People's deeply held beliefs are surprisingly surface-level

Try to change people's minds more

A lot of people (myself included) have a lot of internal illusions about how deep our deeply held beliefs go. I used to think that if someone were structuring their lives around a specific idea, and describing it as one of their most deeply held beliefs, their process for getting to it looked like this:

• I have investigated and compared this contentious belief to others and tested it against the world, and after a lot of careful diligent thought I have decided it is so uniquely powerful as an explanatory tool that I have decided to structure my life around it.

I’ve realized now that a lot of the time, they (and I) are doing something more like this:

• I have muttered this basic idea to myself repeatedly for years to make myself feel important. I first found this idea because a person with a cool jacket said it. I wanted to be more like them.

This isn’t to say all deeply held beliefs are like this, but it happens more often than I thought when I was younger.

We have very strong incentives to construct narratives of ourselves that make us feel important, give us access to the people we perceive as cool and with it, and shield us from the indignities of everyday life. Often the beliefs we trick ourselves into thinking are deeply held are the beliefs we want to be most associated with, because we see them as useful keys to unlock the right social doors. This means that beliefs we perceive as “deeply held” probably don’t have a strong relationship to what’s actually influencing our decisions or how much we’ve interrogated them.

I’ve been in a lot of conversations with people who are seemingly structuring their whole lives around a belief, but when I poke them and ask them simple obvious questions they act like they’ve never thought about it before. This happened a lot in education and pedagogy, a field where notoriously few practices replicate, and a lot of fads take over. I would sometimes meet people who were spending years promoting a specific pedagogical idea as an important key to completely transforming American education. When I would ask simple but specific questions about how the idea compared to others, they would get hand-wavy quickly and not have clear answers. This doesn’t make sense if they decided the belief was important via a lot of exploration of different ideas and evidence, but it does if they want to be associated with something they sense is important and good and high status. I and my friends have had similar experiences talking to people about their deeply held beliefs about politics, religion, and their own careers and longterm life plans.

My favorite Onion headline. Source

I’ve come around to thinking that if someone makes it clear that they’re expressing a deeply held belief, what’s often happening is they’re expressing something they want to be especially strongly associated with rather than something they’ve actually thought deeply about. If you think that someone’s deeply held belief is wrong or harming them, you should go ahead and find ways to gently poke at it. Because they want to be strongly associated with it, it’s helpful to give the belief a lot of status and not attack it directly. Instead, just ask boring follow-up questions about the specifics of what they think. It might be that they have actually put a lot of thought into it and can answer your questions, but if they haven’t this can open up an avenue to show them where they might be wrong. The best way to deflate a harmful belief is often to make it boring and clearly uninteresting when applied to the complexities of the world, rather than trying to make it low status directly. You might be surprised at how willing they are to change their minds when the context is shifted even a little.

A sad result of not noticing this until I was older was that there were probably a lot of minds I could have changed, and maybe saved from some bad beliefs, that I didn’t. I shouldn’t have been so deferential to others’ (or my own) narratives of how they came to believe what they do. This seems like one place where we’re especially opaque to ourselves. I wish I could tell my younger self to push people more on what they thought. Thinking this way makes a lot of otherwise difficult conversations much easier to manage, so I’d like to advertise it more as a simple but really useful intuition.

• The title is a nod to one of the funniest blog titles: Reality has a surprising amount of detail.

• Dan Williams writes about a lot of this stuff much better than I can, you should follow him if you haven’t.