Shut Up (If You Can't Say Something Intelligent)

"It was the more socially connected,...who were more likely to be wrong.

The main hurdle is the way we talk to those we’re close to: our conversations are usually meant not so much to gather information as to establish rapport and to bond - in short, to make friends. And we do that by focusing on areas of agreement and avoiding topics that might cause friction. Our natural tendency toward comradeship makes us, ironically, leery of learning too much about the people we’re befriending.

'When we survey people about how often they talk about this stuff,' says [Francis Flynn, a psychology professor at Stanford] of the weighty topics his research subjects had to grapple with, 'it’s basically never. Occasionally there’s a ‘rarely.’"

-- Drake Bennett, with more evidence of why the people who most need to be liked are moral and ethical idiots - either walking into trouble or causing it for others - aware of little, beyond their own neediness, despite evidence from The Boston Globe.