The illusions of the brain. The effect of reverse action from the point of view of neurobiology


    Correlation of activity in some areas of the brain when a person changes beliefs. Source: scientific article " Neural correlations of one's political beliefs ", Nature, doi: 10.1038 / srep39589

    One of the most interesting cognitive distortions is the backfire effect , which is one of the consequences of a common psychological group phenomenon. polarization of opinions . Group polarization of opinions is a phenomenon when people with opposite views perceive new information biased. Interpretation of the facts depends on the previous attitudes of each person and his beliefs. As a result, when confronted with objective reality, people's opinions diverge further from each other.

    While the effect of cognitive distortion is understandable at the highest level, scientists have set the task to study its mechanics. What happens in the brain when a person is faced with facts that contradict his beliefs? Why can a person in such cases reject the facts and become even stronger in his convictions, showing the effect of the opposite effect?

    Group polarization


    The classic experiment on the polarization of opinions is as follows. From one or two baskets get multi-colored balls. Participants are told that in the first basket 60% of the balls are red and 40% are black, and in the other basket 60% of the balls are black and 40% are red. Then participants are presented with a third color ball (for example, white) and are asked to estimate the probability from which basket it is. Participants of the first group should express their opinion after each ball out loud, and participants of the second group - only at the end of the experiment. The experiment showed that the participants of the first group with each ball express increasing confidence that the white balls come from any one basket - red or black. Thus, their opinions are increasingly polarized. But the "silent" group of participants in the survey at the end of the experiment does not have such a polarization.

    According to the assumptions of scientists, the phenomenon of polarization of opinions is manifested precisely in those cases when people are forced to publicly voice their opinions. As a result, opinions expressed publicly are more polar in nature than decisions taken individually.

    According to some experts, a person is able to strengthen his opinion even in the absence of any new facts, just thinking about this topic.

    Reverse effect


    The effect of the reverse action is a cognitive distortion in a particular individual brain, which occurs during group polarization of opinions or without it. The phrase "backfire effect" in relation to this cognitive distortion was first used by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler in the scientific article " When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions " of 2006, a revised version of which was published in June 2010 in the journal Political Behavior (doi: 10.1007 / s11109-010-9112-2).

    The article presents the results of very interesting experiments. For example, in one of them, researchers checked how false information acts on people and then corrects this information. One group of participants was given an article with a false fact, and another group was given the same article with a false fact, but with the addition at the end of the article where the incorrect information is corrected. Then the participants were asked to answer a series of factual questions and express their opinion on the issue. The most realistic fact was chosen as a false fact - the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq immediately before the US invasion, followed by a refutation. The fake article introduced a real quote from President Bush’s speech in October 2004:"It was a risk . " Such a selection of words suggests that Iraq already has weapons of mass destruction - this is the false fact that the authors of the text of the speech sought to convey to the population.

    In the second study, scientists also tested the hypothesis that the majority of the population supported the invasion of Iraq because of the fear of death after the September 11 attacks and the repeated references to the topic of death and the victims of terrorist attacks in the media ("mortality salience" in the table below).

    The results of the first study largely confirmed the hypothesis of the effect of reverse action. The table and the graph show the effect that the false information had on the respondents, followed by a refutation. The results of Model 1 are shown without taking into account the political views of the respondents. They show that the denial of information had virtually no effect, on average, on respondents. But the results of Model 2 are given taking into account the political views of the respondents. Here it can be seen that, although on average, the refutation did not affect the mass opinion, but there was an obvious polarization of opinions.

    After acquaintance with the refutation, people with very liberal views began to agree less with a false statement, but people with conservative views, paradoxically, became even more entrenched in the idea that there was indeed a weapon of mass destruction in Iraq. That is, the publication of the approval only strengthened their point of view.



    The refutation had no statistically significant effect on people with moderately liberal and centrist views.

    Researchers pay special attention to the surprising effect that the refutation of information had on the conservatives — that is, those for whom this refutation did not coincide with their inner convictions. This is a clear demonstration of the opposite effect .

    Experts have tried to interpret these data, and the most likely explanation of the phenomenon, they believe is a different confidence in the sources of information . People who have the effect of the reverse action, probably more trust in the source of false information than the source of truthful information. As a result, receiving new truthful information from a source of truthful information only strengthens their confidence in the source of false information and convinces them even more of the opinion that they had in advance.

    Since then, a number of other experiments on this topic have been carried out, which also confirmed the presence of an inverse effect in the list of cognitive distortions. This effect is manifested in people with deep convictions that they are right. - if they receive information that contradicts their beliefs, then they are further strengthened in them.

