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Quote by Harry Mulisch

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The Discovery of Heaven

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Harry Mulisch

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“Kahan devised a theory he calls “identity-protective cognition,” suggesting that when forced to choose between factual truth and group identity, most people choose the latter. “Individuals,” he concluded, “subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.” The problem wasn’t that people are dumb, irrational, or even superficial, as I’d formerly assumed. We’ve simply evolved—as a species—in a different way than I’d imagined. “Once group loyalties are engaged,” Haidt says, “you can’t change people’s mind by refuting their arguments.”

Public SpeakingGroup DynamicsUs Vs Them
Book:I Have Something to Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection
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“There was a risk in theorizing. I had witnessed, close up, the fatal, comic effect upon professors and students of hypotheses which had become unconscious convictions. And thus warned, I had thrown overboard, as a reporter facing facts, many of my college-bred notions . . . It was hard to do; ideas harden like arteries; indeed, one theory of mine is that convictions are identical with hardened arteries. But the facts . . . forced me to drop my academic theories one by one; and my reward was the discovery that it was as pleasant to change one’s mind as it was to change one’s clothes. The practice led one to other, more fascinating—theories.”

ArteriesTheoriesConvictions
Author:Lincoln Steffens
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