Why debate never seems to resolve much

This APA Monitor article on intuition may offer up some insight:

In an article in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 88, No. 3), the team presents its finding that people buy into the first-instinct myth because it feels worse to change a correct answer to an incorrect one than to stick with an original incorrect answer. And that feeling makes changing right answers to wrong more memorable than a wrong-to-right change and therefore seemingly more probable.

The end result of this cognitive bias is that people will tend to stick with bad initial judgments due to an aversion to making bad secondary judgments.