When Is Enough Enough to Change Your Mind?
What does it take for you to change your most treasured beliefs? (Hint: Learn about cognitive dissonance.)
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In a skit, comedian Richard Pryor plays a husband whose wife comes home early to find him in bed with another woman. The naked woman grabs her clothes and makes a quick escape. The dialogue ensues:
Wife: You’re cheating on me!
Husband: I’m not cheating on you.
Wife: I saw that woman in bed with you with my own eyes!
Husband: Well, who ya gonna believe — me or your lying eyes?
Have you ever believed in a person or an idea, only to be confronted with evidence that your trust or belief in the idea was misguided?
Suppose you meet someone causally. You like the person and are thinking about a get-to-know-you lunch. You subsequently learn from a reliable friend that your new acquaintance is someone who takes advantage of others and is not to be trusted. Based on stories of betrayals, you decide against lunch. Changing your mind had little consequence because you hadn’t become friends with the other person.
Now, suppose you are the wife in the Richard Pryor skit. In that role, you suspected from others that your partner, the person you trust the most, was betraying you. You now witnessed it for yourself. The pain of this information is profound. Your life is turned upside down. What do you do next?
The Layers of Worldviews
Beliefs are internal sets of rules that shape how we interact with the people and things in our everyday lives. We each have a worldview that is the sum total of our beliefs, values, and knowledge. Our worldviews are the rules and knowledge structures by which we make sense of everyday events.
Just like fish who don’t think much about the water in which they swim, you don’t directly experience your worldview because it surrounds you. Your moment-by-moment life would be meaningless chaos without the organizing lens of your worldview. This vast and collective set of values and beliefs is the mental structure that guides your perceptions and actions.
Think of your worldview as a three-dimensional puzzle with each piece representing a belief, value, or kernel of knowledge. Envision these pieces arrayed in layers, like an onion. The outer layers hold your peripheral beliefs, ones that are of little consequence, like the acquaintance you didn’t invite for lunch.
Peel back the layers of your worldview onion and you will find your core beliefs, the ones that are central to how you see the world. There, you find the beliefs, values, and knowledge that cannot be changed without a significant restructuring of your worldview.
Seeing evidence that the person you most trust in life cannot be trusted can rock your world and turn it upside down. Suddenly, you are thrust into a Richard Pryor skit. You then ask yourself: what am I going to believe — the trust that I forged with my partner over many years or the new and frightening evidence to the contrary?
The Painful Reality of Cognitive Dissonance
When faced with a core belief that is contradicted by undeniable facts or the judgment of others, you enter the world of cognitive dissonance. This term can be defined as the uncomfortable feeling (dissonance) you experience when circumstances force you to hold two or more contradictory or inconsistent beliefs, attitudes, or values simultaneously.
Dissonance and consonance are relations among cognitions — that is, the alignment among your opinions, beliefs, knowledge of the external environment, and knowledge of your internal thoughts and feelings.
Your worldview is consonant when all values, beliefs, and knowledge fit together, aligned — like the pieces of a puzzle. Experiencing consonance in your beliefs is what makes you feel more secure, more confident.
When you receive information or experience events that contradict something you believe, then the pieces of your worldview puzzle no longer fit well together. The contradictory evidence reshapes a piece of the puzzle, which creates feelings of unease, discomfort, or even pain.
What happens when your beliefs are confronted with contradictory facts? You then have contradictory beliefs: belief and disbelief.
The closer the beliefs are to your core, the greater the difficulty in maintaining two contradictory beliefs. You cannot simultaneously trust and mistrust someone who is close to you. If you are deeply religious and some event shakes your belief in God, you cannot simultaneously believe and not believe in God. Human nature is such that you have to find a way to resolve this conflict.
When experiencing the discomfort and instability of dissonance, as humans, we seek stability by resolving the conflict and re-establishing consonance.
How we choose to re-establish consonance is the science of cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive Dissonance is Individual and Social
Cognitive dissonance can occur in our personal lives ial situations, such as work or other social groups. Within a social group, members can put their trust in a respected or even adored group leader. When evidence of the leader’s misconduct becomes public, then the group as a social unit must struggle with the difficult choices presented by the dynamics of cognitive dissonance.
When a respected community elder, such as a Catholic priest, sexually abuses a child, parents and the community have to reconcile the two opposing beliefs about the priest as a spiritual leader or as a sexual predator. Which version of facts the parents and community believe (the assertions of a child versus the denial of the priest) is the challenge of resolving cognitive dissonance.
To further illustrate this point, I’ll summarize a study of failed collective beliefs that led a social psychologist to formulate the principles of opposing beliefs, one of the most widely researched concepts in the history of social science.
The concept of cognitive dissonance was developed in the 1950s by a social psychologist, Leon Festinger. He and his colleagues were investigating cult prophesies and the related dynamics of cohesive group thinking. Festinger’s account of this seminal study is presented in his book When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (1956). It’s a fascinating exploration of groupthink social psychology.
Their research became focused when the team read about a small cult called the Seekers. A not-too-charismatic leader of the group was Dorothy Martin (DM), who lived in a Chicago suburb. DM claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrial beings from the planet “Clarion.” According to DM, these beings warned her that the world would end in a great flood on December 21, 1954. However, a select group of believers would be saved by a spaceship just before the calamity.
