Why People Won’t Change Their Minds on Covid-19

Our brains block out contradictory facts without us even realizing it, new research reveals

People love to consume information that supports their views and ignore facts that don’t. Scientific experiments have confirmed this “confirmation bias” over and over. You might be confident that you don’t do this, that it’s a problem only for those other people, the inflexible type. You’d be wrong, new research shows. And you might be surprised to learn that in some cases, you probably don’t even consciously realize that your brain is blocking contradictory information on your behalf.

Confirmation bias can get in the way of mutual understanding on politics, religion, and just about any controversial topic you can imagine, including whether to wear facemasks during a deadly pandemic or how quickly to “get back to normal” after an economic shutdown.

Meanwhile, an infodemic of Covid-19 myths and misinformation is being planted by obscure special-interest websites that pose as legitimate news sources, then shared by other posers (there are at least 132 such websites, according to the watchdog NewsGuard). These articles and memes play right into our existing biases, says Thomas Davenport, PhD, a professor of information technology and management at Babson College.

“If you’re biased against China, for example, you are probably comfortable with media accounts (and Trump tweets) that emphasize the coronavirus’s Chinese origins,” Davenport writes in MIT Sloan Management Review magazine. “If you’re biased against the U.S., you may believe social media messages suggesting that the U.S. developed the virus and implanted it in Wuhan, China.”

Hardwired hardheadedness

The new research finds we tend to block out legitimate facts that contradict our views without even realizing it. Our brains create a cognitive blind spot we’re not aware of, and apparently nobody is immune.

“Our study found that our brains become blind to contrary evidence when we are highly confident, which might explain why we don’t change our minds in light of new information,” says study leader Max Rollwage, a doctoral student at University College London’s Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging.

In the study, 75 people were asked to play a simple game scientists often use for revealing confirmation bias. A confusing cloud of dots on a computer screen moves mostly left or right, but it’s hard to tell. Each person is asked to determine which direction, then express their confidence in the decision on a scale from 50% sure to 100% certain. Then they’re shown the moving dots again, but this time it’s more obvious which way they’re going. Each person is asked again, giving them an opportunity to change their mind.

On average, those who were highly confident in their original decision were 20% more likely than less confident folks to stick with their erroneous belief, a finding the researchers called “striking.” It’s unlikely they actively ignored the new, helpful input, Rollwage tells me, because they were paid to be accurate.

“Instead, our results indicate that participants were actually not able to take corrective information into account when they were highly confident,” he says.

To prove that point, about a third of the people played the game while hooked up to a scanner that monitored the extent to which their brains processed the information. The less confident individuals processed and integrated the new evidence in Round 2 of the dot game. Super confident people were “practically blind” to the fresh facts in front of them, Rollwage and his colleagues concluded May 26 in the journal Nature Communications.

“Our interpretation is, confidence acts to change neural processing to decrease sensitivity to disconfirming information,” Rollwage says.

Yes, you too

Confirmation bias does not by itself explain why people are so reluctant to change their minds. A related psychological phenomenon, cognitive dissonance, plays a key role. In a nutshell, our brains don’t like competing thoughts, or dissonance. It makes us uncomfortable. So when newly presented ideas challenge our assumptions, we seek to reduce the discomfort by changing our views, changing our behavior, or consciously ignoring the input, perhaps labeling it “fake news.” This can affect not just how we evaluate information that comes our way, but what information we seek. It’s well established that conservatives and liberals, in general, spend the majority of their TV-news time with different news networks.

But what’s perhaps most interesting about the research by Rollwage and his colleagues is that nobody seems to be immune to confirmation bias.

“These effects are unlikely to be specific to particular individuals, and instead apply to all of us,” he says. “This phenomenon seems to be very general, and is likely to affect a variety of situations, such as political debates, investment decisions, and even science itself, as when a scientist needs to update a hypothesis, for instance.”

In a 2018 study, Rollwage and colleagues found that people with extreme political views aren’t as good at knowing when they’re wrong as are moderates — even on issues unrelated to politics. “Radical participants — on both ends of the political spectrum — showed reduced insight into the correctness of their choices and less sensitivity to post-decision evidence, indicating a generic resistance to revising mistakes,” they wrote in the journal Current Biology.

All this research could help explain the gulf in views over the Covid-19 pandemic, from how quickly to reopen the economy to whether or not to wear facemasks, especially given that both the science and the health advice has been evolving amid a highly charged political environment.

Which brings us back to the dots. In the game, participants are given a binary choice: The dots are moving left, or their moving right. People who wish to confirm your biases on controversial topics, perhaps via memes they hope you’ll blindly share, often employ the same binary tactics in “us vs. them” fashion.

“The very large and important issue of how to manage the virus in the U.S. is increasingly framed as a ‘save the economy or lock everything down’ question,” Davenport points out. The binary choice “masks the possibility of other alternatives, or pursuing one decision in some places or situations and a different one in others. If possible, he suggests, “consider multiple different framings of the same decision — ideally some with nonbinary outcomes.”

That sounds like good advice for everyone, not just those other people. Of course, opening our minds may not be easy.

“I think the current Covid-19 situation highlights the importance of considering new information and updating our beliefs accordingly, especially as scientific evidence is rapidly evolving,” Rollwage says. “Our research suggests that people who are very certain in their beliefs might find it challenging to incorporate new evidence that contradicts their worldview.”