I frequently write about how difficult it is for people to question their own assumptions and change opinions that are emotionally held. Many of our current political disputes arise from just such resistance to entertaining new data which might bring deeply held feelings and beliefs into question. For just one particularly glaring example, consider Global Warming. The science that underlies the arguments over Anthropogenic Global Warming are poorly understood by the vast majority of people who argue the points yet the passion with which the argument is engaged suggests that many people have a powerful emotional investment in their beliefs.
The history of science, which represents mankind’s most successful attempt to approach understanding the world while limiting the impact of personal bias, if replete with examples of resistance to paradigmatic shifts.
One of my favorite examples from the history of medicine concerns Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (July 1, 1818 - August 13, 1865), one of the most important and least known heroes of medical progress. Semmelweis was the head of the Vienna Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic in 1847 when he noted the disparity of mortality and morbidity between the wards run by Doctors and those run by Midwives, which had 1/3 the mortality of the Doctor’s words. At that time, Puerperal fever, an infection that women suffered after child birth, was epidemic in Obstetric’s wards throughout Europe, with mortality rates ranging 10%-35%. Semmelweis, well before the wide spread awareness and acceptance of the germ theory of disease within the Medical community, reasoned that there must have been some discrepancy in behavior between the Doctors and Midwives that led to the disparate outcomes and determined that some agent was being carried from the autopsy room to the patients and between the patients. At the rime, Doctors would do autopsies, and then examine patients; there was no concept of antisepsis. Hand washing was not part of the medical tradition at the time. When Semmelweis published his results of a controlled study, comparing a ward where Doctors washed their hands with a "chlorinated lime solution" before and after examining patients to a more traditional ward, the mortality rate in the hand washing ward was ~2% compared to the 18% of the traditional ward. Such dramatic results of an intervention should have been more than enough to convince the Medical Establishment of the wisdom of hand washing, yet the resistance to Semmelweis’s ideas was intense.
The 19th century Medical establishment was much more hierarchical than today and the learned Sages at the time were not about to take the word of a young upstart; further, to accept Semmelweis’s results would have implied that the Medical establishment was responsible for the unnecessary deaths of thousands of young women through the years. This was intolerable; better to resist such inconvenient truth than to accept and appreciate their own contribution to a historical tragedy. Further, since the germ theory of disease was not yet well known and in its infancy, there were complaints that Semmelweis was promulgating religious arguments to press his theory; religious arguments were considered irrational and anathema to a Medical establishment that prided itself on the most modern and rational approach to dealing with the mysteries and tragedies of the human condition.
Today we look back and marvel at the way in which the eminent physicians of the time blinded themselves to what we see as so obvious. Presumably, in 50-100 years, when a more complete understanding of climate has been achieved, our grandchildren will look back and marvel at how the Global Warming skeptics fooled themselves into denying the obvious, or alternatively, how the Global Warming proponents fooled themselves into an anxiety driven, panicky acceptance of quasi-religious belief in nonsense.
Under the heading of "unconscious determinants of behavior and beliefs" I would suggest that humans have a long history of difficulty accepting paradigmatic shifts. This can be easily related to my comments about 20% versus 80% in the Passover story in my post yesterday, and is almost certainly applicable to many of our current difficulties. Our death grip on our favored beliefs (recall that the resistance to the germ theory, fully accepted 20 years after Semmelweis proposed its application in the hospital setting, caused needless deaths of many innocents, including members of the Medical Establishment and their loved ones) is not just a matter of psychology, by of neurology as well.
Recent research developments in neuroscience and cognition suggest there are definitive anatomical and neurophysiological substrates to the difficulty we have in changing our minds. The Eide Neurolearning Blog is an invaluable resource for reports on current research in the area. Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide work with children with learning disabilities and do a very good job describing recent work and offer links tot he articles as well. They recently described some work that sheds light on Why It's Hard to Get Rid of Old Ideas:
Dunbar and his colleagues at Dartmouth have been studying why it's hard for people to overcome their misconceptions. Their work had built on earlier studies that had found that University students, faculty, and staff, were held onto misconceptions about the origin of seasonal change (perhaps acquired in grade school, junior high, or high school), despite formal coursework in planetary motion or direct instruction with a videotape. Excerpt: "Why did the video, which was supposed to address the misconceptions, have no significant effect on the students? Interestingly both students' responses and their explanations, indicate that they did not encode the relevant information that was inconsistent with their theory."
When fMRI studies were done of students slipping into this same mistake, researchers found that information that fit within a person's preconceived ideas ("plausible") were more readily committed to memory, while contradictory ideas ("implausible") received less attention.
As I have pointed out, this tendency to filter new data to make it fit pre-existing frameworks is ubiquitous and impacts everything from individual psychology to learning to politics. As Drs. Eide suggest:
The tenacious grip of old ideas is a common dilemma of inventors and innovators of various sorts. No wonder, individual turn to transdisciplinary experiences, discussions with outsiders, even dreams to see problems from a different light.
New ideas that do not fit are thrown out or altered into easily rejected caricatures; those that can be fit into the old model are then held onto with all the vigor devoted to the underlying model. This leads to such eventualities as people who adhere to AGW proposing that the skeptics be treated as criminal for questioning the theory.
[Please note, I am not arguing the theory, just using it as an example of the kind of resistance I have been describing in this post. Jimmy J’s post from last week is my answer to current arguments about AGW. Of note, however, thus far I have not heard the AGW skeptics calling for the silencing of the AGW proponents, while I have repeatedly heard the opposite.]
We all tend to be strongly wedded to ideas and beliefs that fit into and support our system of looking at, and understanding, the world. The ability to question our assumptions and critically evaluate new data is crucial to change. The current demand by our MSM and by many in the blogosphere that our politicians adhere to rigid, ideologically defined positions, and that anyone who changes his mind is a "flip flopper" (an accusation that did not start with the Junior Senator from Massachusetts) damages our political discourse. How much better would it have been to have had reporters pin down Mr. Kerry to explain what new data led to his change in approach?
For the current political season, would it be preferable to have reporters and commentators playing "gotcha" with Hillary Clinton viz Iraq or with Rudy Guliani viz abortion, or try to find a way for the candidates to fully explicate what their positions are, how they have evolved, or stayed the same, and how they arrive at their conclusions? Do we want a candidate who remains faithful to positions when conditions change, or is able to change his opinions and course when the situation warrants? And, most importantly, how do the candidates differentiate between their underlying, bedrock convictions, and their more expedient political positions?
Sadly, it appears that the kinds of political discourse that could help us understand how our leaders think is the least likely outcome of an approach that relies on appeals to the rigid paradigms of much of the competing bases of the electorate. Of course, one could argue that better means of disequilibrating our paradigms can be dangerous, as well...but that is a subject for another post.
Finally, in considering the Eide's point, that what children learn impacts on their future ability to incorporate new, often conflicting data, a new appreciation of the dangerous approach we are taking in our mis-education of our children is worthwhile. Between dropping the teaching of the Holocaust for fear of offending "some" students to raising our children to only understand our own history through the prism of post-modernism, with its emphasis on power relationships as the only measure upon which to judge, we risk the continuing loss of faith in our own civilization; and once that faith is lost, the future of our civilization comes into serious jeopardy.
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