A small group of about 15 followers, deeply convinced by DM’s prophecies, began gathering around her. They left jobs, sold their belongings, and severed ties with non-believers in preparation for the end of the world.
Needless to say, Planet Earth was not flooded on December 21, 1954. It didn’t even rain on that day in Chicago. Even more distressing, the group was told by DM that a flying saucer would arrive prior to the flood to take them to a safe location. That didn’t happen.
Hmm…No Rescue Flying Saucer. No Flood. Now What?
Instead of admitting they were deceived, the cult members went through a process of cognitive dissonance. When the group’s beliefs (rescue UFO, flood) were undeniably disproven, all were distressed, but they responded to this distress in different ways.
A few left the group to pick up on their former lives. These members accepted the contra-evidence by abandoning the cult-inspired beliefs. Others refused to abandon these beliefs. Instead, they reinterpreted the evidence to make it consistent with their beliefs by accepting “new” belief-confirming “evidence.”
The new evidence was that DM received a “new message” from the aliens saying that the God of Earth had decided to spare the planet due to the group’s strong faith and commitment. The remaining cult members rationalized that it was their intense faith and prayer that saved the world from destruction. In their view, their small group saved the world for all to live another day. To put this another way, they could not accept that they were wrong.
After this “new revelation,” the group actively sought media attention to spread their story, a stark contrast to their earlier reclusiveness. In other words, they doubled down on their false narrative. After several weeks of revised catastrophic prophecies that never materialized, more members peeled away. But several ardent believers hung on.
Although they tried to recruit new believers, there was little public support for their cause. In the 1950s when UFOs were news topics, DM’s beliefs in populated planets and interstellar spaceship travel had a strong appeal for school boys who flocked to her. However, the boys’ parents lodged a complaint with the police who warned DM to cease and desist.
The in-depth study of this occult group illustrates the dynamics of cognitive dissonance. People hold collective beliefs with varying degrees of intensity as core or peripheral values. When faced with undeniable contra-evidence, those with peripheral beliefs will accept the contradictory facts and change their beliefs. Those for whom the belief becomes part of their core identity will disregard the contra-evidence and will defend the false belief with an even greater commitment to a disproven idea.
Belief rigidity, when held in spite of contradictory facts, is a function of cognitive rigidity. I will take up this topic in future essays. But here, we can see that cognitive rigidity is a style of thinking that is brittle and does not allow for flexibility in finding new solutions to old problems.
Principles of Belief Rigidity
Festinger identified five principles that account for why a person does not change their beliefs when faced with counter-evidence. His five principles are summarized here:
- The belief must be held with deep conviction and be relevant to how the believer behaves in support of the belief.
- The believer must have taken actions to support the beliefs that are difficult to undo.
- The belief must be sufficiently specific and objective such that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
- The undeniable contra-evidence must occur and be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
- The believer must have social support from other believers.
The first two principles explain why a believer would hold onto the belief. The second two principles explain why someone who is less committed to the belief might let go of it. But it is the fifth principle that can be crucial to someone holding onto a disproven belief — social support.
It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.
The Challenge of Cognitive Dissonance: From Personal Relations to National Politics and Policy
No one wants to be in a Richard Pryor skit where trust is betrayed and the person trusted denies the betrayal. Conflicts such as these are existential to a relationship. The resolution to maintain or end the relationship comes at a great cost.
We are at a similar existential crossroads with respect to societies where extreme political rhetoric has polarized liberals and conservatives into core beliefs that are diametrically opposed.
We have seen that core beliefs can be resistant to change, even when presented with undeniable counterfactual evidence. With each passing electoral cycle, the disparities of core beliefs held by each polarized segment appear to be worsening.
Thirty years ago, the political scientist Samuel Huntington (1993) made this prediction:
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.
The history of politics has traditionally been the history of debating public policy. Should a national government have a big or small footprint? To what extent should the government regulate business? Does trickle-down economics lessen or worsen income inequities? Should governments be responsible for offering a safety net to those with limited financial resources?
These are questions of public policy over which citizens with different interests debate: business wants less government regulation while consumers want more. The polar arguments in debates like these are important to each side, but these may not be core beliefs by which people define their self-identities.
The cultural conflicts predicted by Huntington reach into the heart of core beliefs. Questions of who marries whom (between a man and a woman only, between partners of the same race only), gender identity (men are men and women are women only), racial identity (Jews and people of color will not replace whites), religious identity (America is a Christian nation as evidenced in its founding principle of Manifest Destiny).
People who debate public policies are typically academics and political elites who argue a lot and then perhaps go out for drinks together after the debate. Identity beliefs exist at the very core of people’s worldviews. These beliefs are not easily abandoned by counterfactual evidence. Members of the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers will not likely offer to have drinks with Black Lives Matter members after the protest.
Today, about thirty percent (or about 40 million) of Americans believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. This is Trump’s MAGA base. No MAGA believer has produced any evidence in support of this belief.
