Dealing with Entrenched Beliefs

One of the more difficult problems that we face in dispute resolution as mediators and peacemakers is dealing with entrenched beliefs. And I don't think we have to look any further than what's going on right now in our country to understand the power of beliefs and how entrenched beliefs can polarize people and put them into places where it seems like disagreement is impossible. And like just about everything else in human conflict, it all comes down to what's going on in the brain. And in terms of our interventions, it takes our understanding of what's going on inside the human brain with beliefs to be able to come up with procedures, interventions, and processes that will help people get into a place where they can find some common ground. And of course, it's difficult work, as just about everything else. What's really interesting is that as neuroscientists begin to study beliefs in the brain and trying to understand how all of this works, what they find is that beliefs are very deeply emotional processes. As I have said many times before, we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. And beliefs, although they seem to be based on some kind of rational thinking, oftentimes, and in fact most of the time, are based on emotional processes in the brain. Beliefs, of course, are nothing more than cognitive schemas that allow us to process information quickly so that we don't have to use a lot of power to solve problems. And beliefs are heuristic shortcuts that we've talked about before that help us take situations that we are familiar with, have beliefs around them that help us navigate and make sense out of those, out of the social and physical environment around us. Beliefs also allow us to have certainty. They allow us to have, to resolve ambiguity and to the idea of a sense of control. And we know that having that sense of control, having that sense of certainty, being able to understand our environment that we live in, even if it's a complete lie, gives us safety and security and allows us to navigate through an uncertain environment. But as this quote says, our results further support the notion that emotional processes are tightly coupled to complex and high-dimensional human belief systems. And such emotional processes might play a much larger role than we currently believe, possibly outside our awareness of its influence. And this is pretty recent. This is just not even 18 months ago. And it— and I think it's pretty clear that— that a lot of this processing does occur outside of our control. So a quick review then of our evolutionary biology. As we all know, the human brain evolved to solve problems while highly mobile in extreme weather conditions and in a dangerous environment. It is not a rational operating machine like a computer. The rationality was simply adaptive to help us solve problems. But most of the time we are operating, operating automatically and we are operating to solve problems that persist when you've got to walk around on two feet, food is scarce, and the way weather conditions are adverse. Of course, those are not the conditions that we have in modernity, in our modern complex Western civilization, but the human brain— and the human brain has managed to adapt, obviously, to a very complex culture, and in fact we've culturally evolved much faster than we have environmentally, or rather evolutionarily. But the fact remains that the human brain of 250,000 years ago 50,000 years ago is the same brain today. And many of the artifacts that allowed Homo sapiens to survive and thrive and move to every environmental niche on the planet are the same kinds of legacy issues that cause us problems today in a very complex culture. So the other thing that we know is that We are reality-creating machines. That is, our brains are creating a constant reality. This reality oftentimes is a private reality. It may not have anything to do with what's actually going on in the physical environment. But as it turns out, enough of us can create a sufficiently shared reality that we're able to communicate symbolically through language, and we are able to collaborate and cooperate and work together as groups because we are able to have realities that are fairly closely meshed together. However, there are plenty of times when we create individual realities that are, that are at odds with other people's realities, and this is when we start to get into beliefs that start to crash. And it all goes back basically to how Kahneman describes the System 1, System 2 processing in the brain. In System One, of course, is all about emotions, intuition. It's fast, associative, automatic, and effortless. And that is the System 1 processing and decision-making is how we navigate through most of our day. System 2, which is the slow, deliberative side of our brain that does the— what we would consider to be the rational thinking, is it's conscious, it's slow, it's painful, and it takes a lot of metabolism. And so the— So we have to be thinking about when we're looking at beliefs, are we dealing with a System 1 process or are we dealing with System 2? And typically all beliefs are— they might be created by System 2, but they are System 1 functions in that they are operating automatically outside of consciousness with a strong emotional component and they're effortless. Now this is where it starts to get interesting. So for example, let's take this proposition. The question, is Sam friendly? Or, and if we are to answer this question and we allow our System 1 decision-making systems in the brain to answer this question, then what System 1 is going to do is go out and look for all evidence and only the evidence that supports the truth of this proposition. So we will look for the most recent evidence we can find that Sam was friendly. Well, we saw him the other day and