In this podcast episode, I do a bit of a deep dive into the taboo of changing our minds, confirmation bias and stereotyping, and the lack of ‘trust’ for those of us who reinvent our identities.
Our human curiosity, growth, and love of learning are superpowers we should never let go of.
When science clearly gives us new information, remaining open and curious instead of trusting stereotypes and confirmation bias is so crucial to a world where everybody is safe.
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Episode Transcript:
Hi there, welcome to today’s episode where we’re going to talk a little bit about changing our mind or as I like to call it, growth and learning.
The reason I’m starting with that definition is because changing your mind as a phrase, as 3 words together, often seems to have a lot of stigma to it, and I would say that certainly in my experience growing up as a cis female in the Western world, is that changing your mind is not a good thing according to society.
Changing your mind is something that is almost demonized. It is seen as a negative. It is often paired with things such as being inconsistent, being untrustworthy, or lying.
And certainly in my experience, this starts really young.
I remember being maybe 5 or 6 years old when I kind of learned that it was not a good thing for me to change my mind. I remember going to, I think, a couple of sessions, maybe 2 sessions of a sort of little club that ran on Sundays, and I remember somewhat enjoying it, and then on the, I think the 3rd session, I told my mum that I didn’t really want to go back.
And I remember even that being a full discussion and being asked for a lot of different reasons, a lot of different things about why and why not, and “but I enjoyed it before”, and “I seemed to like it”, and “what’s happened, and why now do I not like it?”
And I am now in my mid to late 30s, and my mother still talks about the time she signed me up and got me ready and we did all the induction and got everything ready for the Sunday sessions that I would go to, and then me saying after a couple of sessions that I didn’t want to continue.
And it is so interesting to me that over 30 years later, this is a core memory for both my mother and I.
And I feel like that as a tale, as a story, tells us so much about how humans work, how our brains work, how memories work, but it also shares the real depth of impact of changing your mind and how almost taboo it has become.
Now, as an adult, I feel like particularly when I look at the media, certain celebrities, people kind of in the public eye, there is a lot of pressure for people to stick to their word, to consistently keep doing what they’re doing.
If someone has become famous for a particular viewpoint or supporting a particular cause or for being in a particular religion or presenting as a certain gender or donating money to a certain charity, there is almost this complete expectation that they will never ever change and that this will be consistent forever.
But one of the things the human brain is really good at doing is learning.
Our brains are wired for growth. When we hear a new song, neurons fire in our brains, creating new connections or strengthening old connections.
When we learn a new fact and we perhaps learn it a few times or it particularly shocks us or it has a particular value to us, that again sends electrical impulses through our neurons, creates a pathway.
We learn, we grow. Our brain structure literally changes as we learn information or go through experiences.
And it therefore still confuses, confounds, and shocks me that we are expected to never change our minds, particularly when we may have learned more information, when science has perhaps given us a new view on truth.
Even if we were to separate the biology of our brain and how that works in the neuroscience, when we consider human psychology: our consciousness, our minds, our attention span, dopamine hits and motivation, all of that stems from pattern recognition, from seeking to make sense of things.
When I see that there is a circle hole and then there is this cylinder, my brain wants to connect that I can put that cylinder through the circle hole. That is not just like learning on a biological neuroscience level. That is my brain understanding the world, depth perception, moving my hands in certain ways. There is so much that goes into a simple experience such as a toddler learning which shapes go in which holes, that when we are then confronted with very clear evidence of something that perhaps we didn’t know before, I feel like as a, as a species, there’s no way we can’t learn that.
Now I say that knowing full well there is something called confirmation bias where our brain will filter out information that doesn’t fit with what we think the world should look like.
And I’m going to get slightly political here and just mention gender expression and identity, which is a human construct.
There are biological aspects of gender identity, and I’m not going to go fully into that, but what I do want to focus on is the fact that learning and changing our mind, or changing how we might perceive things, or what we might say, or the language we use, thinking about almost that political correctness is the phrase that we use in the UK, and how that really does shape who we are as human beings who are constantly learning, who are constantly wanting to seek the truth.
