# Stand and be counted: defending our public positions.

# Stand and be counted: defending our public positions. Simply having spent resources does not sufficiently account for some folks’ investment in their ideas. After all, the Millerite farmers stopped farming after the Second Coming didn’t come. The Xhosa wiped out the last of their food stocks after the ancestors failed to resurrect. Indeed, it seemed that events that contradicted their faith actually intensified their religious activity.

For a lot of us, the point of no return is when we make a public declaration of our opinions or loyalties. Once we commit ourselves publicly, it’s much harder to back away. Tavris and Aronson give a good example:

Some scientific evidence for the power of irrevocability comes from a clever study of the mental maneuverings of gamblers at a race track. . . . The investigators asked everyone how certain they were that their horses would win. The bettors who had placed their bets were far more certain about their choice than were the folks waiting in line. But of course, nothing had changed except the finality of placing the bet. People become more certain they are right about something they just did if they can’t undo it (22).

We don’t even have to care very much about the substance of the commitment, as with the U. VA. students who wrote about firefighters; our ideas become worth defending primarily because we offered them.

(This, by the way, may not hold true in other societies. In Japan, the official position is often understood as a starting point, with lots of room for accommodation among parties (Kerr 104-5). Presumably people there would either be less reluctant to back off an opinion, or more likely to keep the opinion as a kind of facade while acting quite differently, without embarrassment.)


# Explanations become commitments. Our actions don’t always have to be consequential to trigger the drive to make everything consistent. It turns out that the very act of explaining sets up its own barriers to later change. Because we very quickly integrate new information into our existing frameworks and webs of knowledge, tying strand to strand, it becomes very difficult to replace that information or cut it loose.

“[P]eople persevere in their beliefs because: (1) they generate explanatory schemata providing reasons for presumed empirical co-occurences; and (2) once developed, these abstract, explanatory scripts become independent of the data originally giving rise to them. Immediately thereafter, externally-supplied supportive evidence apparently is unnecessary to sustain the beliefs and contrary empirical evidence is relatively powerless to destroy them” (Smith 124). In other words, whatever information I base my opinion on, once I’ve consciously adopted that opinion, I probably won’t change it even if the original information changes (say, I can’t for the life of me find any WMD in the palace basements). Besides defending my public position, I have also integrated the explanation into the great web of my knowledge, so that even if the original supports wither, there are still plenty of connections to hold it up.

Connectionist models of thinking suggest that our knowledge is organized in fluid, flexible, evolving networks of information, which change in response to what we see in the world and need from it. But once we articulate these sets of knowledge, so the research indicates, once we put it all into words, our understanding tends to harden in some sense, making it tougher for us to keep learning beyond that point. We may draw very sensible conclusions from high quality information, but once we turn it into a formula or a model, or incorporate it into an existing model, and embed both in the great matrix of our organized knowledge, the original information may drop away while the conclusion lives on, independent and impervious to new data.

Let’s look again at the U. Virginia study. This is the experiment in which college students were given an article about firefighters, developed opinions, were told that the article was a fake, and were asked again to give an opinion. All those who’d developed strong arguments in line with the article maintained their opinions, even after finding out that the underlying information was false. They said that the data didn’t matter because their reasoning was sound. Now, there was no reason for these volunteers to care about the substance of the article, and yet, once they’d staked out a position, these college students could not be persuaded by additional, truer information.

And look at what happens when we’re asked to explain on the basis of no reliable data at all. Why was the cashier rude to me? Why can’t I win Joe’s love? Why did my kid get cancer? Why did the five innocents fall to their deaths from The Bridge of San Luis Rey? These questions seem urgent, and so we develop explanations even when we haven’t a clue. We tell ourselves stories which, not being based on real data in the first place, cannot be refuted by any.

That helps me understand the role of the political talk shows. They spend most of their air time retailing rumors or faking outrage at fake scandals. This misinformation is not meant to convince anyone; rather, it’s filler for the faithful, intellectual styrofoam meant to plug the gaps in the audience’s shaky stories. Permissive liberals, socialized medicine, spit-upon soldiers, taxation at bayonet point, free-loading people of color, any of these will do to clog up the emptiness that might give rise to doubts.