he was smiling. And he said hello to us, and he came over and bought us a cup of coffee at Starbucks, and we would take all those bits of information that support the concept that Sam is friendly, and we would— our System 1 would immediately draw the conclusion that Sam is friendly, and we would form a belief structure around that. But if you frame the question in a different way, such as this: Is Sam unfriendly? Our brain is going to do exactly the opposite. It's going to go out and look for all of the evidence that Sam is unfriendly. He gave me a glare. He didn't come to the table. He didn't return my telephone call. And we're going to be looking for evidence to support the proposition that Sam is unfriendly, and then we're going to form a belief structure that Sam is unfriendly. Notice that System 1 is not looking at all of the information. It's only looking for the information that supports the truth of the proposition. And this is where people get into trouble with beliefs, because because if they have System 1 brains that are functioning and are not using their System 2, they're incapable of looking at information that is inconsistent with the truth of the proposition. So, for example, if you ask, "Is Sam unfriendly?" and somebody forms a belief structure around that, it becomes very difficult for them to look at information that says that Sam is friendly because that is a System 2 function and it's painful and it's effortful and it's difficult. And so people don't like doing System 2 thinking because it hurts. And as a result of that, when people form belief structures, it's much easier to hold on to a belief because it's all about System 1. It's effortless, it's automatic, and I don't have to think about it. It just makes it a lot easier. And yet, when we get into complex problems, for example, political issues or policy issues, that are ambiguous and difficult and complex, if people resort to System 1, then all they want to do is hear people who talk to their System 1. They don't want to try to process any information that is inconsistent with that. And that is part of the reason why we get political polarization of the type that we've seen over the last 15 or 20 years. So, part of the brain that is really interesting is is a part called the anterior cingulate cortex, and you'll see that it's that little blue part there that's shaded in the middle. What's really interesting is that, is that the anterior cingulate cortex has many functions, but one of them is to monitor our internal state versus the external state of the environment around us and alert us if there are any inconsistencies or conflicts. And what One of the things that's really interesting is that when neuroscientists have studied the brains of people who are politically liberal versus the people who are politically conservative, they find a difference in the anterior cingulate cortex. With liberal people, they find an anterior cingulate cortex that is more active and can be activated more quickly than the conservative brain, where it is less susceptible to being activated by conflict on the outside. Think— the thinking being that people who have a more conservative bent tend to want to see things the same way, and so they're not as sensitive to changes in the environment, whereas people who may have a more liberal political bent are more sensitive to changes in the environment and, and have the ability to detect conflicts and then deal with them in a different way. Neither one is good, neither one is bad. It's just the way it is, and again, it's across the spectrum of humanity. So, our brains are constantly scanning our environment to compare what we expect with outside reality. And if there is a conflict detected, in the ideal situation, System 1 should delegate the resolution to System 2. However, if System 2 is not well developed because of lack of education or training or whatever, most people will try to solve the problem heuristically with System 1. One believes. And sometimes this is effective and sometimes it's not, but when we're dealing with conflict, human conflict, social conflict, it almost always is ineffective because we're going to be drawing the wrong kinds of conclusions and inferences. We're going to quickly get escalated when people are challenging our police structures, and now we're in— now we're into the argument, the fight, and the violence. So here's another study. It says that the results of our study suggest that belief, disbelief, and uncertainty are mediated primarily by regions in the medial prefrontal cortex, the executive function of the brain, the anterior insula, which has to do with disgust, and the superior parietal lobule and the caudate. So basically what it's saying is that there are different parts of the brain that are actively associated with the concepts of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. And what's really interesting, if we look at this a little more closely, is that disbelief activates the anterior insula. So the anterior insula— the anterior insula is the part of the brain that is associated with disgust, and you can see it there highlighted. And basically discussed the brain has adopted this part— we've adopted this part of the brain, the anterior insula, from the olfactory senses, you know, and applied it to abstract thinking so that we actually get feelings of disgust when we have disbelief. And basically, the acceptance and rejection of propositional truth claims, that is beliefs, appear to be governed in part by the same regions that judge the plausibility pleasants of taste and odors. So, if we encounter a belief that we, um, don't agree with, we actually feel disgust. And if we are feeling disbelief, then we're having this emotional reaction, uh, that is associated with the feeling of disgust, which powerfully motivates us not to look for