Your title is un-self critical and condescending, so your conversations probably aren’t terribly productive in either direction.

That turn of phrase has never been used by someone conversing in good faith and with an open mind.

Edit: Jack Nicholson excepted

Not sure if this is helpful, but my take is:

Because in most cases, what is assumed to be “truth”is subjective. If you’re talking political. More often things are blurred with regards to truth as most things tend not to be empirically true, but instead, emotionally true.

For example;

“All conservatives are Nazis!”

This is inherently untrue. Yet I see every day- people who believe this to be the absolute truth. Same thing with-

“All liberals want to do is make our children gay!”

Also untrue. But when you try and correct them, they will almost always entrench themselves within their own version of the truth and disregard any form of critical thinking.

Humans are more influenced by emotions than logic, which means that critical thinking alone may not convince them. Only those who are receptive to logical reasoning can be persuaded that way.

A video about it

People don’t like being wrong.

“I think it’s very easy to convince people they are wrong.”

“Actually, here’s all these studies that prove that the opposite is-”

“Well I don’t believe that.”

Many reasons.

• the message seems fishy
• the messenger is not charismatic/trustworthy enough
• there’s lack of clarity in the message
• it contradicts personal model of reality, and these form the cornerstones of our identity, thus can’t be changed just like that
• etc, etc, etc

Be honest, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much does this question have to do with your constant posting about how the maaaaan, maaaaan, is holding down all your crypto “investments” and they’re due to go to the moon any day now as soon as the cabal of lizard people who run the world is eradicated?

Is there even an objective truth though? I’d say there technically is, but I think we all have our own subjective versions of what our “truth” is that rise and fall like a sine wave around the straight line of objective Truth.

Just remember that what is popular is not always true, and what is true is not always popular.

There was a study about sometihng simiilar a while back. It was posted on Reddit, so if that site hasn’t imploded yet, you might be able to find it. I don’t remember the whole thing, but it said a lot of people rather double-down on their already accepted beliefs than open themselves up to new results. It wasn’t everyone, of course and it wasn’t for all topics either. Maybe someone can go find that study and post it here for OP.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

The older you get the more you believe that your view of the world is right. This makes sense. Children still need to find out how everything works. They get corrected all the time because the formed wrong assumptions and opinions.

However, Imagine if you checked your smartphone’s manual every time you used it. Imagine your colleague had to fetch their reference books whenever you asked them something about their job. No-one would survive for more than a week.

This issue is a research point in AI: How ‘certain’ do you want an AI to be? Always second-guessing itself would render it as useless as always assuming it was right.

People don’t like making mistakes. I don’t know if it’s innate or a cultural phenomenon, but in my experience, the immediate reaction to a mistake is a bad feeling—even for inconsequential ones in a friendly environment. Being wrong is not only making a mistake, but living by it. There’s a much greater incentive to not be wrong. The easiest way for an individual to “not be wrong” (in their view) is to assume that the other is wrong, so they reject their hypotheses in a discussion.

Most people’s values and beliefs are all wrapped up with their sense of self, so if those beliefs get attacked, they feel like they’re being attacked.

Avoiding this is very tricky and counter-intuitive, but there are techniques. Look up “street epistemology” if you’d like to know more. There’s a guy on YouTube who goes to college campuses and has discussions with passersby regarding their beliefs. Basically, it’s asking people “What do you believe?” and “Why do you believe that?” Like I said, though, it’s tricky and takes a lot of practice, and it’s really easy to fall back into old patterns again.

When you interact with people, you often do it on your grounds, i.e. in your area of expertise. This inherently means that you are more likely to be right in a discussion. I believe this transfers to other areas of your life – where you are not the expert. So you automatically assume you’re right even if you aren’t. However, in my experience this doesn’t apply to situations where you are very aware that you are the (intellectually) subordinate person, e.g. when talking to a doctor.

People just make up their own truth and say that you’re the one in need of “truth.” It’s a product of the “alternative facts” era that mainly Trump ushered in and others have picked up. If your facts do no support the preferred agenda, it’s just dismissed as “fake news.” Easy-peacy.

Confirmation bias is strong with some.