"I Like My Opinions, Why Would I Want New Ones?"

A psychological barrier to persuasion

One challenge in persuading people or at least getting them to listen to your ideas is persuading them. The other is persuading them to be persuaded.

One of the things I’ve realized as I’ve written about urbanist ideas here over the years is that a lot of people don’t just happen to hold the ideas or preferences they hold; they like them. They don’t want to be convinced they’re (possibly) mistaken.

Think about when you were a kid and you didn’t want to try some food, and your parents said “Try it, you’ll like it!” “No, I won’t like it!” “Why don’t you just try it?” “Because I know I won’t like it!” Well, eventually, you try it. And then you hate the fact that it tastes great, and you struggle with all of your energy to resist smiling or acknowledging that you like it. It’s kind of a deflated feeling to realize someone else was right. To give them a chance to say “I told you so.”

I wonder how much of that psychological self-protection is an element in these arguments over ideas and policies. There’s something naive about the notion of the marketplace of ideas, that the best ideas win when we have rigorous debate, etc. etc. It’s the intellectual equivalent to the naive notion of “homo economicus,” or that humans are always rational economic actors. This kind of thinking strips away our quirks, our sense of identity, our humanity—really, it pretends the black boxes of our minds don’t exist.

I’m going somewhere with this.

I was part of a long Twitter back-and-forth the other week with a bike skeptic in suburban Texas and a couple of women with children, in cities or close-in suburban neighborhoods, who used e-bikes a lot for everyday errands. They were insisting that it was perfectly possible and even pleasant or easy depending, say, on the weather; not for every trip all the time, but a perfectly good way to reduce short car trips and get outside and also get things done (i.e., not sport cyclists).

The Texas fellow, however, simply kept insisting that no self-respecting Texan would ever run errands on an e-bike (unless maybe he lived in Austin), that these two women and their families were outliers and that normal people have no interest in this, etc. etc. He was mostly polite, actually, but his tone was a little bit condescending, a little bit dismissive—but most interestingly, a little bit threatened.