information that confirms the contrary information. So, the things to remember here is is that disbelief activates the same region of the brain that registers disgust at rotten foods and foul smells, and therefore disbelief evokes negative emotions that repel us from an idea, thought, or statement. And again, we can see this play out in the political polarization of the country in this, in this election cycle, and we see the people become really violently opposed to each other because they're feeling the disgust of another person's belief structure, which renders them incapable of thinking rationally about another person's position or idea and basically strengthens their own belief structure. So, you can think— I see it in mediation of litigated disputes. We see this quite frequently where lawyers will say— a lawyer will tell me in mediation, "We will win this lawsuit." And the question that we have to ask ourselves is, what does it mean if this statement were true? Okay, so what happens here is that if we choose to believe it or unbelieve it, that is a function of System 2. The choice to believe or disbelieve is a choice made by System 2. But most lawyers do not always have well-developed System 2 brains. Some do, some don't, just like other human beings. And so, they rely on System 1. System 1 assumes the statement is true and looks for information to confirm it, which is easy and effortless. And so, that's why we see people in mediation of litigated disputes making the statements, "We will win this lawsuit," and asking them to focus on the weaknesses of their case becomes very difficult because unbelieving is a function of System 2, which is effortful. Painful. And so getting people to look at the other side of the story, it can be extraordinarily difficult. And oftentimes that's, of course, is what we need to do because in any conflict you have two different conflict stories, both of which are opposed to each other. And trying to get one side to step into the shoes of the other can be extremely difficult because the brain— their brains are just simply resisting that possibility. So, Remember that unbelieving is, which is the sense of being skeptical, is a function of System 2. And to be skeptical of our own beliefs is also a function of System 2. And it's very difficult to be skeptical of our own beliefs. We resist unbelieving because it is effortful and painful. And you can experience this anywhere by asking people about their belief structures and challenging their belief structures by asking them to give you information that contradicts their beliefs, and you will see that people will get very, very resistant to that very quickly, especially around deep belief structures in politics, religion, and other big social issues of the day. So, there's some really interesting studies that support all of this and give us more insight into all of this. There was a very famous study done after the Bush-Kerry campaign, presidential election, I think 2004, done by Drew Weston and his colleagues at Emory University. And basically what they did is they took partisan Republicans and partisan Democrats and ran them through a scanner to watch their brains. And with each partisan candidate, they gave, they showed the the subject statements by the candidate of choice that were true and where the candidate was consistent. And when they did that, the brain of the subject was very happy. Emotional centers were great, prefrontal cortex was online, everything was great. And then what they did is show statements to the subjects made by the candidate that were objectively false. In other words, the candidate was lying. And did this for both Bush and Kerry. And for both Democrats and Republicans, the partisans who had very strongly held beliefs, they saw something very interesting happen. The first thing that happened was that the emotional centers of the brain lit up. And the second thing that happened was that the prefrontal cortex, the ability to think, the system 2 part of the brain, shut down. And the third thing that happened was that it appeared that dopamine— the dopamine circuits of the brain lit up to reinforce the pre-existing belief structure in the face of the inconsistent but true facts that would have challenged the belief structure as being false. In other words, people were rewarding themselves for holding on to a belief that really didn't have any validity in fact. Of course, we call this stubbornness. That's exactly what it is. It's based in the brain. That stubbornness that we talk about and we see so much in conflict is caused by holding on to belief structures because it's easier to hold on to a belief structure than it is to be skeptical of our own belief structures and form new belief structures. Only in the most extreme conditions will we change our belief structures, and then only with great pain and with great difficulty. Another study that I think is really interesting is one that had to do with expert opinion. So the question becomes, who do you think makes a better firefighter? So most people don't know who makes a better firefighter, and therefore they just take a guess. And if you look at— so you can ask them two questions. One, is it Is it the cautious, by-the-book conservative, or is it the risky, gung-ho maverick? And since most of us don't know much about firefighting, the correct answer should be, "I don't know." That's the correct answer. However, most people show just a minor preference for the risk-takers. Now, if you take a group of people and you ask them this question, and they basically will say, Maybe they've got a small preference for risk-takers. And then you show them a report, and the report basically says why risky firefighters are better. And this is written by Joe Fireman. It's a real— and he's the expert on all of this. So naturally, people are going to form