Sometimes we need to 'unbelieve' our tribe

We need to be careful of who we listen to. Photo / Getty Images

In today's "attention economy", it often seems that people have decided on what they believe not after any kind of rational assessment of the facts, but rather according to the belief system of their particular political or ideological camp.

For example, long before the jury finally arrived last week at a not-guilty verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the American teenager charged with homicide over two killings during civil unrest last year, many seemed to have already decided what the outcome should be. To the left, Rittenhouse was a murderous white supremacist. To the right, he was a hero who was innocently and righteously defending America against mob violence and destruction. Both sides seemed to view the beliefs of the other as unconscionable. Such polarisation and vilification of those with whom we disagree can be seen in the discussion of other contentious topics such as Brexit or abortion.

It is by now pretty well established that the internet — and in particular social media algorithms that feed us more of the kind of content we have already looked at or engaged with — has made our societies more divided and resulted in the belief systems of various tribes becoming increasingly entrenched. But why is it that we are so quick to accept the material we come across in our particular filter bubbles? What is making us all so unwilling, perhaps even unable, to understand the "other side"?

An essay by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, may offer some insights. In a 1991 paper entitled "How mental systems believe", Gilbert argues that in order to comprehend an idea, our brains initially accept it as true, even if only momentarily. It therefore takes more effort to reject an idea than to accept it, because acceptance is something that we do automatically, whereas in order to disavow it we must go through a process of what Gilbert calls "unbelieving" or "unaccepting".

Gilbert's thesis, grounded in social and cognitive psychological research, builds on the work of 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who argued that acceptance of an idea is part of an automatic comprehension of it. This ran counter to the thinking of René Descartes, who held that we first understand an idea, and then subsequently decide whether to accept it or to reject it — a process most of us might like to imagine we go through when working out what we believe but which, according to Gilbert, is not borne out by the evidence.

"People are especially prone to accept as true the things they see and hear," Gilbert writes. "People are Spinozan systems that, faced with shortages of time, energy or conclusive evidence, may fail to unaccept the ideas that they involuntarily accept during comprehension."

Gilbert argues that "as perception construes objects, so cognition construes ideas", and thus initially "believes" them. "In both cases, the representation of a stimulus is believed — that is, empowered to guide behaviour as if it were true — prior to a rational analysis of the representation's accuracy."

If Gilbert is right, it is little wonder that, in an economy that depends upon flooding us with information reinforcing our pre-existing beliefs, we are finding that our resources are often too drained to make the effort of "unbelieving" what we are fed.

"The challenge in the digital age . . . is that people are generally disinclined to devote their overtaxed attention to anyone with whom they disagree, or any perspective that makes them in the least uncomfortable," says Romin Tafarodi, who co-authored another paper with Gilbert, published in 1990, that discussed the same ideas.

In the later essay, the author points out that "a system that believes its representations prior to assessing them . . . can only work if those representations are largely accurate".

We live in a world in which algorithms are deliberately set up to feed us content that tells us what we already think, and in which political campaigns intentionally flood our timelines with false and misleading information. It is crucial that we find a way of incentivising the effortful process of exposing ourselves to opposing viewpoints, and of sometimes "unbelieving" our own side.

- Financial Times