Beware Of Agreeable Humans

Sometimes there comes a research paper which vindicates one's lifetime of learning that had  become a heuristic without a way to quantify it. 

This is one of those papers. 

At this point in life; I get irritated by people who agree with him even though I know they didn't "believe" what I said (maybe even worse they didn't hear a word I said). 

All this happens because of their inability to change their mind but yet want to "preserve" their image of a nice person by shedding disagreement.  

Someone who argues has some sort of skin in the game and has some iota of possibility of changing their mind. 

One needs to be viscerally involved to change their minds. Mind and Body are one and the same. 

But you have no chance with readily agreeable folks. Beware of them. 

Love is overrated; changing minds is a prerequisite for love. 

World would be a better place if changing minds is celebrated as much as humans celebrate love. 

Dispositioned to resist? The Big Five and resistance to dissonant political views

Next, we find that extraverted individuals resist opposing political views by bolstering their prior political views. A closer look at the index of empowering strategies reveals that this effect is driven by social validation (i.e., reminding oneself that significant others share the same opinion). Because extraverts are social in nature, they might seek reassurance from their social environment when their opinions are challenged. This idea seems to align with earlier research that suggests that extraverts are significantly affected by the opinions of their peers (Alkiş & Taşkaya Temizel, 2015).

Similar to extraverts, agreeable individuals value the ideas of their social circle (Alkiş & Taşkaya Temizel, 2015). In line with this, our data shows that agreeable individuals remind themselves that others in their environment share their views. However, if they can, they will avoid confrontation with alternative political information. Out of the Big Five, agreeable individuals also seem the most resistant. Although surprising, this finding somewhat aligns with previous studies that emphasized the importance of conflict-orientation in understanding people's reactions to political disagreement (e.g., Testa et al., 2014).

Although neurotic individuals react to opposing views with negative affect, they do not seem to avoid such confrontation. Instead of withdrawing from the confrontation – which we hypothesized – we have indications that they engage with the opposing views through contesting and empowering strategies, even if only marginally. Thus, the expected mechanism might be reversed: neurotic individuals become activated precisely because they find counter-attitudinal views emotionally upsetting. This logic aligns with previous findings that show that the strongest motive for neurotic individuals to comment on news stories is when the story affects them emotionally (Barnes et al., 2018).