Think of an opinion you hold fairly strongly. Now try to remember when you actually formed it; not when you first encountered the topic, but when you genuinely sat with it and arrived somewhere. For a surprising number of opinions, if you’re honest, the arrival moment looks less like careful reasoning and more like: someone else sounded certain, it resonated, and at some point it became yours. This episode looks at how opinions spread; not through the quality of the argument, but through the contagion of certainty and what it means that the nearest confident voice often does more of our thinking than we’d like to admit.
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AI Generated Transcript:
Try this small experiment, just in your head. Think of an opinion you hold fairly strongly — about a film, a public figure, a current debate, doesn’t matter what. Now ask yourself: when did you actually form that opinion? Not when did you first encounter the topic — when did you actually sit with it, weigh it, and arrive somewhere. For a surprising number of opinions, if you’re honest, the answer isn’t a moment of careful thought. It’s something more like: you heard someone else’s take, it sounded right, and at some point afterward, it just… became yours. Not borrowed in the sense of “I’m quoting someone.” Borrowed in the sense that you forgot it was ever anyone else’s in the first place.
I’m Andrei Barburas, and this is The Unlearning Project — a podcast from barburas.com, where every couple of weeks we take one assumption that usually goes unexamined and we crack it open. Today’s assumption is about where our opinions actually come from — specifically, the assumption that holding an opinion means you arrived at it. That if you believe something, there’s a process behind that belief — evidence considered, alternatives weighed, a conclusion reached. For some opinions, sure, that’s roughly what happens. But for a much larger share than most of us would guess, the process looks less like reasoning and more like… absorption. And the strange part is, absorption and reasoning feel identical from the inside.
Let’s start with why that’s true — why an absorbed opinion doesn’t feel borrowed, even to the person holding it.
When you encounter a confidently stated opinion — someone explaining, with conviction and apparent expertise, why something is true or good or terrible — your mind doesn’t usually file that away as “here is a claim, made by someone else, which I am now aware of.” If the source seems credible, and especially if the claim resonates with something you were already loosely inclined toward, the claim tends to get integrated much more directly. It stops feeling like “this is what they think.” It starts feeling like “this is what I think” — and crucially, it starts feeling that way almost immediately, often before you’ve had any real opportunity to evaluate it independently.There’s a concept in psychology sometimes called “source amnesia” — the tendency to remember a piece of information while forgetting where it came from. Normally this is discussed in terms of memory errors — you remember a fact but not which book or conversation it came from. But there’s a broader version of this that applies to opinions, not just facts: we often retain the conclusion of someone else’s reasoning while losing all track of the fact that it was, originally, someone else’s reasoning at all. What’s left, in our own minds, is just the conclusion — sitting there, indistinguishable from a conclusion we reached ourselves, because the part that would mark it as “external” — the source, the context, the moment of encountering it — has fallen away.
This is where I want to bring in the idea of “the nearest confident voice,” because I think confidence is doing more work in this process than almost anything else.
Confidence, as a signal, is processed very differently from confidence as a property of being correct. These are not the same thing — someone can be extremely confident and extremely wrong, and someone can be quite correct while expressing real uncertainty. But here’s the issue: confidence is immediately legible. You can detect it instantly, from tone, from pacing, from the absence of hedging. Correctness, on the other hand, often isn’t immediately legible at all — verifying whether something is actually true can take real effort, sometimes more effort than most situations call for, or more expertise than most people listening actually have.
So when you’re faced with a claim, and you don’t have the time, the expertise, or honestly the motivation to independently verify it — which describes the vast majority of opinions we encounter on any given day — confidence becomes a stand-in for correctness. Not because anyone consciously decides “I’ll trust this because they sound sure.” It happens faster and more quietly than that. The confidence itself produces a feeling of plausibility — and that feeling of plausibility is very easily mistaken for the feeling of having evaluated something and found it to be true.
This is, I think, one of the most underappreciated dynamics in how opinions spread — not through persuasion in the sense of someone making a careful case and you weighing it. Through something closer to contagion, where the thing that transfers from person to person isn’t really the argument at all. It’s the certainty. The argument is almost incidental — a kind of packaging. What actually moves is the feeling of “this is settled, this is obvious, anyone reasonable would see it this way” — and that feeling can transfer completely intact even when the underlying argument, if you actually examined it, turns out to be quite thin.
