A dose of complexity can disrupt overconfidence cycles and spur rethinking cycles. It gives us more humility about our knowledge and more doubts about our opinions, and it can make us curious enough to discover information we were lacking. In Peter’s experiment, all it took was framing gun control not as an issue with only two extreme positions but rather as one involving many interrelated dilemmas. As journalist Amanda Ripley describes it, the gun control article “read less like a lawyer’s opening statement and more like an anthropologist’s field notes.” Those field notes were enough to help
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