"I'm just being accurate"

Start with the belief that makes the habit feel like a virtue. You're not trying to win. You're being accurate. The fact is the fact, and you're the one who has it.

Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin and Lee Ross, in 2002, ran three studies on what they called the bias blind spot. In surveys, people rated themselves as less subject to a range of cognitive and motivational biases than the average person, than their classmates, than fellow travellers at an airport. That's ordinary enough. What's less ordinary is what happened next. When people were shown that they'd displayed a bias, and read a description of how it works, they insisted their own judgements had been accurate and objective anyway. And in a final study, people rated a peer's self-serving explanation of a test result as biased, and their own identical self-serving explanation as free of bias.

The finding isn't that people are biased. Everybody knows that. It's that the feeling of being unbiased, of just seeing the facts, is universal and is present in people who've just been shown they're wrong. From inside, accuracy and bias feel identical. They both feel like seeing clearly.

Now sit at the dinner table. You feel certain the plumber came on Tuesday. That certainty feels like accuracy. Across the table, your partner feels certain it was Wednesday, and their certainty feels, to them, exactly as you feel yours. Neither of you is experiencing bias. Both of you are experiencing clarity. One of you is wrong, and the wrong one doesn't feel any different from the right one, because that's what Pronin's studies found. The feeling of being right isn't evidence of being right. It's what disagreement feels like from either chair.

I'm not saying you weren't right about the plumber. The calendar said Tuesday. I'm saying that the certainty you had before you found the calendar was worth nothing as evidence, because they had the same certainty and were wrong. And I'm saying that in the arguments where there's no calendar, which is most of them, what was said at Christmas, whose idea the holiday was, whether you'd mentioned Saturday, you're both running on that same worthless certainty, and calling it accuracy.

"I'm just being accurate" is what everyone in an argument thinks. Both of you think it. That's the problem, and it's not one that more certainty solves.