The Science Behind Why People Can't Change Their Minds
- Kevin Lankes
- May 9
- 12 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2WJ8W2bBwts
Alright, picture this; you’re arguing with your alcoholic uncle on Facebook, which, let’s be honest, is the only reason you even go on there anymore. Your uncle says something so outlandish and offensive that you know he’s wrong and not only that but he’s so wrong that he’s probably also just about to get a call offering him a cabinet position in the current administration. You link a study with the real data about whatever he’s saying, thinking that should end the madness, but lo and behold, he doesn’t care about the facts at all and refuses to engage honestly and change his mind. And then maybe, just maybe, you also catch a glimpse of your own reflection in the screen, and you may notice that this little ritual of yours is a tiny bit self-righteous, a little self-affirming. Maybe, underneath it all, you’re right and your uncle is wrong, but that’s not really what’s important. It feels good to fight with your uncle. And maybe not just him, probably some others, too, maybe even everyone. So what’s that’s about? What’s going on here? One field of research thinks it has the answer. And we’re about to break down the current research into the scientific reasons why we generate opinions and what’s behind our need to be right about those opinions. Stick around for the full explanation because we’re about to get into why people can’t change their minds.
I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m your host for the evolutionary evidence behind your racist uncle’s wildly offensive social media activity. Somebody needs to break into his house and steal the caps lock key from that guy.
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Now that that’s out of the way, in order to get to the bottom of this, we’re going to have to go back, way, way back, to where it all began. Humans have been around for about 300,000 years, with the earliest known human-ish ancestor popping up around two million years ago. Somewhere between those points we developed into the people we are today, and from the cro magnon days of 300 millenia ago we likely changed quite a bit, too, based on groups of isolated humans spread across the globe for tens of thousands of years. All that equates to lots and lots of changes, a lot of them we can see in the genetic and fossil records, but some of them we can’t completely puzzle out. But researchers in the field of evolutionary psychology are striving to close some of those knowledge gaps.
Basic concepts in evolutionary psychology are things like the idea that finding mating partners was historically difficult for early humans, so that manifests today in the mechanism of jealousy, which ultimately is just a way to protect our ability to pass on our genes. Even things like altruism can be linked to evo-psych in the sense that we may only be doing nice things for each other because that’s how community evolved over time in human society, with the expectation that we’d also be looked after in the same way. Researchers call this level of altruism hypersociability. So you can see that it might be very possible that most things about human behavior, as with biological function, may be linked to the possibility of long-term survival.
The simplest hypothesis I’ve ever personally seen about this revolves around food. Today, we don’t have to think about this much at all, especially in most American households, but 50,000 years ago, if you didn’t know where the food was, you and your entire family would die. So, the need to be right about that was extremely fundamental to our ability to survive and pass on our genes. Early arguments in human culture may have simply been about where to go hunting, what plants were the most nutritious, etc. Not about whether or not devil-worshipping lizard people are secretly running the government from the nonexistent basement of a pizza place. And that’s where your unhinged uncle comes back to the table, or the facebook chat, rather.
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber are among those who believe the idea that humans evolved a deep sense of community in order to ensure their survival. This is not that controversial, lots of people accept the extreme sociability of humans is derived from a place of perpetuating the species. Mercier and Sperber also believe that reasoning evolved in order to maintain a place of individual security inside that larger community. The pair claims people argue not so they can be right, but so they can live. The mechanism of argument didn’t come from a desire to piece together the mysteries of the world or to become a completely rational being, it derived from a need to increase an individual’s social status so they weren’t off risking their lives while others loafed around in the cave. Just ast today, as individuals, we’re often very wary and watchful of others. And there was an enormous benefit to being right for cro magnon people, and nothing at all to gain from thinking objectively. No one is going to stand up and say, “Yeah, you’re right, everyone, I should be the one to throw myself at the sabertooth tiger instead of Jim. I’ll go do that now. Jim, you just keep hanging out and playing finger bone jenga.”
And one theory pushed by some researchers in the field that I definitely buy into is that society has changed way faster than natural selection could keep up. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, who founded one of the most prominent schools of evolutionary psychology at UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology, have written that, “Our species spent over 99% of its evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers in Pleistocene environments. Human psychological mechanisms should be adapted to those environments, not necessarily to the twentieth-century industrialized world.”
