{"id":18007,"date":"2019-09-23T01:27:49","date_gmt":"2019-09-23T01:27:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=18007"},"modified":"2019-09-24T15:38:15","modified_gmt":"2019-09-24T15:38:15","slug":"always-sticking-to-your-convictions-sounds-like-a-good-thing-but-it-isnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/always-sticking-to-your-convictions-sounds-like-a-good-thing-but-it-isnt\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Always sticking to your convictions’ sounds like a good thing \u2013 but it isn’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Patrick Lynch<\/a>, University of Connecticut<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

There is nothing wrong with strong opinions. They are healthy in a democracy \u2013 an apathetic electorate is an ineffective electorate.<\/p>\n

But a curious fact about American society\u2019s supercharged political culture<\/a> is that even the most humble debates (think: Which fried chicken sandwiches are best?<\/a>) turn a tweet into matters of conviction.<\/p>\n

The result is that many of us come to see criticism as intolerable and disagreement with our opinions as a mark of moral inferiority<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a problem not just because it can lead to incivility; it\u2019s a problem because it can lead to dogmatism, and when it comes to matters like climate change<\/a> or immigration<\/a>, even violent fanaticism.<\/p>\n

\u2018Where your beliefs meet your identity\u2019<\/h2>\n

I\u2019m a philosopher who studies truth and democracy. And as I argue in my recent book, \u201cKnow-it-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture,\u201d<\/a> the key to understanding why people are prone to turn straightforward disagreements into matters of conviction lies in understanding what convictions are in the first place.<\/p>\n

A conviction isn\u2019t just a strongly held belief. I strongly believe that two and two make four, but that doesn\u2019t rise to the level of a conviction.<\/p>\n

Convictions are about what matters to us. Most importantly, they signify to others what kind of person \u2013 parent, friend, citizen \u2013 we take ourselves to be. They reflect our self-identity. It is this fact that makes a conviction feel so certain, so right.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Demonstrators clash during a protest in Philadelphia, July 28, 2016, during the final day of the Democratic National Convention.<\/span>
\nAP\/Alex Brandon<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is pretty obvious in some cases. Whether you are Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Muslim, your religious convictions shape the kind of person you and others see yourself as being. The same is true of your convictions about hotly contested ethical issues like abortion, the death penalty or gun control. In such cases, conviction becomes where belief meets identity.<\/p>\n

Of course, people do change their minds about such things, but the connection between conviction and identity helps to explain why it is so difficult for them to do so \u2013 even when the evidence points in the other direction.<\/p>\n

People\u2019s convictions reflect the kind of person they aspire to be, and as a result they are ready to make all sorts of sacrifices for them \u2013 including sacrificing the facts and logic if need be.<\/p>\n

And because it is connected to a person\u2019s identity, giving up a conviction \u2013 even admitting it might need some improvement \u2013 feels like an act of self-betrayal and a betrayal of their tribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And naturally, the tribe may well agree. As a result, and as Yale psychologist Dan Kahan<\/a> and his colleagues have emphasized, it can actually be pragmatically rational to end up ignoring the evidence and sticking to your convictions. No one wants to crush their self-image; nor does anyone want to be voted off the island.<\/p>\n

Grudge matches everywhere<\/h2>\n

Conviction\u2019s connection to identity also helps to explain how our increasingly polarized<\/a> political culture can encourage us to turn every debate \u2013 from debates over chicken sandwiches to the path of hurricanes \u2013 into a grudge match.<\/p>\n

People\u2019s identities, particularly political identities, are not formed in isolation. We construct them by adopting opinions that are woven into larger cultural stories of the tribes we want to remain a part of<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And it is the nature of cultural narratives to expand \u2013 to go beyond the question of who to vote for to what kinds of cars to drive, sports to watch and coffee to drink<\/a>. The stories become about who \u201cwe\u201d are, who \u201cthey\u201d are, why we are right and they are wrong.<\/p>\n

As a result, opinions about questions that should be settled by empirical data \u2013 like the safety of vaccines<\/a> or the effectiveness of a wall for stemming illegal immigration or the reality<\/a> of climate change<\/a> \u2013 end up being absorbed into a larger identity-shaping story. They become convictions and immune to evidence.<\/p>\n

So what happens when it becomes super easy to share and shape our convictions \u2013 when people carry in their pockets devices essentially designed to do just that?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
What happens, the author asks, when people\u2019s convictions \u2013 here, about the safety of vaccines \u2013 become immune to evidence?<\/span>
\nAP\/John Bazemore<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Reward and punishment<\/h2>\n

For many, identity is increasingly constructed online, their self-image determined by what social networks say about them and what they say in response.<\/p>\n

Social networks, in turn, can act as tools for reinforcing and policing the way in which people describe each other<\/a> and the convictions these descriptions encourage. Platforms like Facebook not only let people communicate their emotions; they let people reward and punish each other for doing so.<\/p>\n

Put these facts together \u2013 that our identities are shaped by cultural narratives and those narratives are increasingly told online \u2013 and you get our digitalized political culture, which promotes, rewards and upholds blind conviction<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By sharing our outrage or our emotional attachment to some claim of fact, we signal to each other that the tribe must commit to it. We signal to each other that it should be a matter of conviction, that it should be part of \u201cour\u201d story. And we signal that it would be dangerous to change our minds.<\/p>\n

As a result, commitments that we think are principled, a result of the evidence and our individual story of our best self, are actually just fragments of a larger cultural story.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not really \u201cours.\u201d<\/p>\n

When people are unaware that convictions can seem principled while actually being blind, they are helpless in the face of the conviction machine. And that helplessness makes their stories \u2013 their very identities \u2013 vulnerable to being hijacked by those who feed off tribalism and focus conviction-inspired rage into an ideology of contempt and hate.<\/p>\n

[ You\u2019re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation\u2019s authors and editors.<\/em> You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter<\/a>. ]\"The<\/p>\n

Michael Patrick Lynch<\/a>, Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Patrick Lynch, University of Connecticut There is nothing wrong with strong opinions. They are healthy in a democracy \u2013 an apathetic electorate is an ineffective electorate. But a curious fact about American society\u2019s supercharged political culture is that even the most humble debates (think: Which fried chicken sandwiches are best?) turn a tweet into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":18009,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[3593,139,6972,2034,412,537,6973,551],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18007"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18007"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18013,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18007\/revisions\/18013"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}