“The only thing harder to change than someone else’s mind is your own.”

One problem with changing a belief system is that there are a multitude of reasons we humans adhere to them, and each reason creates discomfort when challenged.

Often, a person will have multiple defensive responses to protect their belief system, which is actually a mode of protecting themselves. You may have witnessed this before when you provide valid proof that denies one aspect of a person’s belief system, and they immediately pivot to any number of alternate defenses or expound on a connected issue. It is this raising of tangent defenses that is often a walk-down of a list of pain points a person confronts to protect their beliefs.

RUBRICS: I told the story before about my engineering friend who maintains the universe was created 6,000 years ago because to deny that would be to deny his scriptures and thus his entire rubric for understanding the world. When people adopt a rubric for pan dimensional perspective, they are reluctant to let go of any of it.

FEAR OF DISORDER: As with the above, abandoning even non-religious rubrics leaves a person with a sense of disorder, and associated with that, disorientation. These emotions spark associated feelings of fear since venturing unguided into the unknown is routinely terrifying.

PERSONAL ATTACHMENT: Many religious people will tell of their moment of faith, where they felt a “personal connection with God, the God Head, the universe, etc.” Anything deeply internalized (personal) is never abandoned easily. Folks who “lose their religion” likely never had that moment of deep and distinctly personal reaction to faith, and thus walked away because the pain was “only” in abandoning inherited tradition, not a personal connection.

COMMUNITY: Excommunication hurts for a reason. When one is part of a community, there is more than a shared set of beliefs. There is fellowship, personal connections, reinforcement of beliefs, safety in numbers, and more. To walk away from, or to be tossed out of a community is an agonizing and scary proposition.

CONSENSUS: Recall the experiment with the smokey room. Consensus is a form of safety. The “wisdom of crowds”, though not always wise, gives each member a feeling that “I can’t be out of my mind when all these other people agree,” though the old adage holds true that a million people doing a stupid thing is still stupid. When an individual lacks sufficient knowledge to make a sound decision on their own, following the mob is at least plausible and might earn one a new friend.

BIAS CONFIRMATION: It takes very few real-life examples that confirm one’s bias to cement a belief. Take the story I told of the San Francisco racist. He learned his racism from his elders. He may have seen 100 people of the other races that were fine folks. But it only took two or three of them acting in ways that his father and grandfather said “they all” acted like to make the concept a granite-hard reality in his mind. When one has their biases confirmed, they have what they consider “proof” of their beliefs, and armed with that, they can and will ignore all other evidence.

PLAUSIBILITY: People often maintain belief systems that are merely plausible, with or without contra evidence. My Aunt Emma used to predict rain by the pain in her knee, though I quickly concluded she had never actually tallied her prediction success rate. But it was, for her, a plausible explanation since it happened at least once.

AUTHORITAH: Feel like disobeying God today? Authority comes in many forms, the Almighty being just one. Belief systems linked to any form of authority – parental, religion, law, etc. – require one to deny authority if they disagree. This may be OK for common criminals, but most folks prefer to toe the line … most of the time … the rate of marital infidelity is an alarmingly high contraindicator.

STATUS QUO: People dislike change and disruption. The “normal” course of life is “suitable enough”, predictable and thus “safe”, and that suitability is a belief system in itself. Any threat to the unrocked boat is a  threat to those rowing it.

LONGEVITY: In the book The Cognitive Science of Belief: A Multidisciplinary Approach, they note that “higher cognitive processes such as those involved in belief seem to be strongly influenced by prior knowledge as opposed to new evidence alone.” Any belief you acquire or develop, and which is reinforced with even casual observation, creates an almost statistically weighted bias against new information. Hence, the older the belief, the less likely new intel will change it.

MATH: Most people will not resort to Bayesian reasoning, the use of probabilistic evaluation to test their beliefs as new information becomes available. Most won’t even rank how sure they are about their own beliefs in terms of numbers (i.e., “I’m 75% sure of this”) even if their self-assesment is unbiased.

“We like to think we make complicated decisions based on rational analysis, but most of the time, we actually make an emotional decision and then invent a rational analysis to justify it.” —Seth Godin