a belief based on this report that they don't read. They're just told about it. And they naturally report a strong preference for risk-takers over non-risk-takers. So then they're shown, they're shown a report where they're told— let's go back to this— they are told that this report was false and Joe Fireman didn't know what he was talking about. And so then they have to ask, so the question becomes, what Well, what— who makes the better firefighter? I've been told that this report that I relied on is no longer valid. I don't have a basis, factual basis for my belief structure anymore. So who does make the firefighter? And the correct answer should be, I don't know. We should go back to the status quo. But what the research shows is that people still report a strong preference for risk-takers even in the face of information that shows they're their original belief was contradictory. And of course, they did this to show that the— they did it in the opposite way too. This is called belief perseverance, and it's based on the phenomena that we think that Drew Weston found showing that dopamine circuits in the brain reward us for holding on to beliefs that are inconsistent with the true facts of reality. So what we know, and we know this from common experience, and now we have some neuroscience to tell us why this is happening, is that we have a difficult time evaluating and interpreting information inconsistent with strong belief structures. And we also know from common experience and also from science that beliefs cannot easily be changed and our belief structures interfere with objective assessment and evaluation, especially in high-conflict situations where people, where people have really become polarized into positions and into belief structures and they are confronted with strong and polarized belief structures of other people. So, the question becomes, as peacemakers and mediators and dispute resolution professionals, how do we work with deep-seated beliefs? And the first secret, of course, is that strongly held beliefs are not solvable with logic. And as I say often and over and over again, you cannot solve an emotional problem with logic. A belief— people with strongly held polarized beliefs are highly emotional, their prefrontal cortex is not working very well, and so there is no amount of logic, explanation, fact-based reasoning is going to help people with strongly held beliefs change their minds or be able to accept the truth or validity of what appears to be objectively verifiable facts. If we start using logic on people who have strong beliefs, what we're going to do is be faced with intransigence, stubbornness, difficulty, and in some cases violence, and we're gonna essentially escalate the conflict. So we have to find other ways of dealing with these beliefs, and that gets us to the concept of framing. This is the basic, basic tools that we use in dealing with beliefs. So a frame is how we make sense out of reality. Frames permit us to process some information, but most importantly, frames exclude much more information. So whatever is within the frame is real and truthful to us at a subjective level, but anything outside the frame does not exist. So framing is fundamentally a System 1 process. It's easy, effortless, emotional, automatic, and associative. Frames are how we create our cognitive heuristics, the short— the mental shortcuts we use to make fast and dirty judgments about how to negotiate life, that most of the work of that work most of the time. So, these frames are really mental shortcuts for dealing with complex information. And instead of having to use all the mental power of System 2 to sort out every single problem we see, when we see repeated problems over and over again, we can develop these cognitive heuristics, these shortcuts that allow us to process information on very little factual information. And most of the time, do a pretty good job of figuring stuff out. But it's when we get into ambiguity, uncertainty, stress, high emotion, all of the— and everything that exists in high risk, everything that exists in high conflict, especially highly emotional conflict, is where this cognitive heuristic process that we have evolved to solve problems breaks down. And that's— and that, of course, is prime definition of what happens in highly emotional conflicts. Um, so, we can think about 7 categories of frames. So, one category is situations. Situations are stories about how we got to where we are today. So, that's storytelling and it could be a lot about myth. It could be based on some kind of reality. It could be any kind of story that helps explain where we are today. So, that's one kind of frame. Another kind of frame has to do with what we would call attributes. So, attributes involve stories about who we are and what we are and who the other person is and what the other person is all about. So, we can have stories about the history of our relationship. We can have stories about the attributes. I'm good, you're bad. And so, we can label attributes and create stories around those attributes that help rationalize and justify why we have come to the conclusion or the belief about attributes. We can have frames around choices which involve stories about possibilities that are ahead of us. And notice that I'm emphasizing the word stories because this is all about story creating and storytelling, which becomes a very powerful process, uh, that we can use as mediators and peacemakers in helping people create stories in different frames. Another frame has to do with actions. So these are stories around behaviors. What happened? What were the actions of the past? What are the actions in the present? What are the potential actions in the future? All of which surround us with stories about action and actors. Who's involved in this and who's— who did what? Who is doing