If you look at polling data, there are a few issues on which Republican voters seem to have changed their beliefs since Donald Trump began his campaign for the presidency. 카지노사이트
In 2015, just 12 percent of Republicans held a favorable view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Gallup. Now 32 percent of Republicans like him, the firm found in a February poll.
Or take the issue of free trade: Historically, conservatives have been in favor of it. But from 2015 to 2017, Republican support of free trade dropped from 56 percent in 2015 to just 36 percent in 2017, according to Pew.
It’s easy to look at these changing poll numbers and see something blatantly hypocritical — that these Americans are knowingly giving in to Trump rhetoric praising Putin and belittling free trade, betraying their former ideals.
But new research from psychology suggests something else is probably going on: Many political beliefs are fickle, and people probably don’t realize it when they change their minds.
Michael Wolfe, a memory and learning researcher at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, recently published an experiment in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology that found when people change their mind on a subject, they have a hard time recalling that they ever felt another way.
It’s an intriguing finding in part because it affirms that people think their beliefs are more stable than they actually are. Which means they may be less open to information that conflicts with their belief.
It’s also further evidence that despite what we may think, we don’t hold consistent ideological views. We tend to agree with whatever our leaders agree with, which is particularly worrying with Donald Trump as president, as I described in a recent story about how conservatives are realigning their views with his.
Why we don’t remember when we change our minds
Wolfe ran the study on a sample of a few hundred college students, using as a topic the effectiveness of spanking as a disciplinary measure. This subject was chosen for a few reasons: It’s one that many people have an opinion on, but it’s not so partisan or political that people would be totally unwilling to change their beliefs. It’s also a topic on 바카라사이트 which it’s relativity easy to find evidence both for and against.
First, Wolfe and his co-author asked the participants if they believed spanking is effective on a scale of 1 to 9. A few months later, they brought the participants into the lab to read arguments for or against spanking. After the prompt, the students were asked to again rate their feelings about spanking. But here’s the key: They were also asked to recall what they first thought about spanking, several months back.
On average, the students changed their minds when they read an argument that was counter to their initial belief. But most didn’t remember. It was just easier to remember the text they’d just read than to think back on their past opinions.
“We don’t go in and grab a memory like opening up a word file or reading it off a tape,” Wolfe explains. “But rather, if you ask a person at a particular time to report their belief, they construct their belief at that moment based on a combination of things that are easily available to them at that time.”
Memories aren’t retrieved; they’re constructed with cognitive shortcuts. And when memories are constructed, we can’t easily see the seams. We don’t notice that they’ve changed.
“When people try to remember a previous belief, information that’s available at a moment biases their ability to remember this old information,” Wolfe says. “They end up thinking their current belief is very similar to their previous belief.” 온라인카지
Here’s the key chart from the study. On the right, it shows that when a participant reads a text that counters what they initially believed, they’re around 2 points more likely on a 9-point scale to endorse it. Then look at the “recollection” scores. That’s their guess for what their original answer was. It’s much more similar to their post-reading answer than it is to the initial response.