282. Do you believe you can change other people's beliefs?

What are the implications of believing it’s impossible to alter other people’s beliefs? By Alex Fradera What makes us stand up and advocate for what we believe? Whether denouncing the tyranny of taxation or making a plea for the necessity of universal health care, we’re surely driven by our conviction and the urgency of the situation. But how about what we believe about belief itself, whether it is fixed or malleable? Work in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology untangles the previously invisible effect of our belief in human certainty. This is a tricky topic to study. People who believe attitudes are set in stone are more likely be more motivated to stand up for their own, thanks to a heightened certainty and faith in their own position. But at the same time, believing attitudes are fixed means the views of your adversaries will be hard to shift, making it less worthwhile to try to change them. In other words, if there’s an effect of people’s beliefs about human certainty on their willingness to advocate (to attempt to persuade others), it’s likely to play out in opposing directions, making it difficult to uncover. Undaunted, Omair Akhtar, who works for Apple, and S. Christian Wheeler of Stanford University recruited 82 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk and asked half to read a scientific article that reported that attitudes are fixed, and the others to read a different version that stated they are easily changeable. Next, the researchers surveyed the participants’ opinions about the death penalty. Those in the “attitudes are fixed” condition expressed both more certainty in their own attitude (whether pro or anti), and a stronger sense that others were unlikely to be persuadable. But they were no more or less likely to say they would try to persuade someone else about the death penalty – an apparently null effect on willingness to advocate, just as we suspected might happen. This might seem to imply that our beliefs about human certainty are irrelevant to our willingness to advocate. But that’s not the case. Akhtar and Wheeler were able to penetrate the fog using powerful advances in statistical analysis, showing that believing in the fixed nature of attitudes both tips us toward convincing others, thanks to increasing the certainty of our own attitudes, and also deters us from trying to convince them, thanks to increasing our belief in the non-persuadability of others. The two contrasting effects, normally invisible, were now apparent.