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Concept
Cognitive inertia
Summary
Cognitive inertia is the tendency for a particular orientation in how an individual thinks about an issue, belief, or strategy to resist change. In clinical and neuroscientific literature, it is often defined as a lack of motivation to generate distinct cognitive processes needed to attend to a problem or issue. The physics term inertia is to emphasize the rigidity and resistance to change in the method of cognitive processing that has been in use for a significant amount of time. Commonly confused with belief perseverance, cognitive inertia is the perseverance of how one interprets information, not the perseverance of the belief itself.
Cognitive inertia has been causally implicated in disregard of impending threat to one's health or environment, enduring political values, and deficits in task switching. Interest in the phenomenon was largely taken up by economic and industrial psychologists to explain resistance to change in brand loyalty, group brainstorming, and business strategies. In the clinical setting, cognitive inertia has been used as a diagnostic tool for neurodegenerative diseases, depression, and anxiety. Critics have stated that the term oversimplifies resistant thought processes and suggest a more integrative approach that involves motivation, emotion, and developmental factors.
The idea of cognitive inertia has its roots in philosophical epistemology. Early allusions to 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 to 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 in contradiction. Ways to combat persistence of cognitive style is also seen in Aristotle's syllogistic method which employs logical consistency of the premises to convince an individual of the conclusion's validity.
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