Let’s bring this into something more concrete, because this isn’t just an abstract description of how minds work — it shapes how groups of people end up converging on shared opinions, often remarkably quickly, on topics that are genuinely complicated and where quick convergence probably isn’t warranted.
Think about how opinions tend to form inside a team, or a friend group, or even a family, about something ambiguous — a new policy, a piece of news, a decision someone else made that’s being discussed secondhand. Often, the first person to express a view with real confidence has an outsized effect on where the group ends up — not necessarily because their view is the best one, but simply because it arrived first, stated with conviction, before anyone else had fully formed their own take. Everyone who hears it afterward isn’t really evaluating the situation from scratch anymore. They’re evaluating it in light of a confidently stated position that’s already in the room. And subsequent opinions tend to either align with that position, or define themselves in opposition to it — but rarely form completely independently of it, as if it had never been said.
This is sometimes discussed under the umbrella of “anchoring” — the tendency for an initial piece of information to disproportionately shape everything that follows, even when that initial piece of information was somewhat arbitrary. Anchoring is usually discussed in terms of numbers — initial price estimates, initial offers in negotiations. But opinions anchor too. The first confidently stated take on something often becomes the reference point that all subsequent reactions are implicitly measured against — agreement, disagreement, modification — even though, structurally, there was nothing that made that first take more deserving of being the reference point than any other.
Here’s where I think this gets genuinely important, beyond just being an interesting quirk of how groups think: if opinions spread primarily through confidence rather than through the quality of reasoning behind them, then the people whose opinions end up shaping everyone else’s aren’t necessarily the people who’ve thought about something the most, or who have the best access to relevant information. They’re the people who are most comfortable expressing certainty — which is its own trait, somewhat independent of how much careful thought sits behind that certainty in any given case.
And this connects back to something we’ve touched on in other episodes — the way confidence itself isn’t evenly distributed, or evenly permitted, across different people in a group. Some people express uncertainty as a kind of intellectual honesty — “I’m not totally sure, but…” — while internally being quite confident. Others express confidence as a kind of social habit, almost independent of how confident they actually are internally. And listeners, for the most part, can’t tell the difference. What they can hear is the tone — and the tone is what gets absorbed, conclusion and all.
So what does this mean for how we think about our own opinions — not in a way that leads to paralysis, where you can’t hold a view about anything without an exhaustive audit of its origins, but in a way that’s actually useful?
I think it starts with a small, practical distinction: the difference between an opinion you hold because you’ve engaged with the substance of an issue, and an opinion you hold because you’ve engaged with someone’s confidence about that issue. These can produce identical-sounding opinions — the words might be exactly the same — but they’re held very differently. An opinion built on substance tends to have some texture to it — you can usually say something about why, beyond just restating the conclusion more firmly. An opinion built on absorbed confidence often has much less texture — when pushed, it tends to either restate itself, more loudly, or retreat fairly quickly, because there isn’t much underneath it beyond the memory of someone else having sounded sure.
Neither of these is necessarily “bad” — we can’t independently verify everything, and trusting confident voices on topics outside our expertise is, in many cases, a reasonable way to navigate a world with far more information in it than any individual could personally evaluate. The issue isn’t that absorbed opinions exist. The issue is when an absorbed opinion gets experienced as a reasoned one — when the feeling of certainty gets mistaken for the feeling of having actually worked something out, and that mistaken feeling then gets defended, sometimes quite forcefully, as if it had a foundation that, if you actually looked, isn’t really there.
Here’s the question I want to leave you with. Pick one opinion you hold that you’d describe as fairly strong — something you’d defend without much hesitation if it came up. And try to trace it back, as honestly as you can, to its actual origin. Not “what do I think” — but “where did I first encounter this, and what did that moment actually look like?” Was it a careful weighing of something — or was it the nearest confident voice, arriving first, and never quite leaving?
That’s it for this episode of The Unlearning Project. We’ll be back in two weeks with another one. Until then, listen for the difference between certainty and reasoning — in others, and in yourself.
