Lifestyle Paralysis

Change can be positive or negative, desired or feared.  However, most people most times resist major change. Their default is the status quo; it usually is less effortful for them to continue to feel, behave, and think the same way that they always have.  In the emotional realm, such people might be described as “fixated” at a given level of development.  In behavioral realm, they could be said to be “perseverating.”  There is a host of ways to characterize the default status quo.

In the realm of thought, resistance to change sometimes is called “belief perseverance” that occurs when a person refrains from rejecting a status quo belief even when he becomes aware of evidence inconsistent with that belief.

Alex Filipowicz, Derick Valadao, Anderson, Britt, and James Danckert (2016) wanted to understand whether surprising new information was more or less likely to cause individuals to “update” their status quo beliefs.  Their research participants included non-surprise controls and experimental subjects who were induced into one of three levels of surprise intensity—low surprise, medium surprise, and high surprise.  Overall, surprised persons updated faster than did non-surprised controls.  And in general, the more surprising the information, the quicker the updating tended to be.   However, some in the high surprise condition updated more poorly than others did.  The investigators suggested for some unknown reason those poorly-updating high surprise subjects placed more faith in information with a longer track record as opposed to one particular very new fact; they were inclined to disregard the most recently presented information in lieu of older information.  One might infer that the confidence of those subjects was so very threatened by the highly surprising information that they had to summarily dismiss it in order to maintain their self-esteem.

What else could determine whether or not one uses available information that contradicts his status quo ideas?  We can find some clarification by applying a few communication principles.  Herbert Paul Grice, a renown English language professor, proposed four relevant conversational guidelines:

Maxim of quantity – We seek just enough information, no more and no less.

Maxim of quality - We seek correct information.

Maxim of relation - We seek the most relevant information.

Maxim of manner - We seek information that is expressed as clearly and coherently as possible.

To concretize this application, imagine that you always have thought that the benefits of exercise were being over-hyped.   You felt so because you never exercised, and you considered yourself to be quite healthy.  Your blood pressures always have been solidly normal.  And your blood sugars had been virtually ideal.  Your skepticism had been fueled by contradictory information about exercise and health promulgated in the popular press.   So, you always ignored news factoids that advocate exercise as a biological cure-all.

You subsequently talk to your doctor who tells you about a new, comprehensive, state of the art National Institute of Health research project.  The study specifically was designed to determine the health areas that exercise does and does not help.  Your doctor addresses every one of your health-relevant study questions, presenting all this in a concise and crystal clear manner.

You now have received the new information in a fashion fully consistent with the best known maxims of communication.  Let’s suppose that you regard the new research as highly surprising.  The issue then turns on whether you place greater faith on your previous corpus of past information or on the new challenging information.  

To my mind, as I wrote in the previous blog, whether you change/update your exercise beliefs depends primarily on your specific personality, and your specific contexts rather than on how surprising or how well delivered new health information is.  If you are a victim of belief perseverance and your lifestyle is paralyzed, you need to address your personality and contexts.

References

Filipowicz, A. et al. (2016).  Rejecting Outliers: Surprising Changes Do Not Always Improve Updating.  Decision, December 19.  No Pagination Specified.  

Grice, H. P. (1975) 'Logic and conversation'.  In P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds) Studies in Syntax and Semantics III: Speech Acts, New York: Academic Press, pp. 183-98.