The Psychology of Believing
Confirmation Bias
We tend to believe things we expect to experience. For example, if you have heard that New Yorkers are rude and subsequently visit New York, you'll be more prone to notice that expected model of rude behavior and remember it; even if the behavior is one you would dismiss or ignore in your hometown. We have a bias toward confirming, remembering, and accentuating what we have been told if we like the person who told us or if we hear the same thing several times.
Whatever political belief system we have, progressive or conservative or anything in between, will encourage us to more readily believe news put out by those espousing the same. This inclination will often discourage us from investigating the claim enough to get to the truth of the matter.
Another example is called "bad omens". If you accept the superstition that walking under a ladder is bad luck and you walk under a ladder, you will be strongly inclined to attribute any coincidence of bad luck to having walked under a ladder. You will use the coincidence to strengthen that belief and consider your experience as evidence of your belief. Confirmation bias is so strong that even if you change your mental acceptance of the bad omen, you will experience an emotional twinge whenever you walk under a ladder. A long period of time will pass before you lose that twinge.
Humans also have a bias toward believing anyone they hold in high regard or consider to be an authority, even when that person has no legitimate claim to knowledge in the field they are talking about. Some examples of this would be entertainment figures, politicians, theologians, and other celebrities. And the reverse is true; if we don't like them we will often dismiss their thoughts and words without considering their knowledge or accuracy.
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Entrainment
In physics, physiology, and psychology there is a process called entrainment. The physics side of entrainment observes that if pendulums are placed near each other, the oscillations of one will affect the speed of the other until they are synchronized.
The physiology of entrainment is observed in the phenomena that women who live in the same house will experience the coinciding of their menstrual cycles after a time.
The psychology of entrainment is no less powerful. One authoritative voice which can sway a few can eventually sway the mass of people. The movement toward influencing more people picks up speed faster and faster with each individual who unthinkingly joins in. It is only the strongly independent mind that can or will maintain freedom of thought. There is a known and practiced methodology for effecting psychological entrainment. That is another story which we will get into another day.
Examples of psychological entrainment are plentiful. One well known circumstance involves the reporting by witnesses of an auto collision. If witnesses talk amongst themselves, one confident witness speaking with authority or certainty can alter what the other witnesses report as their memory of the collision. This alteration can include colors of cars, speed and direction of travel, the point of impact, and what happened following the impact.
Volatility of Memory
Our experience of the world is based on the model of the world we build in our brain. A subtle change in our experience will mostly go unnoticed because our brain will alter our memory model to accommodate the change or bring the experience and model into coherence.
Consider the following experiment conducted by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, Distinguished Professor, University of California in Irvine:
A woman is brought into an interview room. She is told by the interviewer that she is going to be asked to remember certain events in her past that were learned from her mother and friends. The interviewer goes through several memory items asking the woman what details she remembers.
The woman is told of an event which took place in a mall when she was quite young. She was lost and her grandmother found her. The woman remembers nothing of the event but the interviewer persists with some details of her having been lost in the mall.
After having gone to other events, the mall event is brought up again and the woman now remembers vaguely. The interviewer goes on with other events and returns again to the mall. Now the woman remembers in some detail and can recall the emotion involved in being lost.
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