Why You Can’t Convince a Theorist – Part I

Having spent many years studying and working in the field of psychology, one comes to understand the human psyche to a certain degree when it comes to people with different views and how hard they will hold on to those views despite the information that is available around them or presented to them by friends, neighbors and experts.
    The problem is, that once a person has his mind made up, it is extremely difficult, even at times impossible, to change that opinion, even though it may be wrong. Part of the problem is in perception, that is, how a person sees what he or she consider to be the truth.

After all, as Peter Ditto (left), professor of social psychology at the University of California, Irvine, stated: “We all think of ourselves as being these rational people. We hear evidence, and we process it," and went on to add: "What's clear from decades of social psychological research is that people's emotions get involved in their reasoning, their motivations, their intuitions. Those shape and bias the way we process information."
    Another problem is how people understand and accumulate “facts,” or rather, what they consider to be “facts.” First of all, when it comes to stating one’s opinions argumentatively, details simply don’t matter as much as we think they do. This is because when someone has their mind made up, they really don’t listen to another person’s processed information, stance, or viewpoint. And what they do hear, is simply processed within the realm of their own beliefs and bias perceptions—and discarded if it is not in agreement with these preconceived views.
    Despite having been married many years, our first true argument as a young married couple is still fresh in the mind. It was over, of all things, the color of something. Now, having been an artist, gone to college, and earned a living in the art field which involved numerous experiences with color, it seemed my wife, just out of school, was wrong in her perception of a color.
    Nothing she said on the subject mattered to me much because, after all, “I was the artist,” not her, and to-date she had very few experiences in color compared to me. My perception told me the color was a certain shade and that was it.
    There is also a recollection of the first time going toe-to-toe with a professor over whether or not dinosaurs ever actually walked on the earth, or the time of a wing-dinger with a superior officer in the military over whether or not a forward observer could reach a fire zone in time to call in a strike. We all have encounters stemming from differences of opinions, and one of the things that most of us learn, some sooner than others, is that there is no winner of an argument.
    The fact is, that during an argument, people think emotionally, some more than others, but emotion becomes involved in all extended discussions that are argumentative. This often evolves into what is morally right and wrong. It is not that we lose the ability to be rationale, we lose the ability to think clearly without emotion, experiences, perception and other outside influences becoming part of our opinions, beliefs, and “facts.”

There is also a matter of timing involved. There was a time when if someone went out on the street and shouted their beliefs by yelling, shouting, and causing a disturbance, they would have been viewed as “weird” or “crazy.” Today it is a way of life to those who feel it is the only manner in which they can voice their opinions successfully and influentially.
    One of the problems stems from the fact that most of our lives are spent in rather logical processing of thoughts, ideas, and desires: “What movie do want to see?” “What do I want to eat today?” “How do I pay for that?” “Is that something I can do?” Generally, however, we use that simple thinking on more important or involved issues: “Is my boss really going to buy this excuse,” “Can I really complete that report?” “Can I really afford that car?”  Sooner or later we begin inserting moral beliefs into our non-moral issues, “Should I have to work overtime,” “Is that an issue I should support?” “Can I make that light?” As a result, we often find that we are coming to conclusions first, and then looking for the reasons that support our beliefs afterward.
    At some point, then we encounter someone who views the world differently than we do and our factual reality differs considerably from their perceived reality. We often encounter this first when we marry and find out our spouse literally grew up in a different world than we did. Or we go to work for a boss whose moral views are different; or we enter into business with a partner who, as it turns out, sees the world of business different then we do. We find that others’ politics are different than ours, religion different, their family background is different, their mores different than ours.
    Then come the time when those differences become important. It might be over politics, over religious differences, over morality, over lying and cheating to get ahead, over being honest to the very core. Or simply differences that lead us down one path and a friend, loved one, or grown child heads down another and discussions of those differences evolve from light to heavy.
    Sooner or later in such discussions, one person is likely to be far more knowledgeable than the other, thus we find the lesser knowledgeable person relying on made-up facts, untenable positions, unwarranted stances, that when not accepted often leads to the raising of voices and stronger statements—even to loud shouting. This is because those who know more, rely on reason and facts to make their point, which are rejected out of hand because the other person has just as valid—in their mind—points as the one with the knowledge.

It is one of the reasons there are no winners when arguments occur. One may overpower the other, one may hold a higher level position than the other, one may intimidate the other, one may be kinder than the other—but the end result is that no change in position or stance occurs.
    "It's not that people believe anything they want to believe,” but that “People still think and need rationale, but the things that they are being asked to change are the very things they count on as evidence.” Thus, they are not likely to change their minds, no matter the persuasiveness of the one “controlling the high ground,” his or her argument simply does not carry any weight.
    The fact is, people tend to be a lot more skeptical of information they don't want to believe than information they do want to believe. We often lap up information we want to believe—things we agree with, like, hold dear, and/or readily accept. As a young baseball pitcher I was taught that all left handed hitters like the ball down (generally from the thighs to the knees) and all right handers prefer the ball up (from the crotch to the just below the letters). While I never found that information to be totally wrong, I did find over the many years pitching that there were distinct exceptions and it was hard to choose between “does that guy like the ball up instead of down? Or am I just missing my spots?”
    Old paradigms (a fixed belief or way of thinking or doing something) are under attack in our modern world. Yet, once a person establishes a paradigm, it is difficult for that person to change it. In our grandfather’s generation, banks were not to be trusted. In our father’s generations, banks were to be trusted. Now we are seeing a swing back to that of our grandfather’s era with the honesty of banks in question today, and their integrity suspect when they allow government to confiscate accounts, rob trust funds, etc. But one of the biggest hits we have taken in recent years is the attack on truth as being true.
    It was Aristotle who claimed that “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true,” yet in our modern generations such simple logic is hard for some to grasp.
(See the next post, “Why You Can’t Convince a Theorist – Part II,” to see why people who have their mind made up or believe a certain way are almost impossible to have change their mind)