Similarity among Opposite Opinions

By Jian Shuo Wang on 2010-05-21 22:21 · Government

I found out an interesting fact: there are more similarity among the two opposite opinions than those who share more similarity.

Here are example:

If Tom and John are arguing Linux is better or Windows is better, they share more in common than another guy who thinks both Linux and Windows are good, depending on where to use.

Another example: Tom loves Facebook, and John hates Facebook, but they share much more in common than another guy who has never heard of Facebook, or yet another guy who does not care.

3 Comments

Good observation. That seems to be true of religious disputes too. Catholics and Protestants have more in common than other religions, but in Northern Ireland, the hostility is enormous. Sunni and Shiite Muslims fight over doctrines that outsiders don't even understand. When the U.S. was just a bunch of colonies the Protestant Unitarians and Trinitarians were fiercely hostile toward each other. And I've heard that even Tibetan Buddhists have sects that plan assassinations of the other side. Jews and Muslims have lots of common practices--no pork, women covering their hair, praying stances. I'm sure the list could go on by people who know more about it.

For us outsiders the reasons for the disputes seem arcane and trivial, even kind of comic.

— zjemi · 2010-05-21 23:32

agree. it's the love-hate dilemma. people argue because people care. my observation is: the 1st 5 minutes of argument is the most useful moment, things go personal and useless afterwards. and i can usually just use 2 words to conclude any arugment: "depends" and "trade-off".

— pczou · 2010-05-22 13:53

That is totally true and if we paid more attention to this, maybe ppl wouldnt fight about stupid things or get differences solved easily.

It's just as when you are in a relationship, you know so much about that other person that you might hurt her/him worse than anybody else, thus you need to be careful about what you say and dont say hehe.

— Claudia Frias · 2010-05-24 04:56