Awe may be THE solution to rigid mindsets

Psychologists have noted that many people, when presented with evidence that contradicts a belief of theirs, simply ignore or rationalize away that evidence, holding even more tightly to their existing beliefs.

If we are to fundamentally change the world in the direction of an Abundance Game, we must accept that many of our fellow people will face enormous such challenges. My book is replete with challenging ideas. I didn’t shy away from that, nor do I believe that we ever should. However, it would be really nice if we could find a way to help people to become more receptive to fundamentally new ideas and ways of organizing society.

Now, research is finding that awe may offer exactly the needed solution. Specifically, the experience of awe may offer a way to open up fixed mindsets such as fundamentalism, rigidity, and the general mindset of, “don’t confuse me with facts that contradict what I believe.”

According to the ASU lab and Prof. Shiota, “Awe has been defined as the positive emotion one may experience when confronting a vast stimulus that is not accounted for by one’s current understanding, and/or challenges one’s day-to-day scope of experience. In prior research, including studies funded by the John Templeton Foundation, we have found that awe promotes cognitive and physiological changes that reduce reliance on existing knowledge structures (e.g., cognitive schemas, heuristics) and facilitate taking in new information from the environment.”

Given that the experience of awe should be a common experience in a Celebration Society, once this research has been validated (and I strongly expect that it will be validated soon), we will find that simply getting large numbers of people to visit Celebration Societies as guests will convert them from having various sorts of resistance to becoming proponents, or at least open to learning more.

Of course, it is likely that many people will not even bother to visit until they are already well along the path of such open-mindedness, else why would they bother making such a trip?

Fortunately, I can foresee a solution. Specifically, we can offer to people VR experiences of life in a Celebration Society. Since those will be inexpensive and easy to deliver and obtain, participants will be able to experience awe in the privacy of their own home.

If we can deliver the experience of awe, it should become quite popular. I look forward to us testing the effects of that experience!