Are You Allowed To Change Your Opinion?

I’ve seen a tweet going around with the phrase: “NORMALIZE CHANGING YOUR OPINION WHEN PRESENTED WITH NEW INFORMATION”

At first, I saw at as a rather annoying one of those, “do what you want and don’t ask forgiveness things and was annoyed by it. But as I started thinking about it I realized, that’s exactly what we need more of.

There’s so much pressure to be right all the time. We don’t help matters by being prideful about the things that we say and believe in. After all, why would we believe something if we didn’t think it was absolute fact?

But because there is so much pride in your own opinion rather than the truth, it’s really easy to hold to something whether it’s the truth or not because you don’t want to be proven wrong.

But what if we all took a step back, stopped being so arrogant about the opinions we had and said, “to the best of my knowledge, this is the assessment I have come to with the information I have been presented.” And then when we have a discussion or argument with someone, we are more than happy to switch opinion if they present us with information that we didn’t know about or hadn’t considered.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still going to require a base layer of humility. Because it’s not easy to admit you’re wrong, but I think if we realized that it’s normal for someone with less information to have a different opinion than we might have, then change their mind when we have a conversation (and vise versa) then it would be much easier to have civil debates, where maybe everyone actually does win.