Despite your beliefs when you were 15, you can’t really know
everything. As a result, you often have
to listen to the advice of experts as you form opinions. What kind of expert opinion has the biggest
influence on your attitudes?
You might think that you are most inclined to be affected by
experts who agree with you. After all,
there is a lot of research on confirmation
bias that suggests that we tend to focus on information that confirms our
hypotheses about the world.
An interesting paper in the January, 2012 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
by Jason Clark, Duane Wegener, Meara Habashi, and Abigail Evans suggests that
the opposite may be true.
Their proposal is that when you hear that when an expert
expresses an opinion that disagrees with your own, your own beliefs are
threatened. In addition, you believe
that experts are probably going to make strong arguments in favor of their
position. So, you pay careful attention
to experts who disagree with you, presumably so that you will be ready to rebut
their opinion. Paradoxically, then, you
may be most strongly influenced by the opinion of experts who disagree with
you.
To test this idea, participants did a broad survey on a series
of topics, one of which was their attitude about taxes on sugary drinks. Then, participants read an opinion in favor
of taxing sugary drinks. Some people
were told that this opinion came from an expert in food and nutrition. Others were told that it was written by a
high-school student. Finally, the
opinion itself consisted of arguments that were judged in a pre-test to be
strong or arguments that were judged to be weak. After reading the arguments, people rated
their attitude toward taxes on sugary drinks.
People who did not believe in taxes on sugary drinks were
hearing opinions that did not fit with their initial opinion. For these people, hearing a strong argument
by an expert increased their attitude toward taxes significantly, while hearing
a weak argument by an expert decreased their attitude significantly. Hearing an argument by a non-expert did not
affect their opinion much.
The opposite pattern occurred for people hearing a message
that agreed with their previous opinion.
In this case, the strength of the expert argument had little influence
on their attitude. However, hearing a
weak opinion expressed by a non-expert led to a significant decrease in their
argument.
That is, people seemed to pay quite a bit of attention to
experts when the expert disagreed with them, but actually paid more attention
to non-experts when listening to someone who agreed with them. A second study demonstrated that this effect
was best explained by people’s expectation that experts would provide good arguments.
I found this result to be both hopeful and cautionary. On the hopeful side, it looks like we have
some tendency to grapple with arguments from people who disagree with us. That means that all of us have some capacity
to change our opinion.
On the cautionary side, though, the modern world has given
us an abundance of choice in the opinions we choose to hear. That is, while we can learn from people who
disagree with us, we don’t necessarily like to hear what they have to say. When given the choice, most people would
rather listen to others who agree with them rather than disagreeing.