Cognitive inertia is the tendency – for a particular orientation in an individual's thinking about a matter, belief, or strategy – to resist change. Clinical and neuroscientific literature often describes it as a lack of motivation to generate cognitive processes needed to attend to a matter or problem.
The physics term "inertia" emphasizes resistance to change in a mode of cognitive processing that has been used for a substantial time. Commonly confused with belief perseverance, cognitive inertia is perseverance in an interpretation of information, not perseverance in the belief itself.
Cognitive inertia has been causally implicated in disregard of impending threats to one's health or environment, in enduring political values, and in deficits in task switching. Interest in the phenomenon was taken up by economic and industrial psychologists primarily to explain resistance to change in brand loyalty, in group brainstorming, and in business strategizing.
In a clinical setting, cognitive inertia has been used as a diagnostic tool for neurodegenerative diseases, depression, and anxiety.
Critics have commented that the term "cognitive inertia" oversimplifies resistant thought processes and suggest a more integrative approach involving motivation, emotion, and developmental factors.
History and methods Early history The idea of cognitive inertia has its roots in philosophical epistemology. Early allusions to a reduction of cognitive inertia can be found in the Socratic dialogues written by Plato. Socrates builds his argument by using the detractor's beliefs as the premise of his argument's conclusions. In doing so, Socrates reveals the detractor's fallacy of thought, inducing the detractor to change their mind or face the reality that their thought processes are contradictory. Ways to combat persistence of cognitive style are also seen in Aristotle's syllogistic method which employs logical consistency of the premises to convince an individual of the conclusion's validity.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two of the earliest experimental psychologists, Müller and Pilzecker, defined perseveration of thought to be "the tendency of ideas, after once having entered consciousness, to rise freely again in consciousness". Müller described perseveration by illustrating his own inability to inhibit old cognitive strategies with a syllable-switching task, while his wife easily switched from one strategy to the next. One of the earliest personality researchers, W. Lankes, more broadly defined perseveration as "being confined to the cognitive side" and possibly "counteracted by strong will". These early ideas of perseveration were the precursor to how the term cognitive inertia would be used to study certain symptoms in patients with neurodegenerative disorders, rumination and depression.
Cognitive psychology Originally proposed by William J. McGuire in 1960, the theory of cognitive inertia was built upon emergent theories in social psychology and cognitive psychology that centered around cognitive consistency, including Fritz Heider's balance theory and Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance. McGuire used the term cognitive inertia to account for an initial resistance to change how an idea was processed after new information, that conflicted with the idea, had been acquired.
In McGuire's initial study involving cognitive inertia, participants gave their opinions of how probable they believed various topics to be. A week later, they returned to read messages related to the topics they had given their opinions on. The messages were presented as factual and were targeted to change the participants' belief in how probable the topics were. Immediately after reading the messages, and one week later, the participants were again assessed on how probable they believed the topics to be. Discomforted by the inconsistency of the related information from the messages and their initial ratings on the topics, McGuire believed the participants would be motivated to shift their probability ratings to be more consistent with the factual messages. However, the participants' opinions did not immediately shift toward the information presented in the messages. Instead, a shift towards consistency of thought on the information from the messages and topics grew stronger as time passed, often referred to as "seepage" of information. The lack of change was reasoned to be due to persistence in the individual's existing thought processes which inhibited their ability to re-evaluate their initial opinion properly, or as McGuire called it, cognitive inertia.
Probabilistic model Although cognitive inertia was related to many of the consistency theories at the time of its conception, McGuire used a unique method of probability theory and logic to support his hypotheses on change and persistence in cognition. Utilizing a syllogistic framework, McGuire proposed that if three issues (a, b and c) were so interrelated that an individual's opinion were in complete support of issues a and b then it would follow their opinion on issue c would be supported as a logical conclusion. Furthermore, McGuire proposed if an individual's belief in the probability (p) of the supporting issues (a or b) was changed, then not only would the issue (c) explicitly stated change, but a related implicit issue (d) could be changed as well. More formally:
This formula was used by McGuire to show that the effect of a persuasive message on a related, but unmentioned, topic (d) took time to sink in. The assumption was that topic d was predicated on issues a and b, similar to issue c, so if the individual agreed with issue c then so too should they agree with issue d. However, in McGuire's initial study immediate measurement on issue d, after agreement on issues a, b and c, had only shifted half the amount that would be expected to be logically consistent. Follow-up a week later showed that shift in opinion on issue d had shifted enough to be logically consistent with issues a, b, and c, which not only supported the theory of cognitive consistency, but also the initial hurdle of cognitive inertia.
