| By the time the polls close on Tuesday, more than a hundred and fifty million Americans will have voted. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to convince them about whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is the superior candidate, and yet, despite feverish efforts, the latest polls aren’t significantly different from those conducted when Harris first joined the race. According to the Times’ national polling average, the candidates have never been more than four percentage points apart. It’s all a testament, among other things, to how difficult it is to change people’s minds. In early 2017, The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert investigated why most of us, as a species, are so hard to budge. Education frequently doesn’t help; in some cases, sharing facts that contradict people’s opinions only makes them cling to their viewpoints more forcefully. Across an array of studies, scientists link this behavior to quirks in our evolution—a process that hasn’t caught up, some argue, to a world of complex politics and sophisticated vaccines. We aren’t totally immovable; an experiment involving zippers and toilets, of all things, offers some hope about the potential to break through. But as Americans near the end of another deeply polarized campaign, our plight can be traced partly to a paradox of our nature. “Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses,” Kolbert writes. “Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.” | 
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