As a species, humans have this really good ability to recognize patterns, to spot things that are consistent, to see where things look like, well, that’s true there and true there and true there. Maybe this is true.
If I look around and all I see is that this thing is true in every case, then it makes sense, rather than me looking through the next million items, if I’ve gone through the first 1,000 and they’re all true with this particular thing, it makes sense that I can categorize that everything in that category is very likely to have that truth.
This is known as a stereotype, which comes from the printing press where we would basically make newspapers by putting all the little stamps of each letter in the right place and literally typing it over and over again by putting it on the ink pad, putting it on the paper, putting it back on the ink pad, putting it on the next piece of paper, and that’s how the same page would be made in the printing press.
We are stereotyping. We are getting an idea of exactly what it should look like, and then we are assuming that every single thing or every single aspect of that category is going to have the same characteristic.
Stereotyping is a natural part of how humans recognise patterns, and how our brain allows us to only take in information that feels relevant to us, because we cannot take in every piece of information, particularly in the modern world with how much information we are being overloaded with on a minutely basis.
And confirmation bias is something that supports stereotyping, where if I keep looking at every single page of this particular diary has a page number on it, when I’ve gone through the first 100 and then I’ve skipped maybe 100 pages and gone onto the sort of 200 and something pages and there’s page numbers, I can quite reliably assume there’s a page number on every page, that this is how the book is written, this is how it is printed.
And confirmation bias means that if there is a page that’s missed that doesn’t have a page number on it, our brain will often filter that information out because it doesn’t really feel that relevant, it’s not that necessary, and, you know, it’s extra brain power for us to suddenly challenge and question and wonder if every page has a page number on it.
That’s perhaps a silly example of it, but I hope it kind of explains the concept.
Because one of the things that we are taught when we are fairly young, I would say around the age of 5-ish, is that there are 2 sexes and 2 genders.
And this is something that is supported all the way through our infant and junior school lessons, particularly when we move into science, move into biology, when we’re having our sort of health and social education, this is how things are presented.
Then we get to secondary school and we learn about X and Y chromosomes, and then we learn about animals and even plants that may have completely different chromosomal structures, that have other sexual presentations, some who can change their sexual presentation from male to female, female to male, some who are androgynous and don’t need to have male or female sort of separations between them.
We have mutations. We then move into the later years of our secondary school or perhaps onto college where we learn about how the XY chromosome is not really that cut and dry, and even in humans, for there to be 2 sexes and 2 genders is a bit reductionist.
It’s not accurate. It doesn’t actually work like that. And if we go on to university-level biology, we trust those who have gone on to university level biology, we can actually see that the idea that there are 2 sexes is just not true like we thought it was.
It just isn’t the case. In anything we find in nature, there is usually a spectrum.
I cannot think of a single thing in nature which is binary. There is not light nor— light or dark. There is a spectrum of light. There is a spectrum of colour. I don’t think there is actually a binary of male/female and that this is the only 2 sections and 2 options there are in nature.
We also know about all these other sort of ways of being.
And therefore, it makes sense if you’ve never learned beyond there being 2 sexes and 2 genders, it makes complete sense for you to believe that until science finds information that actually contradicts this.
Now, this is particularly interesting because I feel that science has given us a lot more information over the last sort of, I don’t know, 30 to 50 years, And they’ve done brain scans of people who identify as trans or non-binary, and we’re starting to find those biological neurological differences that seem to identify gender and that gender identity as actually being reflected in the physical biology of the person.
So again, we are learning that the idea of there being a male and female biological sex actually may not tell us the whole story. Now, this as a fact, I feel, is just very interesting that we have more variety than we thought we had.
And for me, I think that’s really cool that science has been able to show us this, and we are researching and finding out more.
We are learning. And yes, we’re going to have to change our mind, and change our language when it comes to, now we know better, now we know there’s more to this.
We then want to find some language that will be accurate so we know the truth and we can talk about it.
However, this confirmation bias does seem to flare up in particular where people have a distrust of science, have a distrust of those who are seeking the truth, who want things to be accurate rather than tradition.
