Reply To: Does anyone’s mind change, or is it argue for the sake of argument?

Kahneman/Tversky call this crystallization. When give two contradictory pieces of information, most decision makers bias themselves towards the first one they heard. This is confirmed even for professionals. I did at some point very limited experiment like this with several groups of people, and the group of those who learn Gemora showed lower bias (two other groups were grad students and professors in Engineering). Hopefully, if you learn well, this is one of the things you should be able to master – assess information logically rather than based on precedence, authority, personal taste. This could be a part of the test whether one is a talmid chochom …