To believe or not to believe something: how does that actually work?

College

How do we survive the conversations during Christmas dinner this year? Maybe I have something for you. I recently gave a lecture on behavior and change. One of the exercises was applying the literature discussed to current newspaper articles. Students used, among other things, the ideas of psychologist Daniel Kahneman, from his book Thinking, fast and slowto understand more about our voting, eating and flying behavior.

A topic that came up several times: how do you believe something? When do you take something for granted? For example, the Netherlands is ‘full’. Or that safelanders are responsible for the crisis in refugee reception.

Cognitive ease

According to Kahneman, we start to believe something if it is easy to do so. In his words: if we have cognitive ease (cognitive ease), we tend to experience something as attractive and true. Cognitive tension (cognitive strain) actually makes a thought feel unattractive and untrue.

What leads to more or less cognitive ease? Big letters. Stories. Something in rhyme. And – something advertisers have known for more than a hundred years: repetition. You automatically experience an idea that you are frequently confronted with as more attractive and truer. Kahneman writes: “A surefire way to get people to believe untruths is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”

Fallacies

Many fallacies revolve around cognitive tension and cognitive ease. For example, we think that a topic is more important if you can easily recall it from memory (availability heuristic). We are more likely to believe an idea is true if it fits with something we already thought (confirmation bias). And we feel something is right when many other people feel the same way (conformity bias).

The joke about all that quick, emotional thinking is that you can get away with it just fine in everyday social interactions. After all, we all go through life that way. But when it comes to determining what is true or right, our quick, automatic thinking can easily lead us astray.

Christmas dinner

A few weeks ago I heard a psychologist talk about religion on a radio program. Why, for example, do millions of people believe that the savior of the world was born in a stable at Christmas?

This psychologist mainly focused on the tendency towards conformity. What he unfortunately didn’t do was apply these ideas to himself. While in the minds of the people who believe that the Christmas story is nonsense, the same laws are at work.

It is something that my students quickly realized: the challenge is to apply the research into cognitive tension to yourself. Even if it causes some inconvenience. It is precisely when I am prepared to do so, for example at Christmas dinner, that I increase the chance of learning something new and understanding my table companions a little better.

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