I have worked for years in the education community, and I have maintained the same approach in social and political life.
I share with you my views, which I have enriched in practice by receiving pedagogical training, and which I have always sought the truth, with a scientific approach.
In general, truth-seekers outperform the ideologically rigidly biased (ideologues) in many areas. But this superiority is not absolute in all cases; it depends on the context, the time scale and what you define as “performance”.
Why are truth seekers usually stronger?
1. Actively Open-Minded Thinking: (AOT) - being open to new evidence, taking contradictory evidence seriously, questioning one's own side's arguments - significantly improves forecast accuracy, quality of information gathering and calibration.
Ideological bias, on the contrary, reinforces myside bias (favoring one's own side).
2. The advantage of not being detached from reality: The truth-seeker's experiences are “noisy but relatively free of bias”.
If the ideologue's experience is “low-noise but systematically biased”, it feels coherent in the short term but increasingly diverges from reality.
In the long term, truth-seeker gains in learning and adaptation.
3. The motivated reasoning trap: Ideological people with high cognitive capacity use their intelligence to “rationalize their positions” instead of finding the truth (smart idiot syndrome).
So high IQ + high ideological commitment can sometimes be the worst combination.
Exceptions and short-term benefits
- In the game of social influence and persuasion, strategic lying/disciplined ideological posturing sometimes trumps honest truth-seeking (vote-gathering, group consensus building, going viral).
- “Seeking the truth” in a highly polarized environment comes at a social cost; the ideologue can gain more allies and higher status in the short term.
- In some narrow areas (e.g. the internal discipline of a particular ideological movement) rigid ideology can achieve organizational superiority.
Consequently, in terms of long-term individual and societal performance (accurate prediction, adaptation, problem solving, learning speed)
“truth-seeking is by far superior”
In short-term social games (power, status, in-group persuasion), ideological commitment is often more advantageous.
This is why many people consciously or unconsciously choose the strategy of “being on the winning side” instead of “seeking the truth”.
The cost of this choice is usually realized after a few years.