(When we believe something that has no basis in fact, we call it superstition. It's very interesting: apparently even animals can learn superstitious behavior. Researchers rigged a feeding device that dropped food into pigeons' cages at regular intervals, no matter what they did. But the pigeons took to repeating whatever behavior they'd been doing at the first feeding, associating it with the food drop and acting as if it were causing the food drop [Wade, Tavris 1993, p. 219; Vyse 70-4]).

To explain is to reduce the complexity of the world to a few variables. That’s an accomplishment, because it allows us to consider and decide and act. Explanations are tools to represent and map and navigate the world, symbolic units we can shape and manipulate and peg together to solve problems and achieve our goals. But to help us figure out the world our explanations have to be grounded in reality. Our problem is that we so easily divorce our explanations from the information we started with, and so often don’t go back to the well of the world for more.


# Inventing the self. Not all the U. VA students refused to change their minds when they found out about the false information. Some had been told to develop counter-arguments to the firefighters article, and others were told to balance the pros and cons, and a fourth group was given an unrelated task to distract them. When these latter three groups heard that the article was wrong, few continued to insist on the truth of their original arguments. Their stories did not require them to commit so deeply to a falsehood, and so they could seek alternatives with relative ease.

Even so, why did the believer group feel they had to defend their first opinions? We can’t really say they were too lazy to change. As I touched on above, our minds tend to operate as economically as possible, reducing the world to manageable bits of information so we can focus our attention on the most pressing problems. It must take at least as much brain power to paper over a glaring inconsistency as to abandon the error.

How about embarrassment? Did the believers feel stupid for getting the wrong data? Probably not; all the other students were also deceived.

I think it might be that they saw the truth of their opinions as a measure of personal credibility.

• The Self is a kind of explanation. Perhaps our very sense of self is bound up in a need for consistent belief and action. Indeed, “I myself” might be little more than a specialized kind of explanation. Our conscious thinking is, after all, no more than the visible outcome of an vast set of unseen processes going on at every moment in every part of the brain, a sort of mental hernia. “Do we possess a self?” asks Jeremy Campbell. “Or is the mind so good at explaining what goes on in its deeper recesses that it simply builds a coherent story out of bits and pieces of information and calls that story the self? Does our knowledge, and our amazing knack of using knowledge to make sense of dubious data, lead us to create an ‘I’ which is just a plausible fiction?” (246). Elsewhere he likens the self to a public relations specialist, representing the mind to the world as if it is a single agent, without really understanding how the decisions are made (247). No wonder we’re so attached to our explanations: they may be what we are.

Leakey & Lewin offer an evolutionary explanation for our self-awareness:

The best way to understand and, more important, to predict the behavior of others under certain circumstances is to know what you would do under the same circumstances. . . . Inevitably, inexorably, the Inner Eye, as Nick Humphrey calls this mental model, must also generate a sense of self, the phenomenon we know as consciousness. 'In evolutionary terms it must have been a major breakthrough,' observes Nick. 'Imagine the biological benefits to the first of our ancestors who developed the ability to make realistic guesses about the inner life of his rivals, to be able to picture what another was thinking about and planning to do next; to be able to read the minds of others by reading his own.' (296-7).

There is a field of study called narrative psychology, which deals with, among other things, how our stories about ourselves help or fail to help us meet life’s challenges. One of the problems is that the “I” we invent may permit little insight into our own underlying motivations. We may not really understand the processes by which we end up with a particular job or lover or place to eat out. Yet, if we’re asked, and because we insist on an “I” who “decides”, we back up our choices with improvised explanations. “The reasons why unconscious intelligence settles on a particular decision are often profoundly obscure. Not daunted, however, conscious intelligence will go ahead and generate reasons it can express in ordinary language, effortlessly and spontaneously, and may cling possessively to such reasons, even if they are completely wrong. One kind of knowledge, conscious, logical, serial, behaves as if it has insight into a different kind of knowledge, unconscious, parallel, distributed, but in reality it is simply engaging in a form of explaining. The result may look like intuition, since there is not nearly enough available evidence to justify the conclusions, but often consciousness is making up stories” (Jeremy Campbell 218).

