Why We Can't Admit We're Wrong: The Psychology Behind Belief and Violence

Why do people struggle so much with admitting they’re wrong? This episode dives into the psychology of belief, cognitive dissonance, and the power of rhetoric in shaping our minds—and sometimes leading to dangerous outcomes. From impulsive and obsessive violence to the biases that keep us stuck in echo chambers, we explore how worldviews form, change, and sometimes escalate into conflict.

Using insights from Gavin de Becker’s groundbreaking work on violence prediction and our own gut instincts, we unpack what drives extreme actions and how rhetoric fuels today’s heated debates. Join us for an honest conversation on understanding human behavior—and finding paths to meaningful dialogue.

Chapters

• 0:00 Admitting You’re Wrong: Why It’s So Hard
• 1:27 Rhetoric and Escalation of Violence
• 3:59 Impulsive vs. Obsessive Violence
• 7:16 Trusting Gut Instincts: The Gift of Fear
• 12:17 Cognitive Dissonance and Bias
• 15:51 How Beliefs Change Over Time
• 17:07 The Need for Reasonable Leaders

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Human beings, me included, don't like to admit we're wrong. And I had a worldview that is almost opposite of my current worldview. Up until my late 20s, early 30s and I had, I changed one presupposition in my life. And as soon as the evidence from my experience in the world, as I got older and experienced more people, as soon as the evidence stacked up, that that one belief was incorrect, the dominoes fell in all of these other areas, and my worldview changed my politics, changed my expectations of people changed. All of which happened because I was willing to admit, okay, you're wrong about that. I didn't like it. I mean, it was internal. It was internally difficult. Once I admitted that I was wrong about that one belief, then everything changed.

Speaker 2: 0:57

Today, I want to talk a little bit about what we've seen over the past. I would say several months. But really, what culminated in this past weekend? We saw the assassination attempt on President Trump. We've seen rhetoric just heating up, actually, over a period, I would say, in several years. So I wanted to ask you why really, you think at this point, how have we gotten here and what triggers the violent person to act in the way that we thought? It's possible.

Speaker 1: 1:28

At this point, we can't yet determine if some of the increasing negative rhetoric was connected to his motivation. There's just so much we don't know. So I, you know, I'd hate to connect dots that aren't there, but let's talk about, what happens in the mind of a person who commits violence. We psychologists have been largely very bad at predicting violence. And and we really should be looking outside of my field for people who are better at predicting violence. And one of the, one of the authors who I've read, who I think has done a great job, is named Gavin de Becker in de Becker is not a psychologist. He's not a mental health anybody. He's a security specialist. And his company, his company works on providing security for, doing executive protection, private executive protection, but also subcontracted, at least historically, for the Supreme Court. So this is a person who has a great deal of knowledge, and he's got a wonderful book called The Gift of Fear. And, it's the kind of book that I think everyone should read. The the caution I'll give you. Is it? It'll probably scare you, and it probably should, because de Becker has studied the psychology and the mindset of serial killers. So if you want to know how serial killers think, de Becker is an expert. So he is expert at helping people determine what predicts violence. And.

Speaker 2: 3:17

Wow.

