Why we love to argue (no, we don’t)

PUT TWO JEWS in a room and you will get three points of view — or so the joke says. And new research appears to back this up.

According to Steven Miller, emeritus professor of social research at City University, British Jews are far more likely to disagree than British non-Jews. And Professor Miller says that this tendency towards decisiveness and firmness may have become embedded in Jewish genes.

His study, which compared an Institute for Jewish Policy Research survey on social attitudes to a British Social Attitudes poll on the views of the wider population, found that Jews felt far more passionately about commonly discussed subjects including welfare, longer jail sentences, and judging pupils on exam performance.

Respondents were asked either to agree or strongly agree, or to disagree or strongly disagree with a number of statements — or to say they took no view. It may not surprise JC readers that fewer admitted to the latter.

“Jews are far more diverse in their attitudes than non-Jews,” Professor Miller said. “What that means is that there will be more Jews who strongly agree with a statement than there will be non-Jews who do, and a higher percentage of Jews who strongly disagree than non-Jews.”

In a paper for the Journal of Jewish Sociology last year he speculated that one reason for this was that “over successive periods of persecution, pogrom and hostile attack, there was survival value in having the capacity to construe situations in stark terms and to take firm and decisive action”.

In other words, our tendency to be argumentative may well have saved our lives. Unless you disagree…