I’ve changed my mind about some significant issues over the course of my adult life - the death penalty is only one example - but I’ve never denied that I had changed my mind and previously felt differently.
One of my SILs used to be pretty religious. Regular church-goer, while my wife and I are longstanding capital-A Atheists. Recently we had a discussion in which she casually observed that she didn’t believe in God and never had. Struck me as quite curious, as there was one time that she stopped talking to us for a number of years after some discussion about religion. To my credit, I did not ask questions about her miraculous non-conversion…
We have a friend; I remember when the US invaded Iraq. My wife and I strongly opposed the invasion, but our friend said we “had to do something” and presumed that the administration had some information we lacked. Between then and now she has described herself as being as opposed to the invasion as we had been.
I find such changes of attitude curious, and am not aware of having acted similarly myself. I wonder if such people admit to themselves or are aware of their inconstancy? Have you experienced folk changing their minds in this manner while denying that they have done so? Do you think they are aware of having done so, or do they succeed in convincing themselves? I don’t see it as a weakness or fault to acknowledge that you previously felt one way but changed your mind having learned/experienced more.
Once at a summer barbecue my grandmother ground the proceedings to a halt by announcing that she was against spanking children and always had been; you could have heard a pin drop. I’m generally ambivalent about spanking, though I had issues with her doing it - you might have done something wrong, but it might be she was having a bad day.
A friend at a party said he was pro-legalization about drugs, and we’d previously had a lengthy discussion on the subject where he was adamant that drug users were the source of darned near every societal evil you could name, from jaywalking to country music. He didn’t remember the talk, and he was using my talking points from the previous conversation to explain his views. Eh.
My BIL said that he’d figured out my mother was in dementia before anybody else. He had actually been denying it well after I started pointing it out. He stalked out of the house in indignation when I said I still had some of the emails.
Years ago, I had a friend who really liked the salmon patties I made from canned salmon. One day she decided to make them herself. She screwed up the recipe, and they didn’t come out very well. She then denied ever having liked them in the first place.
Some years after my father died, my mother was talking about a short period when her sister had come to live with them; it hadn’t worked out well and the sister moved out again after a short while. I said that the sister might not have realized before moving in how much my mother and father were arguing at the time. My mother reacted with shock and denial – she seemed to genuinely not remember that she and my father had argued with any frequency at all. - it occurs to me that I only saw them a few days at a time a couple of times a year during that stretch; maybe for some reason they argued more when I was there?
There’s a lot of stuff in my life that I genuinely don’t remember. I don’t think any of that involves changing major political positions – I certainly remember having changed several of them since my teens, and some of them later – but if I’ve forgotten, how would I know?
This somehow reminds me of my brother. We used to argue whenever we were together (this began when he was 10 and I was 15 and shared a BR). Eventually, he admitted that most of the time he agreed with me, but wanted to hear my arguments so he could use them against others. I sorely miss him. He died of a brain tumor nearly 26 years ago.
The story about your brother listening to your arguments was touching. I tend to draw out lines of reasoning from my sister this way but she knows I wouldn’t consider my opinions more solid.
In some instances, people deny that they had “changed their minds” because their change was so subtle, perhaps over the course of decades, that they didn’t even realize they’d shifted. To them, it felt like they’d stood on the same political ground the whole time, but the tectonic plates moved at a crawl underneath their feet.
It could also be that the issue itself changed. A lot of former Republicans say their views never budged but it was the Republican Party that moved far into looneyland.
It could also be that many people refuse to admit they have changed their minds because they see it as a sign of weakness. Thus, it’s better to gaslight others into thinking that’s been their stance from the beginning.
Chameleons are common. These are people that agree or disagree with the sentiment in the room without any sincerity. I assume they have no recall of taking a particular position at the time.
I’d bet that a lot of people on the internet feel that way about me. The issue isn’t that I disagree with the majority in the discussion or with certain views, but have issues with their argument for taking that position.
I suppose another possibility is that people are mortally embarrassed about some former stance or belief, and just wish that the whole memory of it would go away.
Yeah, but if their audience was listening and has a decent memory, IMO they create a worse impression that someone who changed their mind to reflect new/changed info.
Back in a college writing class we were assigned to keep a journal throughout the semester and write our thoughts and opinions on anything. Reading a lot of it decades later I often am in disbelief at some of the opinions and stances I had. Even to the point of not even remembering ever having felt that way.
Another possibly relevant factor is how faulty our memories are. IIRC, there was a pretty impressive study comparing interviews of people immediately after 9/11 and again some time later. In the later interviews, people described their personal experiences vastly differently from immediately after.
Over the holidays, we were speaking with a young couple who jammed up their garbage disposal. I observed that you really shouldn’t use the disposal to grind up substantial amounts of vegetable matter. My wife reminded me (assuming her memory is accurate) that upon moving into our second home some 35 years ago, I jammed up the disposal trying to grind up the entire innards of a jack-o-lantern.
I guess after that incident I had completely cleaved to the idea that disposals should be used sparingly. But, I’ll contend that my understanding of disposal usage is a tad less significant (philosophically, if not economically) than one’s belief in a supernatural being - such as my SIL claiming she never believed in God.
IMO college is somewhat of a transitional period. There is no shortage of things I believed when I was young and stupid. Hopefully around college age I had fewer goofy beliefs. The examples I offered in my OP were people who had very strong opinions well after they were out of college.
I’ve got no shortage of positions I no longer hold - primarily because I just don’t really care about those issues or behaviors.
I wonder if that dynamic and the dynamic I referenced aren’t frequently inextricably linked.
The old trope about “the bank never making an error in my favor” comes to mind.
I have a beloved family member who tends to make himself the hero of each and every story that he recounts. It’s not infrequent that I was present for the antecedent event and … uh … remember it very differently than the way he tells it to the audience du jour.
Faulty memories – probabilistically, it would seem – would err in recollection with some degree of randomness, rather than always militating toward making the ‘misrememberer’ look exceptionally good
That would assume that what we forget, and what we remember, is random. Which seems to me to be highly unlikely. While some unpleasant memories may stick precisely because they’re unpleasant, others, especially others that are only moderately unpleasant and don’t carry a strong warning signal, may be forgotten precisely because they’re unpleasant.
Similar to the internet I’ve encountered what I call ‘satellite friends’. These are friends of friends that I’ll encounter at parties and other events where there are conversations where they may elaborate on one side of an issue and don’t intend to leave the impression they are leaning or all the way over in one direction. Then next time, without any knowledge of their lives or general nature they seem to switch sides. If I pointed out a previous conversation that they’ve likely forgotten they might deny that they’ve held that stance ever, and they likely didn’t.
As I understand it (and oversimplified) each time we remember something, we “re-write” (accurately or not), so I guess if one spent a lot of timing thinking about how they wished they’d responded (tweaking events over and over) that might turn into a “memory” that sticks. Or yeah, someone could just be chaning details knowingly to make themselves look good.
