What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [126]
The first claim of my theory is: To the extent that a psychological condition has biological underpinnings because it is prepared or heritable, it will be harder to change; to the extent that it is unprepared—simply a learned habit—it will be easier to change.
The evidentiary aspect of depth is about confirmation and disconfirmation: How easy is it to get evidence for the belief underlying the problem? The other side of the coin of evidence-gathering is even more important: How difficult is it to get evidence that will disabuse you of the belief? It is perilously easy to live our lives noticing only evidence in favor of our deep beliefs and to shun testing whether those beliefs are false. The thought underlying post-traumatic stress disorder—“The world is a miserable, unjust place, with no solace for me”—is easy to confirm. Just read the front page of this morning’s newspaper. The thought underlying obsessive-compulsive problems—for example, “If I don’t wash my hands thoroughly, I will contaminate my child”—will not get disconfirmed by someone who avoids testing it. The person with this thought washes her hands two hours a day. Her hands are always clean, and her child never gets contaminated. She will never get disconfirming evidence because she performs the ritual so frequently. So she will never find out that not washing her hands does not lead to contamination of her child.
So the second claim of my theory is: The easier a belief underlying a problem is to confirm and the harder it is to disconfirm, the harder it will be to change.
The third aspect of depth is the power of the belief underlying the problem. I use power in the sense of the power of a theory. A theory is said to have high power when it is general and so explains many of the facts about the world. Relativity theory—applicable to all of time and space—has high power. A theory has low power when it applies to only a few isolated facts. “There are a lot of ticks this year because it has been a dry summer” does not apply much beyond ticks and humidity, and so is of low power. Everything else being equal, we cling to a powerful theory more tenaciously than to a less powerful theory when we are confronted with exactly the same contrary evidence disputing both.
Some of our personal beliefs are powerful in just the same way a theory is powerful—they make sense of a great deal of our world. Being a socialist or believing in a benevolent God are but two of many possible examples. These beliefs permeate our understanding of what happens to ourselves and to others. They are deeply entrenched. Stalin’s purges did not shake the beliefs of socialists very much, nor did the Black Death make God seem evil or indifferent to most believers. Other personal beliefs have low power. Believing that cars made in Detroit on Fridays have more defects because the workers are looking forward to the weekend explains only your windshield-wiper problem and little else in your life. The thoughts underlying our problems can be of high or low power. The belief that spiders are very dangerous is of low power, whereas the belief that I am an unlovable person or that I need to drink to get through the day has high power.
So the third claim of my theory is: To the extent that the belief underlying a problem has high power, it will be hard to change; to the extent that it has low power, it will be easier to change.
Added together, these claims may explain when a problem will change easily and when it will resist change. Let us reconsider the problems and see.
Transsexualism, the inversion