"Being consistent is a virtue"

You've been told, and you've told other people, that you should say what you mean and stand by it. People who change their view every time someone pushes are people nobody can rely on. Consistency is a virtue, so changing your mind is a small vice, and holding is the virtue defending itself.

There's a real value here and this chapter isn't going to pretend otherwise. But look at what's being kept consistent. There are two different things you could be consistent about. One is your conclusions. The other is your method, which is that you believe things for reasons, and you update when the reasons change. Those two consistencies come apart the moment the reasons change, and at that point you have to pick. You can keep the conclusion and abandon the method, or keep the method and abandon the conclusion. Holding keeps the conclusion. It's consistent the way a stopped clock is.

The fear behind this belief is a particular one. It's that people watching will see the change of mind as flip-flopping, weathervane behaviour, believing whatever the last person said. Mark Leary and colleagues looked at that in 2017 as part of a set of four studies on what they called intellectual humility, which they define as the degree to which someone recognises that their beliefs might be wrong. In the third study, people high on that measure were less inclined to see a politician who'd changed position as flip-flopping. People low on it were more inclined. That tells you something useful about the audience. The people who'll judge your change of mind harshly are the people who'd have judged your holding harshly too, because they're the ones who can't imagine being wrong themselves. The rest see a person who's just learned something.

You can also make the difference visible, and this is the practical bit. Flip-flopping is a change of conclusion with no reason attached. A climb-down is a change of conclusion with the reason said out loud. "I've just remembered the roadworks, the third is quicker." Nobody hearing that thinks you're a weathervane. They think you remembered the roadworks. Chapter 22 is about saying the reason, and it turns out to be the part that makes the whole thing look like what it is.