So we’re just cave people with advanced technology. We’re paleo humans wandering around in a digital landscape instead of off on the plains hunting giant sloths. If we look at our modern behavior and communication dynamics through that lens, some of it does seem to make a little more sense. The idea of communal altruism for individual security through group superiority, and the rejection of anything outside of those in-groups.
This is possibly where the concept of confirmation bias comes from. Mercier and Sperber prefer to call confirmation bias by a different name: myside bias. Confirmation bias is the inability to look at information objectively and instead view it through the lens of your existing beliefs, misinterpreting it to suit your own opinions. It also involves deliberately seeking out information and like-minded people that reinforce your existing beliefs, solidifying groupthink dynamics and establishing community. There’s no way to actually look at information objectively when you do this. Because that’s probably not what it evolved to accomplish.
Mercier and Sperber did an experiment where they had participants submit answers to a set of logic questions, and then they were given the opportunity to present their answers and change their response if they felt like they were wrong about something. But hardly anybody did. Fewer than 15% of people changed anything about their responses. Then the participants were shown another participant’s response and asked to compare that with their own. I guess M. Night. Shyamalan was part of the study, because the big twist here was that the researchers switched responses, so the one they claimed to be someone else’s was actually their own response from earlier that they presented, and the one they said was their response was actually from someone else. Half the study participants didn’t notice the trickery, and among that half, 60% of them automatically decided the other person’s response was super flawed, which again, was actually their own. So confirmation bias in this case is working to reinforce the idea that you are right, no matter what, regardless of the substance of the information in front of you.
The reason that some think confirmation bias might be an evolutionarily beneficial process is because it feels good to argue, and it produces dopamine to fight for your opinion. And things that produce rewarding brain chemistry are generally things that have evolved due to some survival benefit.
And while cognitive bias may be the most famous example of a concept from evolutionary psychology, it’s far from the only one we encounter in our daily lives.
Take the illusion of explanatory depth, which is a concept invented by researchers Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. It describes the idea that people believe they know way more than they actually do. When grad students at Yale were given the task to describe everyday objects, such as toilets, they were first asked to rate their understanding of these things, and they all rated their understanding very high. Then after a deep dive explanation they had to research and write themselves, they were asked to rate their understanding of those everyday things a second time, and those ratings dropped significantly after they really looked into how these things worked. This supports the idea that most people don’t actually know a lot about stuff, even things that they use literally every day, like a toilet. But we believe very firmly that we do.
Researchers believe this concept is an extended form of hypersociability and extreme cooperation. People cooperate so efficiently and are so communal that they can’t clearly see where their own expertise ends and someone else’s begins. And incomplete understanding through the illusion of explanatory depth might actually push some people to a higher level of success. You don’t need to waste time learning about basics if you believe you already know them. You don’t see a lot of architects mastering ancient blacksmithing and metallurgy techniques from the bronze age, they just use the materials without understanding everything there is to know about them. Oftentimes this can be a good thing, and it leads to a higher-level use of certain tools and concepts because people are thinking outside the box even without meaning to.
Unfortunately, you see a lot of people who even insist on misunderstanding a lot of things in order to pretend to do better work, and we can see now why this could happen given the story of how our worldviews and cooperation and opinions evolved. We can also see if we’re thinking a little more objectively, that tech bros who do this, for instance, are a really extreme example of the phenomenon and tend to push it completely into anti-social behavior and outside of the successful use cases of the concept.
It also really throws people in the political arena. Because people suddenly become experts in whatever field the news story of the week is covering. But of course, they don’t really know anything about it, or very little, and sadly, many times, neither do the politicians who enact policy based around it. And for the most part they’ve stopped listening to experts and demonize knowledge. Again, you could see how we got here considering how the evolutionary and natural selection aspects of being right are embedded into our DNA, together with the intense tribalism of rampant hypersociability.
Gallup did a poll several years ago that collected voter beliefs about the economy following a presidential election, and found that one side believed the economy had completely collapsed while the other side thought their guy had made the economy boom. When in truth, nothing at all had changed.
Sloman and Fernbach once wrote that, “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.” Strong feelings can be very convincing though, because emotions seem to be what actually can change minds somewhat effectively at times. So then you have a collection of people who might believe something that’s utter nonsense, but completely self-righteous in their beliefs about it and also possibly hostile toward any genuine evidence that contradicts their views.
