Why It's So Hard to Change Our Minds
“You’re wrong doctor. I’m too healthy. I don’t have Covid,” a dying patient told Dr. Matthew Trunsky, a Michigan pulmonologist. "And their last, dying words are, 'This can't be happening. It's not real,’" South Dakota nurse Jodi Doering said some of her COVID patients told her. “People want it to be influenza, they want it to be pneumonia. We've even had people say, 'You know, I think it might be lung cancer.'”
These patients couldn’t deal with the disconnect between their beliefs and their COVID diagnosis. Mental disconnects are common. How does a smoker reconcile his lung cancer with his belief that smoking can’t cause it? How does an environmentally conscious person deal with buying a gas-guzzling SUV? How can one still believe she’s honest after fudging her resume for a job?
In 1954, social psychologist Leon Festinger and colleagues joined a doomsday group convinced it had received a message from “The Guardians” on planet Clarion that a catastrophic flood would destroy the world on December 21st of that year. Group members quit their jobs, sold their possessions and awaited the fateful day. When it came – and went – without the predicted disaster, their leader claimed they’d been spared by “the force of Good and light.” Group members began spreading their beliefs with greater fervor. Festinger later labeled this phenomenon cognitive dissonance. When confronted with an inconsistency between facts and our ideas, thoughts or beliefs, we’re psychologically compelled to close the gap. Admitting we’re wrong and adopting a different belief is one solution, but it’s not always used. Often, people come up with explanations that allow them to continue their beliefs – sometimes with greater insistence.
The brain fosters this belief jujitsu. Harvard professor David Perkins gave participants social issues, such as whether spending more on education would improve teaching and learning, and asked them for their initial judgment. Then, each participant was asked to write all the reasons they could think of on either side of the argument. Perkins scored each as a “my side” or “other side” argument. He found that people came up with far more “my side” arguments. They found it hard to disagree with existing beliefs.
A belief is formed by a complex set of neural connections that form a module in the brain. The more we reaffirm that belief (those connections), the stronger it gets because of the dopamine released when something is pleasurable. To get that dopamine rush again, we seek confirming evidence of our belief. When the belief is challenged, that triggers the brain’s insula, which is associated with fear and disgust. So it makes more (brain) sense to cling to our belief – which is what dying COVID patients, the doomsday group and Perkins’s subjects did.
Emotion clearly plays a large role in reinforcing our beliefs. Rongjun Yu and colleagues at Cambridge and University College London involved participants in a gambling task where they could choose to “stay” or “gamble” and then find out whether they won or lost. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) of the brain, they found that when people chose to “stay”, a pleasure center in the brain was activated but that when they took a chance, the part of the brain associated with anxiety, fear and disgust was activated. Staying with decisions is more emotionally comfortable than ditching them.
In The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen reports on a study he conducted during the 2004 election campaign between George W. Bush and John Kerry. Participants were given a statement that a candidate made and then a second candidate statement directly contradicting the first. After reflection, participants were asked to rate whether they thought the candidate contradicted himself, from a low of 1 (strongly disagree) to a high of 4 (strongly agree). Participants had no trouble seeing a contradiction for the candidate they did not like (average rating near 4) but had trouble agreeing that their preferred candidate had contradicted himself (average close to 2). Scans of participants’ brains showed that neural circuits involved with logical reasoning were depressed and those involved with positive emotions turned on.
Such studies suggest that confronting people with the logical contradiction in their conflicting beliefs may do little to help them change, as Trunsky and Doering found with their COVID patients. Indeed, Perkins found that people with higher IQs generated more “my-side” arguments, agreeing with previous research that a major function of the logical part of the brain is to come up with reasons for what the emotions have already concluded.
We’re not, of course, destined to sticking with beliefs that ought to be changed, but we should stay alert to the propensity to do so. If we want to think better, we should welcome and even look for contrary opinions. We should acknowledge and work against what economist John Kenneth Galbraith concluded: “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy with the proof.”
Photo Credit: Ross Findon @ unsplash.com