It doesn’t seem to matter for these 40 million MAGA Americans that, prior to his elections as the 45th President of the United States, Trump declared bankruptcy six times, and was involved in 4,000 lawsuits. It matters not that the U.S. Congress twice impeached Trump. It doesn’t matter to the MAGA voters that Trump is charged with silencing a porn star with hush money, that he was civilly convicted of the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room, or that he has been indicted on 91 federal charges related to his attempts to overthrow the government of the United States. Will it matter to the MAGA based that Trump has been found guilty of inflating the value of his businesses by over $2 billion?
When is Enough Enough to Change Your Mind?
Since she was a child, Cassidy Hutchinson (CD) aspired to serve her country as did her family members who served in the military. CD’s interests were governmental and political. She was the first in her family to go to college.
By fluke of perseverance and circumstance, at the age of 25, CD became a special assistant to Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows. From her perch in the White House, CD observed firsthand the chaotic events inside the White House related to the insurrection of January 6, 2021.
An ardent conservative and supporter of Trump, CD witnessed key meetings and events on that day in the White House. Her experience with cognitive dissonance was witnessing Donald Trump’s total disregard for the orderly transition of presidential power from him to Joe Biden versus her belief in the U.S. Constitution. She witnessed Trump’s glee when the crowd that stormed the Capitol chanted “Hang Mike Pence!”Knowing the consequences she would face for her Congressional testimony against Trump (offending trusted Republican colleagues and many death threats), CD chose the Constitution over Trump based on the evidence her own eyes witnessed on that fateful day.
The difficult decision we face when our core beliefs are challenged is whether to change our beliefs or ignore the evidence. From the perspective of Cassidy Hutchinson, she titled her book about Trump and his lies: Enough (2023).
What evidence is enough for 40 million American voters to believe that their Trust in Donald Trump is misguided? What evidence is enough to convince those who don’t accept individual differences in personal identities to believe in cultural diversity?
What About You? By Your Standards, What is Enough?
If you regard others as being inflexible, ask yourself this question: how willing are you to change your core beliefs when contrary circumstances knock on your door? If you can empathize with the challenge of changing your own core beliefs, then perhaps you can better understand the persistent polarities of our times.
The more that political ideologies become identity politics (race, gender, religion, etc.), the greater the challenge in finding fact-based evidence for some middle ground of modified beliefs by which our democracy can survive.
The more that we, as individuals and as a society, can back off from weaponized attacks on core beliefs and return to creating social policies by which both sides of the ideological spectrum can find compromises, the greater our chances of saving our democracy.
Conclusion: Breaking News — Identity Politics is Winning
While finishing this essay, I saw a news headline that caught my attention: “Fact Checkers Take Stock of their Efforts: ‘It’s Not Getting Better.’”
The article documents the decline of fact-checking the public statements of politicians who create false narratives without evidence. The reporters write about the decline of fact-checking organizations around the world. In particular, they point out the decline of fact-checking capacity in social media platforms, like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter).
The article references studies showing that fact-checking programs can lessen false beliefs by exposing false narratives. But rejecting false beliefs is transitory and can be rekindled by re-exposure to false narratives.
The article closes by offering the hope that generative AI models (AI chatbots) will assume a greater and more effective role in identifying political rhetoric that has no basis in facts.
Myself, I am less hopeful that AI can come to the rescue of truth. The question is always: whose truth?
I have written about Elon Musk developing his own branded AI chatbot to reflect the conservative values that he finds missing in other “liberal” venues, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
The science of cognitive dissonance is the study of how people reconcile beliefs that are contradicted by indisputable evidence to the contrary. I have argued that core beliefs are more difficult to change than peripheral beliefs because when arguing about core beliefs, facts don’t matter.
Final Thoughts
In today’s political world of culture wars and identity politics, core beliefs are associated with personal identity. Peripheral beliefs are associated with more peripheral issues, such as public policy. As Samuel Huntington (1993) told us thirty years ago, the emerging political wave that is about to swallow us all is that of a war against permissive cultures and non-normative personal identities.
Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote “The truth should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.” Churchill used this strategy during World War II to protect the Allied troops that landed on Normandy beaches on D-Day (December 6, 1944).
Churchill’s strategy of creating false narratives to protect the Allies’ military advance was effective in its war against fascism. Today, why are autocrats at war against our personal identities? Because it is an effective strategy for the conditions of their political war.
If we believe that our social relations and personal values should be freely expressed without autocratic restraint, how shall we combat their politics of fear that creates fearful beliefs that become lodged in the core of so many people?
Our democracies of today are ours to lose tomorrow if we don’t fight for them. We can do this by calling out false narratives, by diverting the political rhetoric from identities to policies, and ultimately by voting in free elections. And most of all, believe your own eyes.
References
Cave Brown, Anthony. 2002. Bodyguard of Lies: The Extraordinary True Story Behind D-Day
DeWitt, R. (2018). Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science (3rd ed.)
Festinger, L., Rieken, H. W., & Schacter, S. (1956). When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World
Huntington, S. P. (1993). The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 22–49. Retrieved from https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003060963-50/clash-civilizations-samuel-huntington
Hutchinson, C. (2023). Enough
