The stubbornness of beliefs

The stubbornness of beliefs

Flaws in forming and updating beliefs have the potential to snowball. Once a belief is lodged, it becomes difficult to dislodge. It takes on a life of its own, leading us to notice and seek out evidence confirming our belief, rarely challenge the validity of confirming evidence, and ignore or work hard to actively discredit information contradicting the belief. This irrational, circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning. The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them. Those strengthened beliefs then drive how we process further information, and so on.

During a break in a poker tournament, a player approached me for my opinion about how he played one of those suited-connector hands. I didn’t witness the hand, and he gave me a very abbreviated description of how he stealthily played the six and seven of diamonds to make a flush on the second-to-last card but “had the worst luck” when the other player made a full house on the very last card.

We had only a minute or two left in the break, so I asked what I thought to be the most relevant question: “Why were you playing six-seven of diamonds in the first place?” (Even a brief explanation, I expected, would fill in details on many of the areas that determine how to play a hand like that and whether it was a profitable choice, such as table position, pot size, chip stack sizes, his opponent’s style of play, how the table perceived his style, etc.)

His exasperated response was, “That’s not the point of the story!” Motivated reasoning tells us it’s not really the point of anyone’s story.

It doesn’t take much for any of us to believe something. And once we believe it, protecting that belief guides how we treat further information relevant to the belief. This is perhaps no more evident than in the rise in prominence of “fake news” and disinformation. The concept of “fake news,” an intentionally false story planted for financial or political gain, is hundreds of years old. Historical examples include fabricated reporting and sensationalist press campaigns. Fiction performed as entertainment, such as Orson Welles’s radio drama, needs to be distinguished from deliberate deception. Disinformation can use fabricated stories, misleading presentations of real facts, or a mixture of both. Fake news works because people who already hold beliefs consistent with the story generally won’t question the evidence. Disinformation is even more powerful because the confirmable facts in the story make it feel like the information has been vetted, adding to the power of the narrative being pushed.

Fake news can reinforce beliefs its intended audience already holds. A story that fits those beliefs may meet less scrutiny and entrench them further. The Internet is a playground for motivated reasoning. It provides the promise of access to a greater diversity of information sources and opinions than we’ve ever had available, yet we gravitate toward sources that confirm our beliefs, that agree with us. Every flavor is out there, but we tend to stick with our favorite.

Making matters worse, many social media sites tailor our Internet experience to show us more of what we already like. Author Eli Pariser developed the term “filter bubble” in his 2011 book of the same name to describe the process of how companies like Google and Facebook use algorithms to keep pushing us in the directions we’re already headed. By collecting our search, browsing, and similar data from our friends and correspondents, they give users headlines and links that cater to what they’ve divined as our preferences. The Internet, which gives us access to a diversity of viewpoints with unimaginable ease, in fact speeds our retreat into a confirmatory bubble. No matter our political orientation, none of us is immune.

The most popular websites have been doing our motivated reasoning for us.*

Even when directly confronted with facts that disconfirm our beliefs, we don’t let facts get in the way. As Daniel Kahneman pointed out, we just want to think well of ourselves and feel that the narrative of our life story is a positive one. Being wrong doesn’t fit into that narrative. If we think of beliefs as only 100% right or 100% wrong, when confronting new information that might contradict our belief, we have only two options: (a) make the massive shift in our opinion of ourselves from 100% right to 100% wrong, or (b) ignore or discredit the new information. It feels bad to be wrong, so we choose (b). Information that disagrees with us is an assault on our self-narrative. We’ll work hard to swat that threat away. On the flip side, when additional information agrees with us, we effortlessly embrace it.

How we form beliefs, and our inflexibility about changing our beliefs, has serious consequences because we bet on those beliefs. Every bet we make in our lives depends on our beliefs: who we believe will make the best president, if we think we will like Des Moines, if we believe a low-fat diet will make us healthier, or even if we believe turkeys can fly.