None Of Us Will Change Our Minds About Trump Or Any Other Fucking Thing
None of Us Will Change Our Minds About Trump or any Other Fucking Thing
Arie Kruglanski and the rigidity of belief.
Let’s forget, for a little while, about Donald Trump’s lies. There are so many, ranging from the asinine to the near-sublime, that we probably won’t miss any genuine whoppers if we ignore the president’s unrelenting dishonesty for a few minutes. As for the litany of cringe-worthy mistakes and miscues that have characterized Mr. Trump’s first two months in office, where should we begin? With the misspelling of N.A.A.C.P. co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois’s name in a Department of Education tweet?
With an obvious typo on Trump’s official inauguration poster?
Or with my personal favorite (so far): Trump and the RNC paying tribute to Abraham Lincoln by tweeting out a dreadful, saccharine, fridge-magnet quote and wrongly (of course) attributing it to the 16th president.
It’s almost enough to make a fake-news junkie believe that Trump and his pals are intentionally making themselves look lazy and dim-witted, as a kind of smirking pledge to their proudly incurious base:
See? We’re not all that interested in books or history or foreigners. That shit is for ivory-tower eggheads and losers who pretend to like “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” So we can’t spell. So what? Fake news! Build a wall! Trucks! Trucks!
But, okay, just … forget all that. Let’s focus, instead, on a more pressing reality: namely, the unlikelihood of the president’s backers ever “converting” to the anti-Trump camp. If Donald Trump’s routine debasement of the Oval Office has not chipped away at his popularity among his hardcore fans, no amount of prodding, cajoling or accurate, triple-sourced reporting will change their minds. Because here’s the thing: whether we consider ourselves conservative or liberal, radical right or radical left or middle of the road, very few of us ever change our minds once we’ve settled on what we believe is the truth about an issue, scandal or public figure.
Arie Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, has spent much of his decades-long career examining the ways in which people form beliefs and judgments. He has crafted a theory of what he calls “lay epistemics,” i.e., the study of how individual thoughts create subjective knowledge. In Dr. Kruglanski’s view, a craving for certainty drives much more of our decision-making than any of us want to believe or admit, and times of crisis and polarization only serve to ratchet up our craving for that certainty.
Born in Poland in 1939 — a bad year everywhere, of course, but murderously abysmal in Poland — and raised in a Jewish ghetto, Dr. Kruglanski knows a thing or two about both crisis and polarization, as well as the sway that demagogues can exert on individuals, nations and eras.
As a young man, Kruglanski was attracted to and inspired by Freud’s work on unconscious motivation. When he studied psychology at the University of Toronto in the mid-1960s, he found the field dominated by neo-behavioristic theory and the study of animal learning. “This was initially disappointing,” he recently told me, “but I quickly learned that animals, too, are motivated — by hunger and thirst — and to this day I draw on learning and conditioning theory to understand human motivation. To my mind, motivation is the force underlying most of human action, and understanding it is the key to successful interventions to change behavior” — preventing individuals from committing violence, for example, or convincing people to study and to acquire education.
“The basic understanding that psychology has come to embrace,” Kruglanski said, “is that our opinions, impressions, and attitudes are ‘motivated.’ In other words, our opinions are not formed by information alone, because information can be manipulated and distorted. The dog that wags the tail of information is personal motivation. We assume we want the truth, but very often we want something else: to make a decision so that we can move on. Certainty is critical to this process, and the dynamic applies to everyone; we all hold views and make decisions based on our motivations.”
The present-day political climate in the United States, alas, provides for an almost textbook environment in which to watch Kruglanski’s theories play out on a grand, unsettling scale.
“For example,” Kruglanski noted, “if I have a strong motivation to see and defend Donald Trump as an admirable president whose administration will be beneficial to me, my family and society as a whole, then any counter-arguments will slide off of the position I hold, like water off a duck. Anything contrary to what I believe with certainty will be minimized or ignored.”
Kruglanski made frequent use of the term “closure” when discussing the process of formulating one’s worldview through the lens of motivation, rather than through a cool-headed gathering and weighing of information. I asked him if his use of the term is categorically different than the sort of pop-psychology way that many of us have come to speak of closure: that is, working through emotional trauma and accepting that something terrible has happened — the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship — so that we can finally move on.
“No, it’s not that different at all,” he said. “Prior to making a decision, we formulate a knowledge that we’re confident about.
“Say you don’t know who is responsible for the murder of someone you cared for deeply. You’re paralyzed. You can’t move forward. But once the killer is found, tried, and convicted, you have the answer, you have certainty about what happened and you can put it behind you and you can move on. That’s an extreme case, of course, and there is far more complexity involved in moving on from something so horrific — but there’s a kind of elemental commonality there between those two examples of closure. In each case you gain a kind of knowledge. You’ve found an answer, or formulated a confident knowledge about a given question that allows you to act.”
This notion that a quest for certainty drives not only our decisions but our personal politics might be unnerving to those who take pride in getting their news from more than a handful of sources. From Kruglanski’s perspective, information is just one piece — and hardly the keystone — of the edifice making up our private belief systems.
“Most people assume that information is what creates knowledge,” he said. “This is not so. Information can be warped and suppressed. Take death, for example. What can be clearer than death, right? But even death can be denied. People were led into concentration camps where it was readily apparent to anyone who cared to see that they were going to die. And yet they assumed and believed what they were told. That they were only going to showers. So we see that the human mind is capable of tremendous distortions, and it’s all in the service of our own motivations.”
For those of us who have long been seeking arguments that might convince Trump supporters that their man is a thin-skinned totalitarian paranoiac surrounded by far-right cretins, moral bankrupts and probably a few traitors, Kruglanski’s theories could turn out to be liberating. After all, if people make decisions and hold beliefs based not on information, but out of a desire for certainty, then we can safely forget about changing the minds of millions and millions of fervent Trumpkins. It’s never going to happen, just as it’s unlikely that Trump opponents will one day wake up and suddenly “get” why he is such a charismatic and trustworthy leader.
For my part, I’ll take my own certainties and those of my neo-liberal (that’s right, I said it) compatriots over Steve Bannon’s, Stephen Miller’s, Kellyanne Conway’s or Paul Manafort’s any day. May the better motivations of our nature win.