Almost immediately, commentators decried the verdict. For example, the chancellor and the chief diversity officer of the University of California, Santa Cruz, declared that they “join in solidarity with all who are outraged by this failure of accountability.” Although the jurors, who had actually seen the evidence and heard the witnesses, came away with reasonable doubt as to Rittenhouse’s guilt, many people who had not been in the courtroom were certain the verdict was unjust.

That is but one instance of the problem University of Illinois sociologist Ilana Redstone explores in her book The Certainty Trap. People have the propensity to act as if they are certain of something when certainty is not justified. This is not a new problem, but it seems to be growing worse as Americans become increasingly quick to conclude the worst about anyone who disagrees with them. The book, she writes, is meant to be “a roadmap for how to reasonably work through and overcome the heated and divisive hand-to-hand political battles.” It isn’t a right-wing or a left-wing book; Redstone hopes to reach people across the political spectrum, encouraging them to do more thinking and less emoting, to interrogate and clarify their beliefs, and to try to comprehend why others might have come to different conclusions.

Socrates questioned his fellow Athenians, both because he truly wanted to understand what they thought and because he wanted to get them to see the limits of their knowledge while professing his own ignorance. Redstone suggests that we should strive to be more like Socrates, probing for knowledge rather than leaping to conclusions. Our certainty traps lead to intellectual sloppiness, where people stop asking questions because they’re sure they have the truth in their grasp.

Our recent political disputes are full of examples of the certainty trap problem. We have bitter exchanges over gun control, with advocates denouncing opponents as indifferent to the lives lost to gun violence, while opponents condemn supporters for wanting to disarm people so they’ll be at the mercy of criminals. In the COVID emergency, people who wanted stringent protocols and vaccinations claimed that anyone who disagreed with them was in favor of letting people die merely because they didn’t like some reasonable and minor disruptions in their lives, while people who opposed the governmental mandates said their opponents were authoritarians who had fallen for a hoax. What was conspicuously absent was a willingness to consider arguments, objectively weigh costs and benefits, and consider ways to accommodate different sides. On these and many other issues, we have become like two warring tribes rather than rational, thinking individuals.

Beyond civility / Quite a few people have observed this problem and concluded that the solution is to promote civil discourse, encouraging people to make their writings and conversations more respectful, productive, and truthful. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Redstone argues that civility is not enough. She writes:

Our problem is not simply that we have forgotten that conversations on heated topics require respect, a calm tone of voice, and active listening. To be sure, those are crucial skills to have. But the real challenge is the thinking that drives the judgments and demonization in the first place…. One way of understanding the limits of civil discourse as a remedy is that a person can be practicing all of its best norms and still be mired in certainty.

Redstone argues that we trap ourselves in feelings of certainty because we fall prey to three fallacious modes of thinking. First, there is the “settled question fallacy,” which is the assumption that many controversies have already been settled and the individual knows how they’ve been settled. We saw that during the COVID pandemic, when officials kept telling people “The science is settled” on such questions as how to avoid the virus, how to treat it, and so on. What people should have understood is that in science (and everywhere else), knowledge is always provisional; questions are never settled but are always open to further investigation.

Second, there is the “equal knowledge” fallacy, the tendency for a person to think that others would agree with his conclusions if only they had the same knowledge he does. For example, “green” advocates often say that skeptics would agree with their policies if only they knew as much about the environment as the advocates do. Therefore, they believe, differences of opinion must be based on ignorance. There’s no call to examine the skeptics’ grounds for their beliefs, nor to question the soundness of one’s own views.

Third, there is the “known intent” fallacy, which entails the rejection of opinions one disagrees with by ascribing bad motives to the dissidents. For example, in arguments over racial preferences in college admissions, advocates of preferences often dismiss contrary arguments by saying that people who claim to want racial neutrality are actually trying to preserve white supremacy. No further discussion is needed because the evil intentions of the other side have been exposed.

This problem is exacerbated by the growing tendency for Americans to live in “ideological silos,” meaning they only have contact with people and sources of information that align with their preexisting beliefs. As Redstone observes, people now are afraid to express any doubt about the views of their side lest they be attacked as apostates (“cancelled”), which can have serious consequences such as loss of employment or friendships.

People are not the only victims of certainty traps; our institutions are as well. The US government’s response to COVID is a good example. In early 2021, very little was known about the disease, yet key governmental institutions began mandating how people should respond. It turns out that the governmental experts were as unsure about what to do as the rest of us, but they acted as though they were certain. Consequently, people now have far less trust in governmental health pronouncements than before. Redstone rightly states:

A functional society depends on having a critical mass of people with a shared sense that we’re all in this together. Ultimately, there will be times when the only reason to follow through with an action is because of some sense that it is important for the greater good. The way we get there is by building trust. The enemy of trust is certainty.

Educators carry some of the blame for our certainty traps. Increasingly, teachers and professors instruct students that some ideas are unquestionably right and others are unquestionably wrong. Thus, those educators spread their own certainty traps to their students. Educational institutions themselves have become prone to issuing pronouncements that leave no room for doubt. For example, college departments often make it clear they hold to certain views on controversies like the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Anyone who disagrees should not bother to seek employment or education there. In decades gone by, Redstone points out, schools understood that they should be neutral on such issues, but today the zealots have routed the old guard. Our schools increasingly encourage certainty traps rather than careful analysis.

Avoiding the trap / Intelligent, rational humans should not fall into certainty traps, even if they’ve amassed a great deal of knowledge and think they’ve considered all possible grounds for disagreement. A reader of Regulation, for example, may be very confident that minimum wage laws are a harmful policy, considering all the pros and cons. Nevertheless, he or she must be willing to consider any contrary argument. Don’t shut off dialogue with a minimum wage supporter because that dialogue might change your mind.

Redstone does not suggest any silver-bullet solutions to the certainty trap problem. She does make the eminently sensible point that those of us who are concerned about the nation’s division into hostile warring tribes should model good argumentation, never taking the low road of impugning the motives or questioning the intelligence of people who disagree. Thoughtful people often profess to believe this, yet the certainty trap problem seems to be worsening.