Speaker 1: 3:20

They're probably two paths I want to go down. I want to differentiate, real quickly, two different types of violence, and then I, want to talk about what everyone else who has been around a person who has committed violence. Not everyone, but the typical profile of what? What people say afterwards. So if we were to divide up violence into two types, I would say, impulsive and the other I would call obsessive. And so the impulsive type of violence is the kind of the kind of thing that you see, in that you but the, the common sort of scuffle, you see, in a parking lot or, where one person gets mad at another person in a chance encounter. And there's probably a host of problems in the past, but they're impulsive because they are unable to regulate their emotions. And so these are the people who kind of pop off. Now we can go into the why they are dysregulated, why they aren't able to regulate themselves. But that's typically, you know, I got mad and so I punched you. That's the impulsive type. The obsessive type is the type of person who plans and ruminates. And it there there's a subset of our of our population who are exceedingly good at brooding and ruminating and percolating on an idea. And if you look at people who engage in these types of activities and I think we can look at, we can look at the history of people who've been involved in, mass violence and in this case, an attempted assassination. This is a person for whom it took took considerable planning, considerable time, and a great deal of persistence in, in the face of obstacles. And so, that that's not your random. I got mad, I hauled off, and I hit somebody. And that's a really particular type of person. And if you read de Becker's work, he talks about the planning involved and, some of the things that lead up to that, all of which would be really interesting for us. And it's an interesting philosophical discussion. But the more important thing that he said, and this book was written in the 1990s, prior to the revolution in neuroscience. So de Becker didn't know what was happening, in which part of the brain was firing. But I love this story he tells, which is there was a woman, she'd been recently divorced, and, she was having a painter come over to give her an estimate on painting the inside of her house. And so she invited a friend over because she didn't feel really secure being by herself with the, contractor in the house. And the guy comes to the door. He's he's well-groomed, he's clean cut. He's, you know, he's all the things you'd want in, a contractor, and her dog goes nuts, and so she has to sequester the dog into the kitchen, and this guy goes through the house, and the dog is just going wild, and her friend is walking around with her, and she goes, wahey! You know? And then the painter leaves and he says, he seems nice, and the estimate seems pretty good. Are you going to use him? And she says, no. And she says, why not? This is because my dog hates him and my dog is never wrong. And and what de Becker says is there are people who trust their dogs judgment, but don't listen to their own internal voice that says there's something wrong, and every single time. That's an exaggeration. But uniformly after the fact, people say, yeah, I could see him doing that. Yeah. I guess when you think about it, I'm not really surprised. And so there's something in each of us, all of those who are functioning pretty well. We get a sense, that there's something wrong with this other person. And if we look at what's happening in our brains, different, we typically think of our brains as just. I'm a rational, logical problem solver, but so much of our brain is created to protect us and keep us alive. So the parts of our brain that register fear actually operate more quickly without connecting directly to the verbal parts of our brain. And so people call it a gut sense or intuition or, my body told me, all of which is kind of vague language. And I'm going to use a word here, and I want to define it that much of our thinking happens at a subconscious level. And and what I mean by that is not some sort of Freudian unconscious, but our, our brain through our eyes, our ears, our nose, through our skin is picking up information and integrating it in. Is this a threat or not? And, Joe Ledoux, Joseph Ledoux, who's a, leader in neuroscience research, he calls the what most of us call the fear system the fight, flight, fate or free system. He actually doesn't like to call it that. And, you know, it's a it's an academic quibble, but I. But for purposes of our discussion today, what he calls it is the threat appraisal system. And so we have outside of our verbal awareness, a sensation. Our body is picking up danger signs all the time. And what does that. Well, yeah, people call it instinctive. They call it a gut feel. But it, it it it isn't really instinctive. It's very old and it's very self-protective, but it's happening right now and it's worth listening to. And, and the, the, the pro con, decision that Becker makes is. If you if you listen to it and you're wrong, what does it cost you? So for example, if you see somebody and they seem not quite right, or if, if you see somebody and they seem dangerous and there's something about you that you can't quite put into words and bothering you, what does it cost you to act on that? Well, call it intuition. I don't really want to call it a feeling because it's not really an emotion. We'll call it an intuition, but that that subconscious sense, that gut sense that there's something wrong. What does it cost you? Well, he in this woman's case, she doesn't get as good a price on on her. Her painting. In the case of the the attempted assassination, what does it cost you to to do something about it? Well, it costs you very little to act on that intuition or that gut sense. Yeah. What what does it cost you to ignore it? It costs you a great deal. And so his argument, he gives it cost you very little to listen to it. It costs it could cost you a tremendous amount to ignore it. So best to get better at listening to it.

Speaker 2: 12:03

I wonder what it is that really causes these people to, you know, gets them planning to commit this violence, get them to almost snap, if you will. What is it in the brain that happens there? The causes?

Speaker 1: 12:17

I would go back to the brooding and then the, then the process in the brain called cognitive dissonance, which which most of us have heard of. But let me define it, which is, if I if I have, if I hold two pieces, if I hold two contradictory pieces of evidence in my mind that creates an internal struggle. And in order to get rid of that internal conflict, I will then seek out or use information to bolster one and to to bring down the other. And so if I believe that a person is, an existential threat to humanity, and he seems like his wife and his kids love him, and a lot of other people love him. What will I then do? Well, in order to get rid of this, this, these two opposing views in my head, I'll start to seek out information which is also called confirmation bias. I'll seek out information that supports this, and then I'll discount information that supports the other. And the more I tunnel in on a selective sample of information, the more I'll be convinced of the rightness of my decision, which is why viewpoint diversity is so important. It's it's really uncomfortable to be to have to engage with information that is counter to your beliefs. It it's uncomfortable to us all. And if we refuse to embrace that discomfort and and and concede that you could be wrong, you know, I could be wrong. Let me let me look, all of that is uncomfortable. And so we'll just continue to go down the path of looking for information that confirms our bias. So if you've have a person who's particularly good at obsessing, and obsessing means to think the same thing over and over again, and to have difficulty of removing it from your mind, that person can then gather lots and lots of information that supports that one belief and ignore all the rest, or discount it. And so we're all vulnerable to it. The difficulty, I think, that we're facing in our, information saturated environment is that everybody has the opportunity to find a channel of information that supports their already preconceived belief, so there's no necessity to ever question my preconceived belief. I think we have this convergence of human behavior and technology just giving us what we want. And so it's easier to go down, a bad path in our thinking because, look, all all the evidence I keep finding says I'm right, as opposed to finding some more heterodox position or human beings, me included, don't like to admit we're wrong. And I had a world view that is almost opposite of my current worldview up until my late 20s, early 30s and I had, I changed one presupposition in my life. And as soon as the evidence from my experience in the world as as I got older and experienced more people, as soon as the evidence stacked up, that that one belief was incorrect, the dominoes fell in all of these other areas, and my worldview changed. My politics, changed my expectations of people changed. All of which happened because I was willing to admit, okay, you're wrong about that. I didn't like it. I mean, it was internal. It was internally difficult. But once I once I admitted that I was wrong about that one belief, then everything changed. I guess, Tim, I want to I want to provide some hope that, there are lots of people who are just along for the ride in life, and you don't need everyone to be a leader, but you do need a few. And as long as we have a few people who are willing to take those leadership positions and can do it in, in compelling and reasonable ways, you know, we we can have a bright and hopeful future, maybe.