If you are reading an article about a controversial issue, do you think you would understand if it changed your beliefs? No one knows your own mind as well as you do - it seems obvious that you would know if your beliefs changed. Yet a new article in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that we actually have very poor "awareness" of our own belief change, which means that we will underestimate how convinced we were in a convincing article.
Researchers Michael Wolfe and Todd Williams of Grand Valley State University said their findings could have implications for science.
The researchers looked at over two hundred students in two studies and focused on their beliefs about whether spanking children was an effective form of discipline. The researchers deliberately chose this topic in the hope that students would be largely unaware of the relevant scientific literature and that they would express a diverse range of relatively unfixed initial beliefs.
The students reported on their initial beliefs about whether spanking was an effective way to discipline a child on a scale of 1 to 9.
A few weeks later, they were presented with one of two research texts, each presenting arguments and evidence for or against the whipping. After that, the students answered some questions to test their understanding and memory of the text. The students then answered the questions again about whether the flogging was effective or not (using the same 9-point scale as before). Finally, the researchers asked them to recall what their faith was at the beginning of the study.
The students' belief in the spanking changed when they read a text that contradicted their original position. In fact, their memory of their original belief was biased towards their new belief - in fact, their memory was closer to their current belief than their original belief.
Yai Evgeniya