They say you are what you eat.
Well, according to the box of Stouffer’s Lasagna, I’m a family of five.
Opinions and buttholes. Everyone’s got them. They all stink.
But you should realize that an opinion is not easily formed unless a person says and hears the same things every day and practices them in real life.
– Epictetus.
Today on Peeling the Onion we’re going to talk about how you form opinions.
Do you think Epictetus was right? Give us a nod or a shake. Actually do that. Make people sitting around you in the coffee shop wonder what’s going on. Then stick around and see if your opinion changes.
Current Theory
What does modern psychology tell us about how we form opinions?
There’s worldview, social conformity, active biases, and critical thinking. Of those four factors, the first two are dependent largely on your environment. The third factor is more innate into how our brains are wired up. We do have some control over it, but not a ton. The fourth factor is how we compensate for the other three.
Let’s break each down a little bit more and kind of peel off another layer of the onion to figure out what we’re actually talking about.
Most of us don’t remember when we started trying to figure the world out – when we started trying to put the pieces together and assemble a picture of how the world really worked. If you’ve spent any time around small kids, especially in the 3-4-5 year old range, you’ve watched this in action.
My three year old daughter loves to come up and ask us why. A lot of the time, she’s trying to put off something that she doesn’t want to do, but there is a significant portion of the time where she’s actually trying to figure out why something is the way that it is. That is the formation of worldview in action.
What is a worldview?
It’s how we interpret the world around us. It’s built from our youth, and we continue building it throughout our life. Although, by the time we reach our late teens, it’s pretty much static. We’re going to have that worldview for the rest of our life, outside of an earth-shattering, majorly life changing kind of event that really causes you to question what it is you think and believe.
The worldview is how we make sense of the world. It’s fundamental to our character and to our beliefs. It really forms the core of who we are. As an outflow of that, it affects everything we do, usually in ways that we don’t realize.
What is social conformity?
The next process in opinion forming, social conformity, kicks in when we start to realize and assign importance and value to our interpersonal relationships, friends, family – the people in our lives that we care what they think about us. I think most of us can remember what it was like being in school or another peer group and desperately wanting to fit in. That is when we experience social conformity in the most acute sense, but it never really goes away.
There’s two different flavors of social conformity. There is coerced social conformity, and then there’s voluntary social conformity. The coerced flavor is doing what you are told to do out of fear of punishment from an authority figure of some kind. For most adults, the authority figure is represented by the government. The other kind of social conformity, voluntary social conformity, plays a much larger role in how we form opinions.
Inside voluntary social conformity, there’s kind of three subcategories. One of the most powerful drivers of voluntary social conformity is fear of ostracism by our peers. There’s that social group, that peer group, that we identify with that we don’t want to be cast outside of or viewed as different or not fitting in. We go to great lengths to make sure that doesn’t happen. Tied really closely to that is the desire for belonging. It’s kind of the other side of the coin. It’s the social conforming that we do to fit into our peer group, to make ourselves more secure in that association.
The last piece of social conformity is ambition. The ambition flavor of social conformity isn’t motivated externally. We aren’t trying to fit into a peer group. It’s internally motivated. We’re trying to achieve an end and appease whatever group we think has control over the factors that can affect that.
What are active biases?
So we looked at the first two factors, the kind of environmental factors for how we form opinions. Let’s take a look at the third factor, the part that is innate to ourselves as individuals, active biases.
The human brain is the most complex computer in the universe. Every second of every day our brain is taking in massive amounts of information. Everything we see, everything we hear, everything we feel, anything that our senses are giving to us, that is all being received by our brain.
All of us are familiar with what happens when a computer gets overloaded. It overheats and it breaks. Our brain takes shortcuts to keep that from happening. There’s a bunch of different flavors of the particular shortcuts. The one that we’re concerned with here is called active biases.
Not to get too far into the weeds, because this isn’t a video about active biases themselves, but the active bias kind of comes in two flavors. One is a shortcut that the brain is intentionally taking. The other is essentially a copy/paste from a different process that the brain inadvertently applies to something else.
Let’s take a look at some of the active [biases] that I think you need to be aware of in regards to forming opinions. This is not an exhaustive list of all the active biases. There’s a lot more than we’re going to talk about here, and we’re not going to spend a ton of time going into detail about what each active bias is and how it manifests. I just want you to be aware that they are a thing.
If you’re interested, let me know and we can go into more depth on the active biases in another post.
- First up, confirmation bias. That just means that we look for information that supports what we already believe.
- Next is the false consensus bias. And that is, we tend to think that more people agree with us than actually do.
- Next up is the anchoring bias. And that means that we give preference to the information that we knew first, even if we’re presented with contradictory information later.
- Then we’ve got the actor/observer bias. And this is where we attribute external factors to what drives us to make our decisions. But for everyone else, we attribute internal motivations. In other words, we say the things that we’re doing are because X, Y, and Z made us do that, but for everyone else, they’re doing that because they’re an a-hole.
- One of the most important biases to be aware of (and one of the most dangerous) is the bandwagon effect. That is our propensity to go along, even if secretly we don’t agree.
- One that you see a lot, especially in political discourse, is the authority bias. That is where we give preference to authority figures, regardless of the content or the validity of what they’re actually saying.
- Another important bias is the empathy gap. We underestimate the impact that emotion has on the decisions that we make. In truth, most of the decisions that we make are not logically driven, they’re driven by emotion.
- To me, one of the more interesting cognitive biases is hyperbolic discounting. We’ve all seen this in action. That is our propensity to pick a short-term gain versus a long-term reward, even if it’s very obvious that the short-term gain is much lesser than the long-term.
