
Not everyone feels this way, of course. Evangelists, for instance, regard it as their bounden duty to share their own beliefs