The Psychology of Changing One’s Beliefs as it Relates to Nutrition
As humans, we are all subject to biases. One cognitive bias I find to be particularly strong is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when your brain seeks out information that confirms you current beliefs or convictions and ignores information or data that contradicts your beliefs or convictions. It is a bias that I highlight persistently in the context of therapy. In order to think and act more rationally and healthy, it is integral to understand and be mindful of when our own confirmation bias becomes activated and manifests in our own thinking. Once we can identify it, we can start to challenge our thinking, allowing us to create new thoughts and perspectives, allowing for new behavioral choices.
I’ve been thinking a lot about confirmation bias in the context of nutrition science, mostly because over the past several decades, recommendations and guidelines for eating for health have shifted and changed. In the 1950s and for several decades after that, it was recommended to mostly eat carbohydrates and to lessen our intake of red meat and saturated fat consumption. With this recommendation came the advent of substitutes for butter (i.e I can’t believe it’s not butter, canola oil, etc.) and packaged foods advertised as a healthy alternative to saturated fats. In the more recent decade, this has been turned on its head by research demonstrating that these alternative substitutes for saturated fat and packaged goods, depending on how often you consume them, can also be harmful for your health. And yet, it is still a struggle for many people who grew up in the fat-free everything era, to modify their diets to include healthy fats. This is just one example in which changing our diets is met with internal resistance. Because, if we previously adopted these “fat-free” beliefs, we would be subject to experiencing confirmation bias if we are exposed to information that may be contradictory.
Here is how it works in practice. Social media is amok with health influencers lacking nutrition education and credentials touting the health superiority of organic foods because they are “cleaner” and will help you flush out “toxins” from your body. If you are inundated with these messages and information and you started adopting and practicing these behaviors, it may be hard to read about evidence suggesting contradictory ideas and beliefs that are opposite to those practices i.e. eating conventional produce or canned foods and how those foods can be healthful for you. Reading evidence that contradicts this belief (aka conventional produce is safe for consumption and you don’t need to eat tons of vegetables to get the “toxins” out of your body because your liver does that for you) may have you experiencing a lot of internal resistance. Maybe you stop reading the information all together or you automatically reject it because it is not aligned with what you have been practicing and exposed to for years. This is confirmation bias in action. It is the active rejection of information that contradicts our own beliefs even when there is data that supports the new information.
What is interesting is also what occurs in the brain as a function of presenting new information contradictory to a person’s current beliefs. Increased activity is demonstrated in the default mode network which is known as a set of interconnected structures that are associated with self representation and disentanglement from the world. Meaning that, when we are presented with beliefs counter to our own, we try to preserve our sense of self that knows this information and simultaneously, try to defend our current beliefs through our own memory using relevant counterarguments. So instead of using this evidence to help change our current beliefs, it strengthens our desire to defend it. This of course, depends on the strength of the belief with regards to how strongly one believes or identifies with their current belief.
One study in particular highlights what occurs in our brains when we are presented with counter arguments to beliefs that we feel relatively strongly about. In this study, neuroscientists recruited 40 volunteers who were self declared liberals. Scientists then evaluated what occurred in their brains when presented with counter arguments for their political beliefs. They found that those who were most resistant to changing their beliefs had increased activity in the amygdala and insular cortex of the brain, an area important for processing emotion and decision making. The amygdala is specifically involved in perceiving threat and the insular cortex is important for detecting how important the emotional stimuli is, which suggests that when the volunteers were presented with counter arguments, the part of the brain that processes fear was activated. When this occurs, we are more likely to hold on to our current beliefs and reject the new one.
In a recent NPR podcast, it was noted that in order to help change a person’s beliefs, presenting facts are not enough. This has been studied and demonstrated in a variety of different research studies. As an example, a 2014 study in Pediatrics, showed that a variety of interventions aimed at convincing parents that vaccination was not linked to autism and increasing the number of vaccinations, led to even fewer concerned parents saying they were going to vaccinate their children. What we need is emotion to help guide us towards a new way of thinking and doing. If the storyteller, or person trying to change another person’s belief is able to elicit emotion in the other person, they are able to have some control over the other person’s state of mind by actually convincing them otherwise.
Perhaps a better way to help change a person’s belief system, is to present an emotional story that is similar or relatable to the person who is listening, without activating the sense of fear. If you are trying to convince your carnivore sister to eat some vegetables, it most likely is a better tactic to tell her about how your colleague at work was animal based and started experiencing digestive issues, despite engaging in all of the other “bio hacking” wellness optimization behaviors, and how that started to contribute to feelings of depression and that when she switched to eating more vegetables and less red meat, she started to feel more energized, had less headaches and her mood improved. Rather than telling your sister, “you need to start eating vegetables because people who eat carnivore diets are more likely to experience digestive problems because of the lack of fiber.” It is more likely that your sister will listen and be emotionally curious about how your colleague was feeling rather than giving her a statistic that might not be relatable to what she is currently experiencing or trying to make her feel afraid because of what she is currently practicing. The better you are at eliciting emotion in the other person and presenting evidence that supports a new belief, the more likely they will listen and start paying more attention. And paying more attention and being attuned to if and when we are rejecting a belief simply because we aren’t prescribed to it, is how cognitive change can start to happen.
Other factors that help change one’s current beliefs are exposure, mindfulness and willingness. Exposure to the new information in various formats and ways that it is expressed can help to start changing a belief or a behavior. In fact, for kids to start eating or trying a new food, it is recommended that parents and caretakers increase the amount of exposure to the food through different ways (i.e. different ways it is prepared visually, how it is being served and how it tastes).
Being mindful and present to our own thoughts, emotions and behaviors and why we are experiencing them, helps us to become aware of when confirmation bias and rejection of new data and information are occurring. When we are aware and understand why it is happening, we are able to actively make different choices.
Being willing, a quality I try to enhance substantially in clinical practice, can be extremely helpful in allowing change to thoughts and behaviors. You don’t need to prescribe to a belief system or information in order to start practicing it. If you are willing to try as an experiment to see what happens, you can properly assess more objectively if this new intervention is helpful to you.
Start becoming aware of your own thoughts, emotions and behaviors and what you are prescribed to. Would you be able to change your beliefs in the face of new information? I’m speaking about this in the context of changing one’s diet, but this can be expanded to many different areas of an individual’s life (i.e. political beliefs, biases against other people, etc.). I believe that being able to notice and understand your beliefs is the first step in allowing us to question why they are there in the first place and what is holding them in place. If you are someone who is struggling to change their diet to one that is more healthful for you as an individual, I encourage you to think of the change as an experiment. You can try almost anything for a short period of time. Skeptical about adding some healthy fats to your diet? Try it for three weeks and see how you feel. Not sure if you are actually sensitive to dairy despite the food sensitivity test saying you are? Take it out of your diet for a month and see what happens. All of this is information to help you determine how you feel and what is needed in order for you to be your most healthiest.
References
https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/133/4/e835
https://news.usc.edu/114481/which-brain-networks-respond-when-someone-sticks-to-a-belief/