what? Who will do what? Another frame has to do with issues. So these are stories around the problems to be solved, including how these problems are to be defined. And so, how you define the problem and how you go about solving the problem is, is the frame of issues. And it's all about the stories that define how we look at a situation as a problem one way or another. We have another frame called responsibility, which is the frame involving stories about fault, justice, guilt, shame, victimization, accountability. And so, we can frame the stories, the conflict stories around the concept of responsibility and make sense of it that way. And then finally, there is the frame of frame of the news, which is stories about how other, the other 6 frames are reported into reality to third parties. So, how do we take all of these different stories and report them to somebody else? And that is what we would call the frame of news. So, that's the, that's basically what, how frames work. And basically, the frames work by focusing us on only a limited set of facts and creating stories around those facts, around the 7 frames that I've talked about, and that then creates our belief structure. So, although this is inherent in our brain structure, it also gives us a tool for how we might use frames to help people with different belief structures re-see their reality. So, for example, here's an example. Here's an example of how framing might be used with a strongly held belief. In a mediated— in the mediation of a litigated dispute, for example, I might ask a businessman or a businessperson, "Suppose you didn't have this lawsuit. How much would you be willing to pay to buy it?" In other words, if you were a disinterested investor— and this I would ask this question to the person who is suing, the plaintiff, the person who is bringing the lawsuit. And, and let's say the plaintiff has a belief structure that he or she has been deeply injured and is demanding millions of dollars. And, and I want to move them out of that frame to see if I can get them to look at the possibility that maybe the lawsuit does not have the kind of monetary value that, that that person thinks it has. Now, if I challenge that belief structure directly, I'm going to see a lot of resistance. But if I ask this question, so if you were a disinterested investor and you were going to invest in this lawsuit, how much would you be willing to pay to buy it as an investor? And now people have to think about it in a different way. They have to think about risk-reward. They have to think about how much money they want to put up. They have to think about, you know, what are the odds of winning the lawsuit? What are the odds of collecting the lawsuit? And now all of a sudden they are engaging in cognitive processes that allow them to evaluate the lawsuit outside of the belief structure that I'm an injured victim. And that's a helpful thing because it helps broaden their perspectives and gives us a basis for having a discussion about how do we go about settling this lawsuit without interfering with the existing belief structures. You can do the same thing on the other side of the case. You could say something, supposing you weren't involved in this lawsuit, how much would someone have to pay you to endure it. So imagine that you are being sued and you don't want to pay the other side one red dime. You'd rather pay your lawyer $200,000 than pay the other side anything. By framing the question this way, all of a sudden now people are thinking about, okay, so what is this— this lawsuit is really a pain in the butt. It's interfering with my business life, my personal life. I'm I'm frightened by it, I've got anxiety. I mean, I would pay somebody a significant amount of money to get rid of the hassle of this lawsuit. Notice that we have changed the frame again, and the valuation that you put on it because we changed the frame allows people to look at the lawsuit in a different light that opens up space for discussion about what might be a more reasonable way of dealing with the problem. So, you can think about other examples of how you might reframe a problem where you have polarized beliefs and think about framing it in ways, in one of the, frame other than in those, the frame that it's in. So, just by way of example, we'll go back quickly to the 7 frames. So, if we look at these 7 frames, if you have somebody who is blaming the other side responsibility, you might want to change the frame to, "Well, what choices do you have?" or "Where do you think this is going to take you in 5 years? Where do you want to be in 5 years?" Simply by re-asking the question and reframing what's going on to force the conversation into a different frame, you can work around deep-seated beliefs. And you're not manipulating people. What you're doing is helping them get a different perspective of reality because their brain is locked into this one frame and you're helping them look at the problem from another frame which allows new information to flow in, in a different way, allows them to cognitively process it and hopefully, hopefully start working towards a solution that's going to work for them. And so the key of all of this, of course, is that it's all about engaging System 2. And that is the secret to dealing with deep-seated beliefs. Engaging System 2 not by challenging existing belief structures, but by changing the frame, changing the conversation, and getting people to open up their minds in a way that does not challenge their existing belief structures, but allows them to see new information because you're asking them questions and asking them to frame— providing a frame for them that allows a different kind of information to come in that does not challenge their existing beliefs. And so that is the fundamental skill for dealing with deep-seated beliefs of any kind.