And I think when we bring in some of our cultural beliefs, some of the fear-mongering that we are given, particularly around males versus females, victim versus perpetrator, when we sort of believe some of these, again, very binary ideas that we just know aren’t really accurate anymore, but they still play on fears that we’ve believed for decades, if not centuries.
And if we bring things like religion and those sorts of beliefs in as well, there’s also a lot that it talks about which is very segregated on this idea of there being 2 sexes or 2 genders.
As someone who feels that one of the key strengths that humanity as a species has is our curiosity, I find it really interesting that we have demonized changing our minds, learning, growth, accepting new ideas.
You know, we are not meant to learn one fact in school and never question or learn or change our understanding. And this idea that learning and finding out more information and changing your mind is like admitting to being wrong, it’s admitting a failure, or it’s like inconsistent.
But actually human growth and learning is something that is incredibly consistent in the human species. It’s how we’ve come to be the species that we are today because we were adapting, we were growing, we were learning where perhaps some of the other animals were not.
And I find it so interesting that this taboo leans from things like that idea that some people say is fundamental about us having, you know, 2 biological sexes or 2 genders, all the way through to, “Oh, you liked reading fantasy last year, what’s happened? Why don’t you like it anymore?”
If your favourite hobby has now become writing or gaming, or you actually found you prefer romance novels or self-help books instead, this idea that even changing what we find fun, what we find worthwhile, what we want to prioritize our life on, is still that sense of inconsistency or untrustworthiness.
And particularly with those of us who have reinvented our life a few times, there’s that sense that we were lying before, or that we’ve hidden what was actually going on, or that we were pretending at the time.
When actually what’s happened is that I, as a human being across the last 30-something years, have had experiences that have made me question, that have got me curious, and that I’ve then gone and looked for as many resources as I can to find the truth, because that’s something that for me is really important.
I want to know what’s accurate, not what necessarily sounds best for me. I want to know the truth so I can prepare for what I need to manage it.
And particularly now everything is written online or videoed and there’s evidence and there’s proof, this idea that we’re not allowed to change our mind has led to people even doubling down, even when the evidence against what they’re believing or saying is right in front of them.
And I just feel like as a society, as a species, we could really do better.
With allowing people to learn, to grow, and to change their mind.
This feels like yet another way that society is stopping us, disempowering us from growth, from learning, from change, from taking back our power – by discouraging us from being curious, by openly being negative about people who do grow and do change and do perhaps explore alternative theories after a while of believing and sharing about one thing.
I just feel like it’s such a waste of our potential to never celebrate or allow people to grow and change their mind.
As science evolves, as we evolve, as we become self-aware, as we look to define our identity the way we would like ourselves to be, to be someone who we like, I feel like we are the person who spends the most time with ourselves, and a lot of people who I work with really struggle to like themselves because even the idea of exploring alternatives feels like they are lost or lying or betraying something of themselves.
So today I just want you to take this reminder: that “changing your mind is not an admission of wrongness or of guilt or of lying or of secrets.” Changing your mind, particularly if you’re changing your mind because you’ve found something true, whether that’s in yourself like “I never liked this particular thing. I was made to do it by my friend or family or whatever, and actually I want to do this instead” is not bad.
If you change a hobby, or you actually do some research on something and go, “oh my gosh, I didn’t know this was actually how things are now. This is the information we now have. I believe this now as a scientific hypothesis or, you know, as an idea of how I want to move forward with my life.”
Trust that learning and that your curiosity is not a taboo. It’s a superpower. It is something that comes naturally to so many of us, and that seems to be constantly stifled in this current modern age.
So please take this as your permission to be curious, to learn, to research something, to look something up, to ask someone who perhaps you don’t understand to share what they believe or where they get their evidence from.
That supports what they are saying or what they believe, so that we can understand each other better and therefore connect. Because really, as a social species, that’s all any of us are really looking to do.
If you would like to connect with other curious people, head over to the Patreon where you can sign up as a free member and consider joining the Discord.
That’s all for today. Thanks so much for listening, and remember that you are allowed to change your mind.