“What causes people to change their minds? On this blog, I have argued that people do not change their minds on ideological issues. I have argued that econometric regression results typically do not change people’s minds. Why is that?

1. Changing your mind could mean acknowledging a loss of status. If you are an academic, and you achieved status because of your articulation of theory X, then you will not give up on theory X, even if years later much of the profession has switched to theory Y. As Max Planck put it, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

2. Changing your mind could mean loss of group identity. I suppose I could use the unkindest cut example. But let me stick with economic beliefs. If your think of yourself as belonging to a group of conservative Republicans, you probably are going to resist any analysis that promotes Keynesian economics.”

Source: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/changing_people.html

I think the WHY of people not changing their minds fascinates me even more than the fact that they do it at all.

* Warning: side effects may include making an idiot of yourself in public.
** Warning: teenagers are idiots.

“Regardless of whether the information presented confirmed or contradicted the students’ existing beliefs, all of them came away from the reading with their beliefs strengthened.”

Note that this does not say that one side irrationally held to their beliefs in the face of evidence - it says that _both_ sides did. Makes you wonder what the experimenters original hypothesis was, and whether they considered the evidence which they collected to support that hypothesis or not…

Or something.

Step 1: get all homeopathists in one room. Get an equal number of skeptics. Line them up opposite each other. give each an empty glass.

Step 2: Open a big tin of poison. Put a fatal dose of poison water into each glass in front of a homeopathist.

Step 4: Using homeopathic dilution make a super dilute poison solution. Put this solution into the glasses in front of the skeptics.

Each side now think the other has the most deadly solution in front of them.

Drink.

End of problem.
See who dies.

Step 1: get all homeopathists in one room. Get an equal number of skeptics. Line them up opposite each other. give each an empty glass.

Step 2: Open a big tin of poison. Put a fatal dose of poison water into each glass in front of a homeopathist.

Step 4: Using homeopathic dilution make a super dilute poison solution. Put this solution into the glasses in front of the skeptics.

Each side now think the other has the most illness causing solution in front of them.

Drink.

End of problem.
See who dies.