How can we change our stubborn beliefs?
How can we change our stubborn beliefs?
Yesterday I shared a thought experiment from Steven Bartlett's bestseller “The Diary of a CEO”, which addressed the question on whether we really get to choose our beliefs. It came to the conclusion that we do not and that the things we believe are fundamentally based on some form of primary evidence:
https://tanjilahmedr.com/blogs/68a05c177c7f8c87f3f3be4d
Now the bigger question, “How can we change someone’s belief or even more importantly, how can we change our own stubborn beliefs”?
Thankfully, Dr. Tali Sharot, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL and MIT spent years researching and conducting multiple studies on why beliefs exist, why they are hard to change and how to change them! According to her research, the brain considers any new evidence alongside the current evidence it has stored. For e.g if I told an adult that I had seen a pink elephant flying in the sky, his/her brain will compare this new evidence to his/her existing evidence that elephants aren’t pink and they can’t fly, and likely reject it. However, if I told a three-year old that I had seen a pink elephant flying in the sky, they would likely believe me because they have yet to form strong opposing beliefs about elephants, aviation and the laws of physics.
Prof. Sharot asserts that there are four factors that determine whether a new piece of evidence will change an existing belief:
1. A person’s current evidence
2. Their confidence in their current evidence
3. The new evidence
4. Their confidence in that new evidence
Point to be noted, is that humans tend to search for, favour and recall information in a way that confirm or supports their existing beliefs or values. So the further the new evidence is from their current beliefs, the less likely it is to change their thinking.
All of this means, that strongly held false beliefs are very hard to change, but there is one important exception: when the counter-evidence is exactly what you want to hear, you’re more likely to change your mind. For e.g in a 2011 study in which people were told that others see them as much more attractive than they see themselves, they were happy to change their self-perception. And in a 2016 study in which people learned that their genes suggested that they were much more resistant to disease than they thought, the participants were again quick to change their beliefs.
The Secret Recipe:
Prof. Tali Sharot concluded that in order to change beliefs, “the secret is to go along with how our brain works, not to fight against it”, which is what most people try and fail to do.
Don’t try and break or argue with someone’s existing evidence; instead focus on implanting completely new evidence, and make sure you’ve highlighted the incredibly positive impact this new evidence will have on them. One example of this is of parents’ reaction to the false link drawn up between the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, in a now-debunked journal article that was published in 1998. As news of the article’s theory spread, many parents refused to vaccinate their children, and held on to their beliefs stubbornly. Eventually, a group of researchers changed their minds, not by trying to break their existing beliefs – they didn’t focus on their existing beliefs at all – but by offering the parents new information about the very positive benefits of the vaccine – true information about how it prevents kids from encountering deadly disease. And it worked – parents agreed to have their children vaccinated.
But where does the “New Evidence” exist?:
In the words of Stephen Bartlett which I found very inspiring as I could relate to it so well:
‘When I was younger, I struggled with awful stage fright, which itself is underpinned by a set of limiting beliefs. Telling me it was “all going to be OK” was not enough to change my preconception about speaking on stage, how I would perform and what the reaction would be – my beliefs were too stubborn.
The reason my stage fright eventually vanished – to the point that now I feel 99.9 per cent less nervous when speaking in a packed arena or live TV – is simply because I carried on speaking on stage. And doing so gradually gave me, new positive, first-party evidence that replaced the existing evidence I had about my on-stage abilities – the more I spoke on stage, the stronger my confidence in this evidence became, and with it, the belief in my ability and the fear it created diminished.”
In the words of Dale Carnegie which reaffirms this story of Steven “Do the thing you fear, and keep doing it. That is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.”
This I agree is the most important fundamental truth about belief change and how to increase a person’s self-belief – beliefs change when a person gets new counteracting evidence that they have a high degree of subjective confidence in. So if a friend of yours has a limiting belief about themselves, or you have a limiting belief about yourself, the best chance you have of changing that belief isn’t by reading self-help books, inspirational quotes or watching motivational videos. It’s by stepping out of your comfort zone and into a situation where that limiting belief will be confronted head on with a new first-party evidence. This is how you change even the most stubborn beliefs!
#myreflections #anideaaday #beliefs