“Has there ever been a time in the world’s history when people were more sure of their opinions?” asks Jim Ferrell of the Arbinger Insitute.
Ferrell observes, “We become set in our opinions precisely because we have lost sight of the fact that they are merely opinions…our culture is suffering from what one might call ‘opinion creep’—the elevation of unsupported thoughts to the status of opinions and opinions to convictions.”
We don’t know how to have civil disagreements anymore. We fail to recognize that having a thought doesn’t make our thinking the truth. Ferrell writes, “We tend to have convictions about many things and to have opinions about almost everything else. We blind ourselves to the enormity of our ignorance.”
Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Phillip Fernbach in their book The Knowledge Illusion, put it this way: “In general we don’t appreciate how little we know; the tiniest bit of knowledge makes us feel like experts. Once we feel like an expert we start talking like an expert.”
We take that tiny bit of knowledge and, as Ferrell observes, elevate it to a conviction. Sloman and Fernbach write:
“The feeling that overwhelms us is ‘if only they understood.’ If only they understood how much we care, how open we are, and how our ideas would help, they would see things our way. But here’s the rub: While it’s true that your opponents don’t understand the problem in all its subtlety and complexity, neither do you.”
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