Najnowsze badanie zespołu z Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, opublikowane w Scientific Reports, pokazuje, że przyczyna tej odporności na zmianę leży głęboko w mózgu – w mechanizmach związanych z ochroną tożsamości. Wyniki sugerują, że przekonania polityczne pełnią szczególnie silną funkcję ochrony tożsamości, co utrudnia ich modyfikację nawet w obliczu mocnych kontrargumentów.

 

The latest study conducted by a team from Jagiellonian University, published in Scientific Reports, demonstrates that the source of resistance to belief change lies deep within the brain - in neural mechanisms associated with identity protection. The findings suggest that political beliefs serve a particularly strong identity-protective function, which makes them resistant to modification even in the face of compelling counterarguments.

 

The experiment involved 43 individuals with clearly defined left-wing views. Participants underwent fMRI scanning while being presented with counterarguments targeting both their political and non-political beliefs. The study also aimed to determine whether mechanisms of resistance to counterarguments are culturally universal; therefore, the experiment was replicated in a Polish context.

 

The findings show that changing political beliefs is not merely a matter of arguments but a process deeply rooted in neural mechanisms related to identity. Results obtained in Poland confirm that these mechanisms are culturally universal, and that the process of belief change - across both political and non-political domains - is deeply embedded in neural systems responsible for maintaining self-identity.

 

 

 

This preregistered study investigates the neural mechanisms underlying resistance to belief change among individuals with strong left-wing orientations, examining both political and non-political domains. Building on previous work, we aimed to assess whether the neural signatures of belief resistance are culturally universal by replicating the study in a non-American context. Forty-three participants who held firmly established left-wing views were presented with counterarguments targeting their political and non-political beliefs while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Consistent with the original study, participants exhibited robust resistance to changing their political beliefs, although demonstrating greater openness to revising non-political ones. Challenges to political beliefs elicited heightened activation within the Default Mode Network (DMN), especially in regions associated with self-referential processing and introspection—highlighting the identity-protective function of such beliefs. Moreover, greater resistance to belief change was linked to increased activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and reduced activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a region implicated in belief updating. In contrast to the original findings, we observed no correlation between belief change and (lower) activation in emotion-related regions such as the insula and amygdala. Taken together, these results suggest that the process of belief change—across both political and non-political domains—is deeply rooted in neural systems responsible for maintaining self-identity.