Paul Ekman and Facial Expressions
Before I move onto the discussion about belief I would like to talk about facial expressions and the work of one of the most prominent scientist in this field of our time, Paul Ekman. There is a saying that face is the window to a person’s mind (or is it the eye?); we can get a glimpse of a person’s inner feelings by looking at his or her facial expressions. But a strange thing was discovered when Ekman and Friesen were trying to code facial expressions. They were showing each other the expressions of anger and disgust and realized that only the expression alone had the capacity to impact one’s autonomic nervous system. As Ekman put it, “We felt terrible. What we were generating was sadness, anguish…… I' m generating anger. My heartbeat will go up ten to twelve beats. My hands will get hot. As I do it, I can't disconnect from the system. It's very unpleasant, very unpleasant." (http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_08_05_a_face.htm)
What this means is that not only does a person smiles when she feels happy, it also that when a person smiles, she will feel happy as a result of smiling. Many expressions can be as from inside to outside as it is from outside to inside. The same thing happens if a person tries to look angry, sad, ashamed etc. This paints a very different picture to the world we live in and think of it in terms of cause and effect. These causes and effects may sometimes take interchangeable roles.
What Caused the Cure?
Think about placebos. Placebo is defined as ‘a harmless pill, medicine, or procedure prescribed more for the psychological benefit to the patient than for any physiological effect’. There have been documented cases where the patients were cured from strange diseases by placebos. These patients were led to believe that the placebos were the ‘latest medicines’ for curing them and somehow the patients’ belief about being cured helped the body to recover.
The patient would surely think that she was cured because of the medicines, but we know now that sometimes the body heals when it is psychologically prepared to be healed, or when the person believes that she can be cured. Many illnesses like common cold, back problems, high blood pressure, allergies are caused to some extent by psychological reasons rather than physical issues. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosomatic_medicine)
What I wanted to point out by all this is that there can be times when cause and effect is more interchangeable than we realize. They are much more fluid or dynamic then we perhaps understand.
The Search for Mental Comfort
Let us look at belief now. Here I am not talking about only religious faith but about the doctrine regarding life and actions too. A person shapes the actions according to her beliefs. She is likely to choose a surrounding that will support her belief. A person’s speech and actions will reflect what she believes in. But what causes the beliefs to be established in the first place? The answer to this may be something like, “belief is formed by knowledge, experience, moments of madness, surrounding culture etc”.
Belief will make a person shape his or her actions, right? Which means belief is the ‘cause’ and the action taken is an ‘effect’. What if, like facial expressions and inner emotions, in this case also, our ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ take interchangeable roles? And there is already a theory about that. It is called cognitive dissonance.
According to Wikipedia, “Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions”. This theory argues, that when an individual needs to take a decision that goes against the values of beliefs she previously held, she alters the belief to have mental peace after performing the action. When an army personnel learns that he has to obey orders no matter what he may think of the instruction, whether he previously judged everything with his intellect or not, now he will think that there is always more to these instructions than what meets the eyes. When a boy cheats for the first time in the exams, he will probably have a lot of excuses like, “everybody does it” or “that teacher is sooo not fair” etc. That is why we see sometimes sudden incidents change an individual’s personality dramatically.
I know people who were about to leave a certain belief but they were trapped in a social circle that would not approve of leaving that belief. Ultimately they just could not conjure up the energy to stay true to their understanding. I know people who were practicing believers in a religion and when their social circle changed, so did their practices. These incidents might be very few, but they are there in reality.
Let me introduce to another concept called ‘confirmation bias’. According to definition, it “is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true”. Here, an individual only thinks about selective information to consolidate his or her previous belief. Maruf, a friend of mine, whose lifelong dream was to study in Notre Dame College, suddenly failed to get into it. That year the entrees were prioritized according to result and then age. There were many with the same result, and Maruf failed to get into Notre Dame as he was younger that most of us in his batch. Soon, he was talking about all kinds of deficiencies that Notre Dame College had. I never bothered about those, but he seriously did. Once he realized that he would not be able to get in that college, his mind started to work to appease his stress, and confirmation bias only led him to look at the bad sides of the college. Through confirmation bias people strengthen their belief and ignore any information that clashes with it. My friend could not help bragging about the cons of NDC.
What an individual says has an impact on what she believes. It is supposed to be the other way around, isn’t it? In reality, when someone starts to repeat a lie over and over again, one day she will believe in the falsehood herself. The lie seems more natural than the truth at this point. A teacher who tells her students not to watch too much TV, will feel guilt if she tries to watch TV too much herself, this will change her action and most likely she will reduce watching TV herself. Maybe she only told her students that because she was supposed to teach them good things, and now she has to abide by something she never really believed in before.
What I tried to express in this article is that belief is not so much as cause or effect. Rather it is a constantly interacting and reshaping part of an individual’s life. Belief will interact with the surroundings, desires, actions and concepts to give a person mental comfort. It will try to minimize the discomfort felt by a person through conflicting characteristics that she may show through various incidents. In order to shape an individual’s belief, it is crucial to change where that individual moves about, who she mixes with, what she talks about and what she does. A comprehensive and cohesive culturing can lead to a person accepting a solid belief.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.