Musings Report 2017-8 2-25-17 How Do We "Change Our Minds"/Beliefs?
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Welcome to February's MUS (Margins of the Unfiltered Swamp)
The last Musings of the month is a free-form exploration of the reaches of the fecund swamp that is the source of the blog, Musings and my books.
How Do We "Change Our Minds"/Beliefs?
Why is it so difficult for humans to change their core opinions/beliefs?
My friend D.P. sent me a short booklet, The Debunking Handbook, which lays out a strategy for successfully debunking popular (and often quite compelling) myths.
He also sent three podcasts on the topic:
The neuroscience of changing your mind
How motivated skepticism strengthens incorrect beliefs
How to fight back against the backfire effect
What I find particularly worthy of investigation is the link between our identity and our beliefs/views: our core points of view--our filters on "reality" and our interpretations of what we see/read--are intimately bound up with our self-identity.
Thus we don't hold our beliefs about climate change or capitalism/socialism the same way we hold a belief about the proper daily dose of vitamin D, or whether the Great Wall of China is in fact visible from space. (It is not. Most of the wall crumbled into a low earthen mound that's barely visible from 100 feet, never mind 100 miles. The "famous" part of the Great Wall near Beijing was rebuilt. Photos of the wall prior to being reconstructed reveal a much different reality.)
So it seems that the key to "changing our mind" about something is to detach our identity from the belief/position in question.
The booklet doesn't mention this key dynamic: how do we detach a person's belief in a myth from their core identity? If a person's self-identity is tied to being a climate skeptic, then he/she will resist changing their view with all his/her might because their identity is (in their experience) threatened.
If I have no identity stake in the issue, I am more likely to see rational arguments/explanations as unthreatening.
How to separate identity from myth/beliefs? It's not that easy, since "identity" is rarely transparent, even to the individual with the "identity." Having received thousands of emails from readers over the years, and responding to hundreds of them, I've become more aware of core issues in my identity, and common issues in others' identities. The process has left me with less attachment to "taking sides," and wary of investing a mere opinion with ties to my "identity."
My sense is that persuasion must grasp the nettle of teasing apart identity and the narratives in question. This is similar to telling someone they made a terrible mistake falling in love with Person XYZ.
In Sherlock Holmes' story, A Case of Identity, a young woman's secretive lover, Hosmer Angel, fails to appear on their wedding day. Mr. Angel turns out to be a fictitious character, a duplicitous ploy designed to access the young lady's substantial income. Holmes declines to reveal this sordid truth to the young lady, and offers this explanation to Dr. Watson:
"If I tell her she will not believe me. You may remember the old Persian saying, "'There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.'"
Substitute "human" for "woman" and bingo--snatching the tiger's cub away is tricky. (I am indebted to G.F.B. for this insight from Holmes.)
One of the Buddha's core teachings is that our sense of identity is illusory. Our memory of "self" leads us to believe we have an unchanging identity. But our identity is actually changing all the time. Some parts may well stretch back to childhood, youth, university, military service, etc., but substantial parts of our self-identity have evolved, in many cases without our consciously taking note of the changes.
One point of contention in many of the current "social justice" narratives is virtue-signaling: people who identify themselves as "progressive" or "conservative" tend to reinforce their self-identity as a morally upright (or superior) being by displaying or signaling their virtue via what they support or denounce.
Signaling virtue to the target audience displaces actually being virtuous. In other words, the person's identity ("I am virtuous") is entangled not with internal assessments of virtue ("was I compassionate to everyone equally today?") but with telegraphing their virtuous opinions on Facebook.
This is how we end up with people who claim to support free speech clamoring to limit free speech to those who issue the same virtue-signaling speech acts as the believer.
Our self-identity is the tiger cub. If we feel our core identity is being threatened, we will "fight to the death" to protect it, and cling to contradictory beliefs in the process.
From Left Field
Book Review | Failing States, Collapsing Systems: Biophysical Triggers of Political Violence
What Is the Deep State? -- worthy discussion of the topic...
What Caused The Mysterious Bronze Age Collapse? Professor Eric H. Cline presents a more complicated and nuanced scenario in his new book, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed.
Brace for the Oil, Food and Financial Crash of 2018 -- wait a minute--isn't energy cheap?
is Finland’s basic universal income a solution to automation, fewer jobs and lower wages?
Sustainability is destroying the Earth -- lifecycle costs
Revenge of the Deep State: The unseen government within the government has so much data on Americans that it can reward or punish at its own discretion.
Why Nothing Works Anymore: The more technology multiplies, the more it amplifies instability.
John Adams: Short Ride in a Fast Machine (4:39) (via LaserLefty)
New Work, New Culture (interview) "New Work represents the effort to redirect the use of technology so that it isn’t used simply to speed up the work and in the process ruin the world – turning rivers into sewers and rain into acid."
Why Is Everyone So Angry? (via GFB)
Welcome to the age of anger
Rhapsody in Blue - Fantasia 2000 (12:29) (via LaserLefty) -- the animation is well worth watching...
"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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