Tragedy of Commonsense- Why people persist with bad habits

My close friend Abhishek, who is in his early 40 s, leading a happy and healthy life is a sweet spoken gentleman, who smokes moderately and drinks occasionally. On a casual conversation, I once indicated him about adverse health impacts of smoking and chances of Cancer etc. I expected him to be defensive by arguing that he is addicted to it and despite knowing the bad consequences, he is unable to quit and similar lines of arguments.

However, surprisingly he was arguing for ‘positive virtues’ of smoking, such as increased alertness, boosting energy levels, and was completely dismissive about cancer and other ill consequences. He has a ready set of arguments to disprove that smoking does not result in cancer as he had a smoking uncle who lived up to 80 years, non- smoking aunt died of cancer etc. He was not ready to listen to any evidences or scientific studies and reports on smoking and its impact on health etc. I was amused to hear his irrational arguments and his defence against indefensible.

It was an eye opener for me and I tried to understand more about this psychological phenomenon. Later on, I was happened to hear about an interesting cognitive phenomenon called Cognitive Dissonance which was introduced by an American social scientist called Leon Fistinger in late 50 s. It then solved my riddle about why certain people uphold irrational believes and arguments despite having strong contrary evidence against such.

In common man’s language, it is like this. When people are people are committed to a belief or engaged in a habit (like smoking), any contrary evidence against such belief will create a ‘Dissonance’ in the mind of the believer. This dissonance produces a great amount of discomfort and leads him to put all his efforts to either completely eliminate it or at least reduce its intensity. The pathways he adopts for reducing this dissonance depends on upon a) his strength of belief, b) nature of dis-confirming evidence, and c) social support he gathers, to continue his present day belief.  

Accordingly, he chooses any of the 3 different pathways.

a)     Completely disowning the belief and thereby eliminating dissonance

b)     Attempting to rationalize the belief by searching for confirming evidence

c)      Living with the dissonance with all discomfort it carries.

Abhishek, like most others, in the above case opted for the second option where in which his stocks of arguments for rationalization were enough for him to reduce the dissonance to a tolerable limit. Even if his confirming arguments/evidences were weak and plainly stupid, for him it was appeared to be smoothing balm for mitigating the discomfort arising out of dissonance.

His propensity to cling to the existing believes, despite dis-confirmation is also rest on the availability and presence of a Social support system to with whom he can easily interact and exchange ideas. In other words, he will be searching desperately for similar people who have same amount of dissonance and they try to come together for mutually reinforcing arguments and rationalization. In many cases, particularly in religious beliefs etc, the pressure to have such social support tempts people for propagation and proselyting activities.

In other cases, when the dis-confirmation evidence is so strong to refute or ignore and his own belief was not that strong, coupled with the fact that the ‘believer’ does not have a believers community to take solace, he slowly but surely will disown the belief and come out of it to adopt new set of belief.

If the beliefs are very strong, then a few will prefer to live with the dissonance (with all its accompanying discomforts and pains) rather than disowning the faith. However, this is very less likely to happen and in most of the cases either of the above two will happen.

It implies, the course of action one will follow after dis-confirmation will depend on the complex interplay of a) His strength in existing believes b) Nature, strength and irrefutability of dis-confirming believes and c) Society in which he lives.

In other words, many times we ourselves don’t know exactly why we are doing what we do, or why we chose that pathway. But this vagueness and obscurity about our real motivation does not prevent us from making perfectly logical sounding arguments for our actions and decisions.

Lessons for Policy makers-

 Policy maker who wish to bring a socially desirable habits should realize that people are not going to be convinced by mere propaganda and passive social campaigns to give up their long held ‘believes’. There is also a fundamental mismatch between people who cause it and the people who are adversely affected by it. Hence, the asymmetry of cost and benefits will be played out against adapting socially desirable behavior.

We suggest 4 ways out –

a)     Top-down approach- Almost all the undesirable habits and practices have vanished from this earth through legal ban clubbed with its effective implementation. By legal ban, this practice will be vanished from everyday experience and may fall off from menu people s daily chorus. When enough time passed, no one alive would remember them to ‘justify’ it and hence will no longer would be raked up for debates. For example, none would debate on the desirability of Caste discrimination today unlike 60 years back when people openly argued that Caste system have a divine sanction and hence be kept alive.

b)     Social shaming- Habits which cannot be policed and punished effectively can be brought under control by social shaming. For example littering on street or open defecation. However, for it to happen , a critical mass of people have to support such initiative and have to take lead in ‘coercing’ others to follow it.

c)      Catch them at young -  Children is the best vehicle for bringing a desirable changes as new and fresh beliefs can be inculcated in them before they happen to practice any otherwise socially undesirable practices.

d)     Make it easy to practice the desirable behavior by creating supporting infrastructure, Eco-systems, incentivising such behavior both by financial and social rewards. Again, by lowering the entry barrier, more people are attracted towards it and hence a kind of social legitimacy and acceptance is achieved. Similarly, make it difficult to practice the undesirable habits by clear disincentives, high entry barrier and partial bans. (Example- smoking ban in public spaces etc).

People will change not when they are asked to, but when they feel that there is no other option left. They are heavily biased towards Status-quo and exhibit surprising degree of inertia. Hence, a policy maker has to design the strategy which is multi-pronged, keeping in mind the biases, incentive structures and cognitive dissonance that an individual had to encounter for adapting a new habit.