Like in the case of belief perseverance, which is what psychologists call it when people reject new evidence in favor of their own beliefs, opinions, or world views. And this may even cause a kind of backfire effect -- which multiple studies have confirmed, including one study that demonstrated people are more likely to become entrenched in their own political beliefs when they’re exposed to opposing beliefs on social media.
Sloman and Fernbach did another study similar to the everyday objects study, but this time about political stances. And they found the same results with politics as with toilets. They argued this time that punditry is damaging to public awareness and the only form of dialog that really works is to calmly examine and present explanations of policies and their outward effects very plainly so that everyone can see. And that explains how Pete Buttigieg is so effective every time he goes on Fox News.
And that’s important to note because we need to know what our tools are when it comes to attempting to change people’s minds. And even if we can’t do so consistently and efficiently, we need to know what has the potential to work. And what works seems to be two vastly different modes of communication. The first is being exposed to calm and thorough explanations, like in the everyday objects study where those explanations came out of the participants’ own research efforts. So they’re explaining things to themselves. And the other mechanism is primal, fierce, emotional ranting, where it doesn’t even actually matter what the substance of the argument is. There’s a ton of that everywhere in today’s saturated, terminally online hellscape.
Two things need to be said before we close out this examination. And those are that the field of evolutionary psychology has recently been taken over by a lot of radical right-wing misogynist assholes who apply Darwinian adaptationism to their misinformed bad faith arguments, and their racism and oppression. Evolutionary psychology has unfortunately become a target to justify the manosphere’s toxic beliefs about relationships and women, and to justify their worldview about simply existing in society as anti-social mountains of garbage. If you don’t know enough about how awful all of that is, you can check out the video I did where I went into the entire history of toxic masculinity, beginning with the original movements of the 1970s. And just know that if you investigate any of the ideas from evo-psych, you’re likely going to come up against some of that.
The other thing that’s important to discuss is that evolutionary psychology is not an exact science. Some scientists in related fields are even hostile to the idea that it’s a normal science at all. And there are a lot of fair critiques floating around about it. It uses computational modules or so-called Darwinian algorithms to map out how people may have evolved certain cognitive features. But that’s almost impossible to really know for sure.
One key piece of that criticism is that evolutionary psychology is driven mostly by adaptationist thinking. Adaptation is the idea that people evolved particular cognitive features in direct response to a need that arose in their environment. And this is underscored by the constant push for genes to thrive and replicate. Much like Darwin’s finches, who evolved different beak morphology to take advantage of specific food sources, we may have evolved the psychological soup of our cognition based on the particular needs of our own species in a given environment. One of the reasons that the field isn’t classified in the same realm as other sciences is the fact that some of this is simply unverifiable. You can puzzle through an evolutionary psychological concept logically, but you can’t exactly prove it through the scientific method. We can prove a particular finch has a beak shape that evolved to eat a food source because we can watch that beak fit into the exact culinary environment like a key fitting into a lock and we can see those changes at the genetic level.
The technology we’d need to possess in order to fully prove what caused humans to think a certain way is currently prohibitive--it doesn’t exist. We’d need to travel back in time to before recorded human history in order to see 99% of human history, and then monitor human progress the way we can with organisms in their environments today, and we’d need to devise some way to see inside the human cognitive process as it changes. The best we can do is model based on some really solid evidence-based assumptions. Adaptationists believe that everything that governs human thought and behavior evolved out of some kind of psychological adaptation that furthered the goal of replicating genes--in other words--reproducing. The main issues being testability and evolutionary assumptions. It’s worth noting that some evolutionary psychologists argue very hard about the idea that these things are untestable. But we can’t really physically see any of this with a microscope yet, and I think that’s why a lot of other researchers remain skeptical.
And this is just some of the current research behind why people don’t change their minds. It involves what could possibly be a bunch of different evolutionary adaptations that have nothing to do with uncovering the genuine truth and everything to do with simply being right and winning arguments. And we know from current studies performed on our modern human brains that the best way to engage with someone whose mind you’d like to change is by screeching at them with the fury of a thousand exploding suns. Because powerful emotions change minds. Or, by calmly presenting a detailed explanation of a concept and its outward effects, which is itself basically an appeal to empathy.
So go out there and change some minds if you need to, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t work, because even if we know through studies what works best, people still very rarely change their minds. But try your best out there, and let’s do some f*cking good changing minds where we can and exiling our racist uncles to the social media void with a permanent block when we can’t.
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