From “How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion” by David McRaney
When we first suspect we may be wrong, when expectations don’t match experience, we feel viscerally uncomfortable and resist accommodation by trying to apply our current models of reality to the situation. It’s only when the brain accepts that its existing models will never resolve the incongruences that it updates the model itself by cheating a new layer of abstraction to accommodate the novelty. The result is an epiphany, and like all epiphanies it is the conscious realization that our minds have changed that startles us, not the change itself.
Kuhn wrote that “novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.” In other words, when we don’t know what we don’t know, at first we see only what we expect to see, even when what we see doesn’t match our expectations. When we get that “I might be wrong” feeling, we initially try to explain it away, interpreting novelty as confirmation, looking for evidence that our models are still correct, creating narratives that justify holding on to our preconceived notions. Unless grandly subverted, our models must fail us a few times before we begin to accommodate.