A study published on Wednesday, October 9, has given an answer behind why some individuals are so confident in arguments, even though they’re entirely wrong.
Shared in journal Plos One, findings say that it all boils down to believing the only information you have, then forming opinions based on them, even when you don’t have any knowledge at all.
Professor Angus Fletcher from Ohio State University said, “Our brains are overconfident that they can arrive at a reasonable conclusion with very little information.”
“People leap to judgments very quickly,” he added, noting that this is the case even when they’re not aware of the entire story.
In a survey conducted by his team, people were divided into three groups.
The first one was given half a fictions story, the second one was presented with the third half, and the last one was handed the entire narrative.
Individuals in the first group then confidently picked an argument that favored their side of the story. The second partition confidently chose the argument that favored theirs. And the last one went along with the neutral point.
After all of the facts were revealed to the first and the second group, they were willing to change their minds and then were actually less confident in forming an opinion about the entire tale.
“We thought that people would really stick to their original judgments even when they received information that contradicted those judgments,” Angus Fletcher stated.
He continued, “But it turns out if they learned something that seemed plausible to them, they were willing to totally change their minds!”
Researchers of this study however pointed that these findings may not “apply to situations in which people have pre-established ideas about a situation, as is often the case with politics,” according to NBC News.
