A fantastically cute experiment from researchers in Lund
University, Sweden, has shown quite clearly that we can change our minds when
situations change, even about stuff that we think we believe whole-heartedly.
In this study published Sep. 19 in the open access
journal PLOS ONE, researchers gave a group of students a
questionnaire based on certain situations to gauge the “moral response” of the
students to those dilemmas.
The questions and answers were written on a flip chart
that had been manipulated so that when the researchers turned the page, the
students’ answers were given back to them as completely opposite to the views
that they had stated the first time around.
However, when confronted with the completely changed
answers that were now attributed to them, many of the students put up good
arguments about why they supported the new answers instead.
Which at least partly why, I think, we periodically choose
to re-elect the “idiots” we threw out just a few years ago.
