Question
How can you convince someone to abandon a deep-seated belief?
Answer
Ignoring easily falsifiable beliefs, obviously unfalsifiable ones and beliefs with no strong emotional content making them "deeply held," we are left with the tricky ones: complicated beliefs involving some mix of inconclusive empirical evidence and strong emotional content. Confirmation bias and attribution bias run rampant.
Such beliefs are usually part of a larger related set drawn from the same inconclusive mass of raw material. For example, the varying beliefs you could hold about the nature of intelligence or creativity differences among different races, based on bell-curve data about current test scores or Nobel prizes, knowledge of nature/nurture dynamics, genetics, history, knowledge of how to interpret means and variances, and so on.
From such sets, we usually end up picking the ones we wish were true by cherry-picking the facts and arguments to use and ignoring the ones that don't fit.
Social conventions make some of these "we wish it were true" beliefs more acceptable than others. That doesn't mean the arguments are stronger. It's just that some wishful thinking views are viewed as more acceptable. Hence the term "politically correct." The word correct as denoting truth should not need a qualifier. That it does suggests that the truth in question is widely understood as being manufactured rather than proven.We do not feel the need to say that 2+2=4 is a politically correct assertion. A better phrase might be "politically expedient truths."
Most such sets of beliefs relate to the usual suspect topics: race and gender comparisons, superiority/inferiority of different cultures/religions/nations etc.
When you try to change somebody's beliefs in such situations, you are trying to substitute what they wish were true, with what you wish were true. There is no socially acceptable way to adopt an agnostic, non-wishful position. Fence-sitting is not allowed because in these issues, if enough people pick sides, lives will be impacted right now.
It's a collision of quasi-unfalsifiable inconclusive views about incompletely understood, but immediately relevant matters. I call it the Wishfulness Dialectic. As a social phenomenon, it runs a few decades ahead of more substantial dialectics like the Hegelian one. What the Wishfulness dialectic grapples with today, the Hegelian dialectic will deal with in 50 years.
Therefore it is hard to change deep-rooted beliefs. And it should be hard. The standard of proof for real truths should be much higher than for inconclusive arguments supporting hoped-for beliefs.
This doesn't mean change is impossible. You just need to shift focus from changing deep-seated beliefs about inconclusive facts to less deep seated beliefs about values and the everyday behaviors that result from them. Consider these politically correct beliefs that many wish everybody held, and their easier-to-move behavioral counterparts.
The point is that the behavioral "shoulds" in each of these statements are justifiable whether or not the related wishful belief turns out to be true when/if we finally figure it out.
That's all we should really aim for. Personally, I don't really care if someone is a racist or not. So long as they behave in ways that don't interfere with others' liberties. I only care about input-output behavior, not internal states, in other words.
You might ask how major shifts like ending slavery happen without changing "deep-rooted beliefs." They happen first at a behavioral level, and then at the level of beliefs about inconclusive facts. And finally at the level of actual facts as sensitive issues get investigated, understood, reframed and turned into actual truths. And at some point, we are able to navigate those truths without appealing to values-based heuristics to help us grope around in ignorance.
In my experience, real truths are never offensive.
To take your example of racism, in a way the original slave-owning racists never changed their beliefs about the legitimacy of what they were doing. Just their superficial behavior. But as they died out, and each new generation grew up in environments of increasingly non-racist behavior, their deep-seated beliefs about racial superiority/inferiority also became weaker with each passing generation.
I am on record as not being a Gandhi fan, but this is one of his more inspired quotes. This is not exactly the same thing I am saying (I'd replace the last line with "Keep your values positive because they lead you to your truths.")
Such beliefs are usually part of a larger related set drawn from the same inconclusive mass of raw material. For example, the varying beliefs you could hold about the nature of intelligence or creativity differences among different races, based on bell-curve data about current test scores or Nobel prizes, knowledge of nature/nurture dynamics, genetics, history, knowledge of how to interpret means and variances, and so on.
From such sets, we usually end up picking the ones we wish were true by cherry-picking the facts and arguments to use and ignoring the ones that don't fit.
Social conventions make some of these "we wish it were true" beliefs more acceptable than others. That doesn't mean the arguments are stronger. It's just that some wishful thinking views are viewed as more acceptable. Hence the term "politically correct." The word correct as denoting truth should not need a qualifier. That it does suggests that the truth in question is widely understood as being manufactured rather than proven.We do not feel the need to say that 2+2=4 is a politically correct assertion. A better phrase might be "politically expedient truths."
Most such sets of beliefs relate to the usual suspect topics: race and gender comparisons, superiority/inferiority of different cultures/religions/nations etc.
When you try to change somebody's beliefs in such situations, you are trying to substitute what they wish were true, with what you wish were true. There is no socially acceptable way to adopt an agnostic, non-wishful position. Fence-sitting is not allowed because in these issues, if enough people pick sides, lives will be impacted right now.
It's a collision of quasi-unfalsifiable inconclusive views about incompletely understood, but immediately relevant matters. I call it the Wishfulness Dialectic. As a social phenomenon, it runs a few decades ahead of more substantial dialectics like the Hegelian one. What the Wishfulness dialectic grapples with today, the Hegelian dialectic will deal with in 50 years.
Therefore it is hard to change deep-rooted beliefs. And it should be hard. The standard of proof for real truths should be much higher than for inconclusive arguments supporting hoped-for beliefs.
This doesn't mean change is impossible. You just need to shift focus from changing deep-seated beliefs about inconclusive facts to less deep seated beliefs about values and the everyday behaviors that result from them. Consider these politically correct beliefs that many wish everybody held, and their easier-to-move behavioral counterparts.
- It is far easier to convince people that they should treat everybody fairly than to convince them that everybody is equal.
- It is far easier to convince people that they should be polite and kind than to convince them that everybody deserves respect.
- It is far easier to convince people that nobody has a right to force another person to do anything using threat of violence than to convince them that some people are not superior to others.
- it is far easier to convince people that everybody has a right to be heard, than to convince them that everybody has something valuable to contribute.
The point is that the behavioral "shoulds" in each of these statements are justifiable whether or not the related wishful belief turns out to be true when/if we finally figure it out.
That's all we should really aim for. Personally, I don't really care if someone is a racist or not. So long as they behave in ways that don't interfere with others' liberties. I only care about input-output behavior, not internal states, in other words.
You might ask how major shifts like ending slavery happen without changing "deep-rooted beliefs." They happen first at a behavioral level, and then at the level of beliefs about inconclusive facts. And finally at the level of actual facts as sensitive issues get investigated, understood, reframed and turned into actual truths. And at some point, we are able to navigate those truths without appealing to values-based heuristics to help us grope around in ignorance.
In my experience, real truths are never offensive.
To take your example of racism, in a way the original slave-owning racists never changed their beliefs about the legitimacy of what they were doing. Just their superficial behavior. But as they died out, and each new generation grew up in environments of increasingly non-racist behavior, their deep-seated beliefs about racial superiority/inferiority also became weaker with each passing generation.
I am on record as not being a Gandhi fan, but this is one of his more inspired quotes. This is not exactly the same thing I am saying (I'd replace the last line with "Keep your values positive because they lead you to your truths.")
"Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words.
Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior. Keep
your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits. Keep
your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your
values positive because your values become your destiny."