The model was based on probability to account for the idea that individuals do not necessarily assume every issue is 100% likely to happen, but instead there is a likelihood of an issue occurring and the individual's opinion on that likelihood will rest on the likelihood of other interrelated issues.
Examples
Public health
Historical Group (cognitive) inertia, how a subset of individuals view and process an issue, can have detrimental effects on how emergent and existing issues are handled. In an effort to describe the almost lackadaisical attitude from a large majority of U.S. citizens toward the insurgence of the Spanish flu in 1918, historian Tom Dicke has proposed that cognitive inertia explains why many individuals did not take the flu seriously. At the time, most U.S. citizens were familiar with the seasonal flu. They viewed it as an irritation that was often easy to treat, infected few, and passed quickly with few complications and hardly ever a death. However, this way of thinking about the flu was detrimental to the need for preparation, prevention, and treatment of the Spanish flu due to its quick spread and virulent form until it was much too late, and it became one of the most deadly pandemics in history.
Contemporary In the more modern period, there is an emerging position that anthropogenic climate change denial is a kind of cognitive inertia. Despite the evidence provided by scientific discovery, there are still those – including nations – who deny its incidence in favor of existing patterns of development.
Geography To better understand how individuals store and integrate new knowledge with existing knowledge, Friedman and Brown tested participants on where they believed countries and cities to be located latitudinally and then, after giving them the correct information, tested them again on different cities and countries. The majority of participants were able to use the correct information to update their cognitive understanding of geographical locations and place the new locations closer to their correct latitudinal location, which supported the idea that new knowledge affects not only the direct information but also related information. However, there was a small effect of cognitive inertia as some areas were unaffected by the correct information, which the researchers suggested was due to a lack of knowledge linkage in the correct information and new locations presented.
Group membership
Politics The persistence of political group membership and ideology is suggested to be due to the inertia of how the individual has perceived the grouping of ideas over time. The individual may accept that something counter to their perspective is true, but it may not be enough to tip the balance of how they process the entirety of the subject.
Governmental organizations can often be resistant or glacially slow to change along with social and technological transformation. Even when evidence of malfunction is clear, institutional inertia can persist. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama has asserted that humans imbue intrinsic value on the rules they enact and follow, especially in the larger societal institutions that create order and stability. Despite rapid social change and increasing institutional problems, the value placed on an institution and its rules can mask how well an institution is functioning as well as how that institution could be improved. The inability to change an institutional mindset is supported by the theory of punctuated equilibrium, long periods of deleterious governmental policies punctuated by moments of civil unrest.
After decades of economic decline, the United Kingdom's referendum to leave the EU was seen as an example of the dramatic movement after a long period of governmental inertia. Conversely, after 10 years of Brexit, the UK population reversed its opinion of the decision, with 57% thinking it was a mistake and 55% wanting to rejoin.
Interpersonal roles The unwavering views of the roles people play in our lives have been suggested as a form of cognitive inertia. When asked how they would feel about a classmate marrying their mother or father, many students said they could not view their classmate as a step-father/mother. Some students went so far as to say that the hypothetical relationship felt like incest.
Role inertia has also been implicated in marriage and the likelihood of divorce. Research on couples who cohabit together before marriage shows they are more likely to get divorced than those who do not. The effect is most seen in a subset of couples who cohabit without first being transparent about future expectations of marriage. Over time, cognitive role inertia takes over, and the couple marries without fully processing the decision, often with one or both of the partners not fully committed to the idea. The lack of deliberative processing of existing problems and levels of commitment in the relationship can lead to increased stress, arguments, dissatisfaction, and divorce.
In business Cognitive inertia is regularly referenced in business and management to refer to consumers' continued use of products, a lack of novel ideas in group brainstorming sessions, and lack of change in competitive strategies.
Brand loyalty