So great is the bad-decision problem caused by Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency

that our courts have adopted important strategies against it. For instance,

before making decisions, judges and juries are required to hear long and

skillful presentations of evidence and argument from the side they will not

naturally favor, given their ideas in place. And this helps prevent considerable

bad thinking from “first conclusion bias.” Similarly, other modern decision

makers will often force groups to consider skillful counterarguments before

making decisions.

 

And proper education is one long exercise in augmentation of high cognition so

that our wisdom becomes strong enough to destroy wrong thinking maintained by

resistance to change. As Lord Keynes pointed out about his exalted intellectual

group at one of the greatest universities in the world, it was not the intrinsic

difficulty of new ideas that prevented their acceptance. Instead, the new ideas

were not accepted because they were inconsistent with old ideas in place. What

Keynes was reporting is that the human mind works a lot like the human egg. When

one sperm gets into a human egg, there’s an automatic shut-off device that bars

any other sperm from getting in. The human mind tends strongly toward the same

sort of result.

 

And so, people tend to accumulate large mental holdings of fixed conclusions and

attitudes that are not often reexamined or changed, even though there is plenty

of good evidence that they are wrong.