A Mind of Its Own by Cordelia Fine

Author:Cordelia Fine [Cordelia Fine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781848317185
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2013-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

So far, our reluctance to survey the world with an open mind seems to have little to recommend it. Are there any potential benefits to be had from our obduracy? Psychologists have pointed out that a modicum of obstinacy in relinquishing our beliefs is only sensible. After all, we would end up in rather a flap if our beliefs were forever fluctuating in response to every newspaper report or argument with an in-law. There’s also a sense in which our important beliefs are an integral part of who we are. To bid a belief adieu is to lose a cherished portion of our identity.14 Interestingly, people who have recently indulged in extensive contemplation of their best qualities (or been ‘self-affirmed’, to use the cloying terminology of the literature) are more receptive to arguments that challenge their strongly held beliefs about issues like capital punishment and abortion. By hyping up an important area of self-worth, you are better able to loosen your grip on some of your defining values. (Just loosen your grip, mind. Not actually let go.) It’s a curious, and somewhat disquieting, fact that effusive flattery dulls the sword of an intellectual opponent far more effectively than mere logical argument.

It would be much more pleasant to leave it at that: we’re pigheaded, yes, but it’s for good reasons. However, research shows that our stubbornness is so pernicious that even the most groundless and fledgling belief enjoys secure residence in our brains. As a consequence, we are at the mercy of our initial opinions and impressions. In a classic demonstration of this, some volunteers were given a test of their social sensitivity.15 They read a series of pairs of suicide notes and for each pair they had to guess which note was genuine and which was a fake. Some volunteers were then arbitrarily told that their social-sensitivity performance was superior, others that it was inferior. A little later the experimenter debriefed the volunteers. The experimenter explained that the feed back they’d been given about their social sensitivity was made up, and that their supposed score had been randomly decided before they even walked into the lab. Any ideas the volunteers had developed about their proficiency in discriminating between genuine and fake suicide notes should have been abolished by the debriefing. After all, the evidence on which those beliefs were based had been entirely discredited. But still, the volunteers continued to believe in their superior or inferior social sensitivity. When the experimenter asked the volunteers to guess how well they would actually do on this and other similar tasks, their answers reflected whether they had been given ‘superior performance’ or ‘inferior performance’ false feedback on the suicide notes task. What is particularly remarkable about this experiment is that even people who were told that they were social clodhoppers carried on believing it. Even though their vain brains had been handed a bona fide rationale on which to restore their self-esteem, they continued to believe the worst about themselves.

In a similar experiment, researchers gave high school students training in how to solve a difficult mathematical problem.

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