A Reminder that Change is Hard, Even When We Know the Benefits
Just another reminder that people are reluctant to change, even when they KNOW that a particular change is good for them.
From an interesting study by Princeton psychologists done in 1979:
...Even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right.
In one experiment, researchers selected people who either favored or opposed capital punishment and asked them to read two scholarly, well-documented articles on the emotionally charged issue of whether the death penalty deters violent crimes. One article concluded that it did; the other that it didn’t. If the readers were processing information rationally, they would at least realize that the issue is more complex than they had previously believed and would therefore move a bit closer to each other in their beliefs about capital punishment as a deterrence.
But dissonance theory predicts that the readers would find a way to distort the two articles...
This is precisely what happened. Not only did each side discredit the other’s arguments; each side became even more committed to its own.
And apparently, our brains are actually wired to fight back when confronted with dissonant information:
For example, in a study of people who were being monitored by magnetic resonance imagining (MRI) while they were trying to process dissonant or consonant information about George Bush or John Kerry, Drew Westen and his colleagues found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with dissonant information, and the emotion circuits of the brain lit up happily when consonance was restored.
These mechanisms provide a neurological basis for the observation that once our minds are made up, it is hard to change them.
Yeah, our brains are smart, except when they're stupid.
Read the full article here.