    Results of fMRI patients with strong political convictions


    In 2016, neuroscientists from the Southern California Institute for the Study of the Brain and Creativity Jonas T. Kaplan, Sarah I. Gimbel and Sam Harris conducted an experiment on functional magnetic resonance imaging of patients with deep political convictions. These people were placed in an fMRI scanner and studied brain activity at the time when they were introduced to facts that contradict their beliefs. Scientists have discovered that at this moment the same areas of the brain are activated as with a physical threat. The research results were published on December 23, 2016 in the journal Nature (doi: 10.1038 / srep39589).



    The illustrations in red and yellow show areas of the brain that are activated upon presentation of facts contrary to the political views of the person. Blue and green are areas of the brain that are activated upon presentation of facts that contradict the non-political beliefs of the person.

    If you express the results of research in simple words, then in a dispute about politics a person simply turns off the brain.

    As soon as a person is faced with the possibility that his political beliefs may be wrong, he acts at the level of instincts, as if he were physically threatened.

    “The reaction we see in the brain is very similar to the situation if a person walked through the forest and met a bear,” explained one of the authors of the scientific work Sarah Gimbel in a commentary for the podcastYou Are Not So Smart - 93. The Backfire Effect - Part One . “Your brain generates such an instant“ fight-or-run ”automatic [response] ... and your body is ready to defend.”

    According to scientists, some values ​​are so important for a person’s identity that the brain regards abstract ideas as a threat to its physical existence.

    “Remember that the first and main task of the brain is protection,” says Jonas Kaplan, co-author of the scientific work. - The brain as a whole is a big, complex and sophisticated machine for self-defense, and not only for physical, but also for psychological self-defense. As soon as some things become part of our psychological self-identification, I think they fall under the same protective mechanisms that act in the brain for the body. ”

    Modern psychology and neurobiology have already sufficiently studied the process of how neutral facts and theses can be transferred from the category of ordinary information to the field of the psychological self-identification of a person. Such processes are initiated intentionally within the framework of state ideology. It happens that simple technical topics can be politicized due to spontaneous processes, as is the case with such seemingly insignificant technical and scientific issues as air temperature or the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

    Scientists from the Southern California Institute for the Study of the Brain and Creativity have investigated what exactly happens in the brain when belief changes .



    They found a small area of ​​the orbifrontal cortex, the activity of which positively correlates with the degree of change in a person’s beliefs (in the illustration, this is area A). In addition, they found another area in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which negatively correlates with the degree of change of beliefs (area B). The bar chart C shows the degree of average change of belief depending on the topic.

    Neurobiologists say that despite the individual characteristics of each person, the response to the threat of political convictions is about the same for everyone. However, using non-political beliefs as an example, they checked how activity in some areas of the brain correlates with resistance to changing beliefs.

    It was found that in patients with high resilience to changing beliefs, there is a greater activity in the dorsal anterior part of the cingulate gyrus of the cerebral cortex and in the amygdala during brain processing of information that contradicts beliefs. At the same time, activity in the posterior part of the island cortex and in the ventral anterior part showed no statistically significant correlation with the change of beliefs.

    Tellingly, the fMRI scanning study showed no obvious signs of the reverse effect. The authors say that after becoming acquainted with the facts, the subjects temporarily showed a slight decrease in the degree of conviction on political topics and a more significant decrease on non-political topics. A poll a few weeks later showed that the effect was preserved only for non-political topics.

    Possible therapy


    Perhaps in the future, scientists will learn to help patients with deep political convictions that they cannot get rid of (for example, those convicted of criminal offenses for political reasons). By stimulating certain areas of the brain and providing truthful information, people will be able to change their political attitudes and remove them from the zone of reflex psychological self-defense of the brain. This will allow them to activate rational thinking on these topics.

    In any case, it is important to understand the nature of cognitive distortions and remember that the first task of the brain is not logical reasoning at all, but self-defense. Accordingly, you should be very careful if you meet a person whose physiological defense mechanisms are activated in the brain. From a practical point of view, you should definitely convince a person that he is not in danger, he is in complete safety - this will reduce stress and reduce hormone levels to normal levels.

    In the case of further conversation, you should not touch on topics that may come into contact with an area that is part of a person’s psychological self-identification and disables logic. To restore the normal state of a person, it makes sense to raise a pleasant or neutral topic that activates other areas of the brain responsible for pleasure, memory and stimulate rational thinking.

    Scientists believe that extreme cognitive inflexibility in the face of new information is not necessarily inadequate. In the end, there is a certain benefit in providing protection for the most useful beliefs. Changing the mental models of a person without a sufficient cause can cause problems on its own.

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