- Another one that I find absolutely fascinating is the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy is when we say, “I have already dumped so much time, effort, money, whatever into this thing. I’m invested. I’m going to keep putting time, money, and effort into that thing,” even when it’s really obvious that the right move is to cut your losses and abandon whatever that is.
- One of the most important active biases to understand in the modern context is the illusory truth effect. That is when we start to believe something simply because we’ve heard it enough. Stop to think about what have you heard repeated over and over and over and over again from social media accounts, news accounts, whatever. Think about those things and what they’re telling you and go back and look and say, “Is this actually true?” It’s a very, very dangerous bias, and the worst part is that a lot of the people in charge of those things are aware that it exists. They know that bias is a thing.
We’ve got environmental factors and we’ve got some innate stuff going on. These are things that are somewhat in our control but largely not in our control. But we do have something that we can control that lets us correct for and fight back against those other three things. And that’s critical thinking.
What is critical thinking?
Critical thinking is something that we choose to do. It’s an activity that we actively have to engage in. We use it to combat the environmental factors and the innate active biases that we have. Ultimately critical thinking is taking into account what we’re being told, what our worldview is, how that worldview might affect what we’re being told, how social conformity in the people around us might impact that and then any active biases we have, and look at all that in ourselves and in the other people that are involved, the people that are telling us this information, and trying to figure out what is the validity, what is the truth of what I’m being told.
Ultimately critical thinking is an exercise in asking why. Here again this isn’t a deep dive. We’ve got another video planned that’s going to get more into the weeds about how critical thinking works and how to make it work for you. Ultimately critical thinking is the process of examining something for truthfulness and completeness. And it is a process. You have to keep going until you get to something concrete. Something that you know, ok this is truth.
Was Epictetus right?
Let’s go back and take a look again at what he said: We should realize that an opinion is not easily formed unless a person says and hears the same things every day and practices them in real life.
The central thesis there is that environment is central to how we form opinions. If we look at the factors that modern psychology tells us goes into forming an opinion, the first two are worldview and social conformity, which are hugely environmentally driven. Yeah, Epictetus was right. Our environment plays a huge role in what we take in and also how we act because that social conformity makes a huge impact on the things that we do.
As a thought experiment I want you to envision yourself in a poor neighborhood and think about two kids. One kid studies hard, works hard, keeps out of trouble and applies himself. The other kid is (for whatever reason) lost, reckless and decides to join a gang. Be honest with yourself. You tell me – of those two kids, which do you think has a better chance of succeeding in life?
If we look at what the data tells us, the kid that keeps out of trouble, applies himself, has a much better chance of succeeding. The tragedy is that the kid who joins the gang, unless they change, they’re probably going to wind up in jail or death.
I want to flip this thought experiment on its head.
Imagine a rich neighborhood with two kids. One’s a trust fund baby who’s out partying all the time with all the other trust fund babies who has no respect or regard for anything that he has. On the other hand, you have another kid who again studies hard, works hard, and applies himself. And be honest. You tell me – what do you think is going to happen with those two?
The kid who works hard, and studies hard, and applies himself, has a much better chance of succeeding. The trust fund baby that’s out partying is going to self-destruct.
If you’re honest with yourself, you can do this thought experiment with any race, religion, ethnicity, whatever variable you want to use. The point is that you’re looking at the impact that the environmental factors have on the two people that you’re comparing.
What am I getting at?
I said it at the beginning of the video. You are what you eat. You become a reflection of your environment.
Okay, great, you’re harping on environment. Does that mean I need to move? Environment goes way beyond where we’re physically present. Our locality, our physical location is a huge part of our environment, but what’s more important for what we’re talking about here is the people we associate with, what we read, what we listen to, what we watch. Those are the most important pieces of our environment that affect who we are as a people, who we are as a person, and that goes back to the illustrations, the thought experiments that we just did. Locality didn’t matter much. It’s the people and what you’re doing that matters.
As for me, I choose to put myself in an environment where I am surrounded by people that love Jesus. Being in an environment like that makes a huge difference. I get inspiration from the people around me. I see them growing, and learning, and becoming more like Christ, and encouraging other people to do the same. They’re doing amazing things and they’re overcoming hardships. It’s truly, it is inspiring to watch.
I get accountability from people that love Christ. It’s one of the biggest things that Christ preached, is that we’re to hold each other accountable. We’re not to condemn each other. What we’re actually doing with accountability is that we’re looking out for each other and saying, “Hey, you’re not doing this thing right. Help me help you get back on track.”
A huge thing that I get out of being surrounded by people that love Jesus is endurance. I see other people overcoming challenges in their own lives, and they know about the challenges that I’m experiencing. They encourage and support me because they want the best for me.
They give me hope by reminding me that the trials and tribulations that we experience are temporary. They give me hope by watching them overcome the challenges and the obstacles in their life by trusting in Jesus. They give me hope by knowing that I have a group of people who love me and want me to succeed, and want me to learn and grow and be a better person.
The apostle Paul wrote,
“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Romans 12:2
What about you?
What’s your environment? Who do you hang out with? What do you read? What do you watch? What do you listen to?
Is that environment a reflection of who you want to be? I’ll bet money, it’s a reflection of who you are. But is it a reflection of who you want to be?
Is there something you need to get rid of? Or is something missing?
At the beginning of this post, I had you give a head nod or a shake whether you agreed or disagreed with Epictetus’ thesis. What now? Do you still agree with your initial assessment? If you said, “Yeah, Epictetus is right,” do you still think he was right? Or do you think he was wrong? Or vice versa?
Let me know what you think. Did you do some soul searching and decide that you need to change something in your environment? If you’re willing to share it, I’d love to hear what it is. Share this with the people in your lives. I’d love to know what they think and what they took away. Did they change something in their lives? Most of all, let me know what you got out of this post in general.
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God bless.