Note: This post was inspired by my personal experience, but later I discovered a similar concept known as core beliefs in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). I won’t discuss this topic from CBT perspective (though there will likely be overlap), but you can look up core beliefs if you’re interested.
On Beliefs
We can define belief as something a person accepts as true. For example, people can hold beliefs about themselves, others, or the world. Here are a few:
- Someone believes that breaking a mirror brings bad luck.
- Someone believes that smoking is not actually bad for health.
- Someone believes that hard work always pays off.
Now let’s say we take a person who holds these beliefs. We can expect that this person:
- will try to avoid breaking mirrors.
- may smoke if they enjoy it, because their belief does not deter them.
- will be a hard worker.
So we can clearly see that beliefs have chance to affect our lives in significant ways. The extent of their effect can vary depending on the: number of beliefs we have, the content of beliefs, and the degree to how much we believe in them.
We can also see that some beliefs may have negative results in our lives (e.g., the belief that smoking is not harmful) or positive results (e.g., the belief about hard working always paying off).
Also many of our beliefs are formed as a result of our experience. For example, if someone breaks a promise to another person, that person may think promises are meaningless.
Since beliefs can have a big impact on our lives, it is in our interests that we stay open to reconsidering them. This process might not be easy sometimes because we may need to admit we were mistaken - yet, it is important that we engage in this process. For example, in one of our earlier examples, the person might need to convince themselves that not all promises might be meaningless, and that they shouldn't generalize based on the actions of just one or two people who broke their promises.
Why Changing Beliefs Can Be Difficult
As we discussed, it is often useful to reconsider our beliefs. However, certain mental mechanisms can make this process more difficult.
Motivated Reasoning
When we evaluate new information and form opinions, we can do so with two different goals in mind: either to discover the truth or to confirm/justify our desired conclusions and/or existing beliefs. When the latter happens, it's called motivated reasoning. Let's look at some examples:
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If someone plans to go to a concert on Tuesday and develops a runny nose on Monday, they might tell themselves it’s just allergies or the weather — anything but the start of a cold or the flu. They don’t want to face the possibility that they might be getting sick and have to cancel, so they look for alternative explanations.
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Let's say a person supports a political candidate and that candidate is caught lying. The person might say "it’s just media exaggeration" instead of trying to find out if this was true. Since they do not want to change their opinion about their favourite candidate, they try to look for alternate explanations.
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Motivated reasoning can influence our self-perception in the following way. When building our self-image, we tend to interpret information in ways that help maintain a positive view of ourselves, often emphasizing favorable aspects of ourselves while minimizing less favorable ones.
Also, it is reasonable to assume that we can engage in motivated reasoning to some extent. In the first example, if that person also develops cough in addition to runny nose, it may become more difficult to convince themselves that this is not a flu.
As you can see, motivated reasoning can make it harder to reconsider our beliefs because it can lead us to process information in a way that supports our existing beliefs and/or desired conclusions.