And it turns out that doubt is a really easy product to make. A couple of decades ago, psychologists Kari Edwards and Edward Smith conducted an experiment in which they asked people in the United States to produce arguments in favor of and against the politically fraught positions of the day such as abortion rights, spanking children, allowing homosexual couples to adopt, quotas for hiring minorities, and the death penalty for those under sixteen years of age.13 Unsurprisingly, they found that people had biases: the study participants found it hard to construct the kind of arguments that their
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