You don’t have to look very far for examples of people holding
on to their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the
contrary. Thousands still hold to the idea that vaccines cause
autism, that all life was created a few thousand years ago, and
even that drinking industrial bleach is a good idea. Look
at comment threads across the internet and you’ll inevitably find
legions of people who boldly support for these ideas in the face of
any rational argument.
That might be depressing, but it’s not unexpected. In a new
study, David Gal and Derek Rucker from Northwestern University have
found that when people’s confidence in their beliefs is shaken,
they become stronger advocates for those beliefs. The duo
carried out three experiments involving issues such as animal
testing, dietary preferences, and loyalty towards Macs over PCs. In
each one, they subtly manipulated their subjects’ confidence and
found the same thing: when faced with doubt, people shout even
louder.
Gal and Rucker were inspired by a classic psychological book
called When Prophecy Fails. In it, Leon Festinger and
colleagues infiltrated an American cult whose leader, Dorothy
Martin, convinced her followers that flying saucers would rescue
them from an apocalyptic flood. Many believed her, giving up their
livelihoods, possessions and loved ones in anticipation of their
alien saviours. When the fated moment came and nothing happened,
the group decided that their dedication had spared the Earth from
destruction. In a reversal of their earlier distaste for publicity,
they started to actively proselytise for their beliefs. Far from
shattering their faith, the absent UFOs had turned them into
zealous evangelists.
The case study inspired Festinger’s theory of “cognitive dissonance”, which describes the
discomfort that people feel when they try to cope with conflicting
ideas. Festinger reasoned that people will go to great lengths to
reduce this conflict. Altering one’s beliefs in the face of new
evidence is one solution but for Martin’s followers, this was too
difficult. Their alternative was to try and muster social support
for their ideas. If other people also believed, their internal
conflicts would lessen.
Festinger predicted that when someone’s beliefs are challenged,
they would try to raise support for those beliefs with paradoxical
enthusiasm. Amazingly enough, during the intervening half-century,
this prediction has never been tested in an experiment – that is,
until now.
In their first experiment, Gal and Rucker asked 88 students to
write about their views on animal testing for consumer goods, but
only half of them were allowed to use their preferred hand. This
may seem random, but previous studies have shown that people have
less confidence in what they write with the hand they’re less
comfortable with. Indeed, that’s what Gal and Rucker found in their
study. When asked later, the volunteers who didn’t use their
dominant hand were less confident in their views.
However, they were also more likely to try and persuade
others of those same views. When they were asked to write something
to persuade someone else about their opinions, those who felt less
confident wrote significantly longer missives. With a sliver of
doubt in their minds, they spent more effort in their attempts at
persuasion.
Gal and Rucker also found that this extra effort vanished if the
volunteers had a chance to affirm their own identity beforehand. If
they were asked to identify their favourite items (books, cities,
songs and so on) before writing about animal testing, the choice of
hand had no effect on their advocacy attempts. If they were asked
to say what their parents’ favourite things were, the hand effect
reappeared.
In their second experiment with 151 fresh volunteers, Gal and
Rucker found the same effect. This time, they influenced the
recruits’ degree of confidence by asking half of them to relate
memories where they were brimming with certainty, and the other
half to describe relate memories where they were plagued with doubt
Afterwards, the volunteers said whether they were vegans,
vegetarians or meat-eaters, how confident they were in their
opinions, and how important their choice was to them.
As expected, those who remembered times of uncertainty were less
confident that their food choices were the right ones. And as
before, those same doubtful volunteers advocated their beliefs more
strongly. When asked to imagine convincing someone else about their
diet, the uncertain group wrote significantly longer messages and
spent longer composing those messages.
This experiment – with a different method of manipulating
confidence, a different issue at stake, and a different measure of
evangelical effort – adds weight to the results of the first one.
However, the effect only held true among those who felt that their
dietary preferences were important to them. This showed (perhaps,
more expectedly) that the ties between doubt and advocacy are
stronger for beliefs that are people hold more dearly.
The third experiment found similar results, using a far more
trivial issue (well, supposedly more trivial). Gal and
Rucker worked with 106 students who all thought that Macs were
superiors to PCs. Again, the duo successfully manipulated the
students’ confidence by asking them to remember a previous incident
of certain resolve or uncertain doubt.
The students had to imagine convincing a PC-user about the
merits of an Apple product but this time, half were told that they
were talking to a Windows-diehard, and the others were faced with a
more open-minded partner. As before, the students put more effort
into persuading their imaginary partner if their own confidence was
weakened, but only if their partner was receptive.
In all three cases, Gal and Zucker found that doubt turns people
into stronger advocates. More subtly, their study shows that this
effect is stronger if someone’s identity is threatened, if the
belief is important to them, and if they think that others will
listen. It all fits with a pattern of behaviour where people
evangelise to strengthen their own faltering beliefs.
Their study also casts the acts of advocates in a different
light. They might be outwardly trying to change the minds of other
people but their actions could be equally about bolstering their
own beliefs. As Gal and Zucker write:
“The present research also offers a warning to anyone on the
receiving end of an advocacy attempt. Although it is natural to
assume that a persistent and enthusiastic advocate of a belief is
brimming with confidence, the advocacy might in fact signal that
the individual is boiling over with doubt.”