Is Believing: How You Cannot NOT Believe
Have you ever sat in class and thought to yourself “I understand what my professor is saying, but I just don’t believe her”? Would you believe me, your textbook author, if I argued that in order to understand a statement you must first believe it to be true? If accurate, this would imply that you “can’t NOT believe everything you read” (Gilbert, Tafarodi, & Malone, 1993). Furthermore, if this tendency is real, it suggests another obstacle to separating truth from lies.
In a set of clever studies, social psychologist Dan Gilbert and his colleagues have garnered substantial evidence for this rather surprising claim. In one study, Gilbert et al. (1993) provided participants with both true and false statements about two local crimes. Participants were informed as to which statements were true and which false, and half of the participants read these statements under conditions of divided attention, which required that they work on a different task at the same time. The crucial question was whether the false statements would influence the assignment of prison sentences. If the participants were able to identify and reject the false statements, then the false statements should not have affected the lengths of the prison sentences. However, when asked to assign prison sentences for the suspects, false statements that made the crime appear more severe led to much longer prison sentences, but only for the divided attention participants. The reason is that the divided attention participants were not able to ignore statements that they knew to be false. What this and related research has shown is that the mere act of comprehension—simply understanding a statement—requires believing, at least for a moment.
According to Gilbert (1991), the decision to reject a claim by decertifying its validity and thereby declaring it false happens in a second step, following the initial comprehension and acceptance. The divided attention participants lacked the cognitive resources to “unbelieve” the false statements and were unable to move onto the second step and reject the false arguments. Therefore, only in retrospect can one decide that a statement is false.
More broadly, Gilbert has argued that our mental systems must believe that a statement is true in order to comprehend it—to understand what it means. We can’t NOT believe it is true before deciding it is false. Believing is the default or automatic process that occurs upon comprehension. The controlled process—rejecting the claim—only becomes operative if the available mental resources are sufficient to make the extra effort. A good everyday example of this is a person—we’ll him call Steve—who always sets his watch ten minutes early. One morning at the coffee shop Steve glances at his watch and panics—swearing profusely about being late for class—but almost immediately realizes that he actually has ten minutes to spare, which is plenty of time to walk across campus. Steve initially “believed” his watch before he unbelieved it! The same is true when you hear your professor say that people automatically believe everything they hear—you have to believe the claim before you can reject it!
Think Again!
1 What does it mean to say that social cognition narrows or filters the world?
2 As you sit in class or a coffee shop, take a minute and write down examples of each of the core components that you are engaging in.
3 Think about what you did yesterday. What trade-offs did you make between accuracy and mental resource conservation?
4 Why do people believe what they hear before disbelieving it?
The Dual Mind: Automatic And Controlled Processing
How many minds do you have? You probably think this a silly question and answer “One, of course!” Well, many psychologists claim that humans possess a dual mind—two minds in one. Evolution has given us two minds—one that we share with many other species and one that, by and large, we do not (Sherman, Gawronski, & Trope, 2014; Stanovich & West, 2002). These two minds or processing systems, called the automatic and consciously controlled systems, coexist in one brain yet seem to compete for control of our mental system (Evans, 2010; Evans & Stanovich, 2013). The primary distinction between them is that the former involves relatively little or no conscious awareness to operate, whereas the latter is largely conscious. The automatic system is, from an evolutionary point of view, both ancient and widespread, shared by many other animals. The conscious or controlled system, in contrast, is a relatively recent adaptation that is largely confined to the human species and, perhaps to a lesser extent, other primates (Corr, 2010; Lieberman, 2007b).
A simple way to understand the differences between the two systems is to contrast sitting at your computer in your room typing a class paper with reflexively ducking to avoid being hit by an errant Frisbee on the college green. Completing the class paper requires considerable deliberation and planning and relies on the higher brain. Getting out of the way of the Frisbee occurs without forethought, is essentially an automatic response to an environmental stimulus, and is performed by the lower brain. There are several other features that distinguish the two systems (see Table 3.1). The controlled system is relatively slow and sequential (i.e., it performs one task at a time), rational (although not necessarily unbiased), capable of abstract thinking, able to tackle complex problems and future planning, and relies on the working memory system (Evans, 2010; Sloman, 2014). In contrast, the automatic system is quick, engages in parallel processing (simultaneously accomplishing multiple tasks), is intuitive, includes instinctive behaviors, is limited to narrowly defined problems and processes, and relies on implicit learning and memory. The automatic system is also more context dependent, which is to say that, as in the Frisbee example, it responds to and can be automatically triggered by environmental stimuli.
Table 3.1
Another distinction between the two systems is evident in the domain of emotions. For instance, if you were asked to eat a cockroach, you’d most likely experience an instant gut-level disgust reaction, especially because we associate cockroaches with dirt and garbage. This response is automatic, difficult to suppress, and a product of the automatic mind. However, after further consideration of the pros and cons of ingesting one—let’s say after it was properly sterilized, maybe even covered in chocolate, and you are offered a decent sum of money to do it—you might choose to override the initial disgust reaction and eat the cockroach (Rozin & Fallon, 1987). In this case the two systems initiated responses that were incompatible with one another, and the conscious one held sway. This example illustrates another feature of the automatic/controlled duality: Sometimes the controlled system can overrule the automatic one.
These two components of the dual mind are sometimes called the X- and C-systems (Lieberman, 2010). The X-system is primarily reflexive, implicit, or automatic (the “X” stems from the “x” in reflexive), responding without conscious thought. In contrast, the C-system is largely reflective, explicit, and deliberative (the “C” refers to the “c” in reflective) and involves conscious thought (Lieberman,2007a; Lieberman, Gaunt, Gilbert, & Trope, 2002). These two systems rely on somewhat distinct brain regions. According to Lieberman et al. (2002), the X-system (also referred to as System 1) engages in parallel processing and consists of the amygdala, the basil ganglia, and the lateral temporal, ventromedial prefrontal, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortexes. Involved primarily with conscious processes, the C-system (also referred to as System 2) is composed mostly of the lateral prefrontal and posterior parietal cortexes, along with the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe region.
On the one hand, the X-system furnishes us with our ongoing immediate experience with reality and its associated cognitive processes. On the other hand, the C-system reflects on those experiences and responds to X-system processes and outputs. As suggested above, the systems
