If there is one good thing about me, it is I am saintly about admitting when I’m wrong and truly Godly about changing my mind when you persuade me. Admittedly, I do it because you cannot believe how it throws people. Yes, I can look like a fool, but whoa, their faces. Love it.

However, I am unusual. Brainpickings.org looks at the issues of changing one’s mind and in particular how one book talks about it:

David McRaney explores [this] in You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself [UK edition, US edition] — a fascinating and pleasantly uncomfortable-making look at why “self-delusion is as much a part of the human condition as fingers and toes,” and the follow-up to McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, one of the best psychology books of 2011. McRaney writes of this cognitive bug:

“Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do this instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Over time, the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.”

But what makes this especially worrisome is that in the process of exerting effort on dealing with the cognitive dissonance produced by conflicting evidence, we actually end up building new memories and new neural connections that further strengthen our original convictions.

I fancy the book now but Brainpickings writer Maria Popova writes an interesting piece about this.