Life is full of contradictions. Nobody argues, which is usually the sign that a sentence has stopped doing any work. It is the kind of thing you say at the end of a conversation rather than the start of one.
The question with something left in it is not whether contradictions are there. It is what happens inside a person in the second after one turns up. Two pieces of research have looked at that directly, and between them they say something less comfortable than the version of this idea that gets passed around.
Being shown both sides
Kaiping Peng and Richard Nisbett published a paper in American Psychologist in 1999 on how people reason about contradiction. Part of it is an account of classical Chinese dialectical thought, which rests on three principles: that reality is in constant change, that reality is full of contradictions, and that nothing stands in isolation from anything else. The middle one is more or less the sentence this article started with, written down a very long time ago.
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The part worth the most attention is the fifth study. It involved 102 American undergraduates at the University of Michigan and 136 undergraduates at Beijing University. Some read information on only one side of a contradiction, which established a baseline. Others read both sides and were left holding the clash.
The comparison is between groups rather than within one person, which matters for reading the result. The American students who saw both sides rated the more plausible finding as more plausible than the students who had seen it on its own. Their rating of the weaker finding did not shift at all. Being handed a contradiction did not loosen their view of the stronger claim. It tightened it.
The Beijing students moved the other way. Shown both sides, they lifted their rating of the weaker claim and lowered their rating of the stronger one, landing somewhere between the two.
The league table the authors refuse to make
There is an obvious and tempting next move here, and the authors will not make it.
They write that the differences they found are almost surely muted in the two populations as a whole. They note that their Chinese participants had been exposed to Western thought more than most, and that outside this particular study their participants had been living in the United States for years. And when they put the question directly, which way of thinking is the better one, their answer is “it depends”, which they point out is itself a dialectical answer.
What survives all that hedging is narrower and more useful than a verdict about cultures. Showing a person both sides of a contradiction does not reliably open their mind. In one large group of people, it closed it slightly.
The contradiction on the inside
Fourteen years later a different team asked a question that only looks similar. Laura Rees, Naomi Rothman, Reuven Lehavy and Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks wanted to know what an internally mixed emotional state does to the accuracy of a judgment that has nothing to do with it.
They induced emotions in a laboratory: happiness, sadness, or the two together. Then they handed out unrelated tasks and measured how wrong people were.
Seventy-six people forecast temperatures for eight American cities. Average squared error was 116.00 for the ambivalent group, against 160.86 for the happy group and 159.87 for the sad one.
Four hundred people took on general knowledge and estimation questions. Percentage squared error came in at 6.93 for the ambivalent group, 9.65 for the happy group and 9.33 for the sad.
In a third task, 658 people estimated tuition costs with the chance to look at peer advice first. The ambivalent group finished with an average error of 9,245.71 against 10,272.41 for the happy and sad conditions combined. In that experiment the authors tested the mechanism and found that receptivity to alternative perspectives mediated the effect. Being of two minds did not make people cleverer. It made them willing to take something in.
Two different animals
These studies are not a matched pair and it would be sloppy to present them as one. One is about a contradiction between two claims on a page. The other is about a contradiction inside a single person. Different teams, different decades, different questions.
They do sit oddly well together, though. Contradiction arriving from outside made one group dig in. Contradiction carried on the inside made people more receptive and measurably more accurate.
What this does not buy you
The ambivalence in the second paper was manufactured in a laboratory and measured on estimation tasks. It is not evidence that ambivalent people are wiser in life, and the authors do not say it is. They tested happiness and sadness together and state plainly that they do not know whether other pairings, fear and happiness for instance, would behave the same way.
There is also a bill. Research on ambivalence within families finds that people carrying a real mix of love and resentment toward a parent report more stress and lower wellbeing than people whose relationships are clearly one thing or clearly the other. Holding two things at once takes energy, and the energy comes from somewhere.
So the tidy conclusion, that contradiction is good for you, is not available. What is available is stranger.
What is actually left
That life is contradictory is not a finding. It is the starting condition, and the tradition of thought Peng and Nisbett describe had it written down as a principle long before anyone ran a study.
The finding is that the contradictions out there and the ones in here do opposite things to a person. Being shown two sides of an argument can leave you more certain rather than less, which is worth knowing about yourself before you next mistake having seen both sides for having weighed them. And being in two minds, at least briefly, at least under laboratory conditions, made people better at hearing something they had not already decided.
The mass of contradictions was never the problem. What we do in the half-second after meeting one is where the variation lives.