(Perhaps you’ve heard of Male Answer Syndrome. The symptoms are an apparently relentless need to have an opinion about every topic, of any degree of relevance or remoteness to the speaker’s life, no matter how little he might know about it, and regardless of any personal interest he might or might not have. The people most often afflicted are men, though a woman sported the worst case I’ve seen. I also knew a guy who bragged about his ability to talk to lawyers about litigation though he in fact knew very little, and admitted it; he fancied that he bamboozled the attorneys with his fakery. We delight in making up explanations; for some of us, the freer they are of relation to reality, the more we like them.)

The need to explain ourselves provides an alternative to the “cognitive dissonance” model of persistence of belief. According to Festinger and others, we try to reduce stress by bringing our beliefs in line with our actions. By contrast, in this formulation, we’re not really sure why we act the way we do, so we explain our own actions as if we were observing someone else. “Another psychologist, Daniel Bem, has suggested that adjustments between belief and action are not due to a desire to ease discomfort, but are the natural consequence of the fact that when people think they are observing attitudes and beliefs, whether their own or other people’s, all they are really doing is making inferences from clues that are often ambiguous, dim or enigmatic. The prisoners who wrote confessions free of penalty and the students who said a tedious task was fun were in fact, according to Bem, inferring from their own behavior and the circumstances of the test that they must have told the truth. They were applying causal theories to what meager data was available to them. Far from having privileged insight into their own selves, these people were simply indulging in explanations. A bystander casually watching them and noting what they did and said could have reached exactly the same conclusions, without access of any kind to their inner mental processes” (Jeremy Campbell 250-1).


• The Ambassador. But I’m not the only one who needs me to present a well-defined, coherent personality; that is also the basis of my standing in the community, and the principal grid by which I order my relations with the neighbors. My identity grants me something like citizenship in a community. I work hard to sustain it.

I remember doing the tourist bit in Asia. People asked me what I was. I was a kid with nothing but a wad of travelers checks, but when I claimed no status, I was corrected immmediately. “You’re a student,” they’d tell me. “He’s a student,” they’d introduce me to their friends. Similarly, they required me to have a religion-- anything, it didn’t matter. They didn’t expect this American to share their religion, but they needed a label. And as I thought about it, it made perfect sense.

It’s really the same dilemma we face when we first date a new acquaintance. How can we deal with strangers, except as they fit some expectation we already have? Any stranger might be crazy or thieving or murderous or simply unacceptably selfish, but we have no way to judge except to the extent that the stranger does or doesn’t fit our categories. So it’s important to adopt a category and act consistently within it. It’s too dangerous to consort with people whose behavior we can’t predict. Indeed, an unstable sense of self, unpredictable behavior and unstable relationships are defining characteristics of what the shrinks call “borderline personality”-- people who seem to have “no boundaries,” whom we consequently push to the margins of our society.

I must have played the student competently, all those years ago, because folks treated me really well. In looking back, though, I can understand the common sensation that a Self is simply a show we put on to reassure the neighbors. The show may be partly make-believe, a self-conscious masquerade, but we can’t do without it. Reputation or “street cred” are common terms for the same thing. If our neighbors don’t understand us and know what to expect, it’s hard to drop off the kids for an afternoon, borrow tools and money, get help at harvest time, make our voices heard in community councils. No one will help if we get sick; no one will defend us if someone threatens.

So, especially in small-scale societies, where there are not a lot of economic options, it’s risky to wander far from the ideological mainstream. Festinger writes of the jeers and scoffing Millerites suffered from non-believers. But as believers having left the mainstream, it may be even more dangerous to then turn our backs on the new faith, because at that point we’ve undone every expectation that our neighbors can have of us. At great expense, we educated them to a new category, that of our new faith, and now we’ve shattered that. It will be very hard to improvise yet a third identity, a third bid for citizenship. We’ve left the community no Story by which they can make sense of us, or trust us.

In that light it’s hardly surprising that the Millerites or the Xhosa or any of a hundred other groups stuck with their faiths, despite the mounting costs and disappointments. For that matter, it helps explain why presidents and generals kept killing Vietnamese long after they’d lost hope of winning the war. They were obsessed with preserving U.S. “credibility” in the nuclear age ( Schell 64, 133, 154, 341, 343).

But to persist against the sneers of the infidel we need the support of the other believers, the in-group.