Ask yourself the following: what would it take to make you change your mind on a strongly held belief? An empirical one, a matter of fact. Especially one which you have, in part, defined yourself by.
It’s very difficult to do. The power of confirmation bias is well known; Jonathan Haidt, in his fantastic book The Righteous Mind, says that our rational faculty acts like a press secretary, seeking support for policies that are already in place, not looking for new evidence to base policies on. We get a pleasure-chemical reward when we find evidence that supports our argument; holding controversial views, he says, is literally addictive. And now, with the advent of the internet, it is easy to find supportive evidence for almost any beliefs you may hold. Illuminati nuts, 9/11 truthers and Obama birthers, Moon landing conspiracists, Aids denialists, Young-Earth creationists; all of them can find superficially convincing evidence for their beliefs within seconds of reaching the Google home page.

And that’s just the mad stuff. On controversies like abortion, there are serious points to be made on both sides. If you want something to convince you that an 18-week foetus isn’t meaningfully human, you can find that in seconds; if you want something to convince you it is, you can find that too.

More from Tom Chivers/The Telegraph

Posted by The NON-Conformist