[…] The reactance theory was clearly at play in Senate. The majority of Republicans did not want to have their attitudes changed so they were not changed. It is interesting that in the lecture you mentioned that people with higher levels of intelligence are more immune to attitude change. If we were in class I would ask how this relates to learning and neuroplasticity. I always thought that children were smarter than adults because of their willingness to change their beliefs when presented with new information.
Your question would make for a very good class discussion. I would be tempted to approach this from two levels, the neural level and the cognitive level.
In terms of brain development, a child’s brain is much more plastic than an adult’s is. Early brain development proceeds by a process of proliferation and pruning in which an explosion of neural connections is followed by a winnowing away of those that aren’t used. At two years old, you have more neural connections than you will have the rest of your life. Learning from that point is as much about eliminating connections as it is about growing new ones—you might think of it as reducing the noise in the system.
From a cognitive perspective what is happening is schema development. Recall the distinction between assimilation and accommodation, what is happening with the young child is all about accommodation: creating entirely new schemas and actively modifying old ones. As we get older, and our schemas become more plentiful and more elaborate, we become far more prone to assimilation—to the point where we are quite likely to assimilate—deal with new information by using existing schemas—even when we should accommodate. This tendency is sometimes called “the assimilation bias.” This bias occurs because at the neurological level accommodation is “expensive” in that it requires the formation of new connections and/or alterations to existing ones (this is also why taking a class in an area that you aren’t familiar with can be so taxing: creating new schemas is hard work).
Intelligence comes into play here. Higher intelligence means more sophisticated and elaborate schemas, which means more ways to assimilate new information into your existing knowledge base, which means that it is going to take more sophisticated persuasion to get you to change your attitudes. But I don’t think the senate republicans’ refusal to change their minds had much to do with intelligence–the republicans who voted to convict seem to me to be at least as intelligent as a group as the ones who voted to acquit.
As we get older, we become increasingly likely to rely on existing schemas and incorporate new information into what we already think we know (aka increasingly dogmatic). Ignoring the likely influence of factors such as party loyalty and fear of blowback from constituents, and strictly from a cognitive processing perspective, assimilation bias is how I would explain the pro-Trump republican’s apparent inability to be moved by the overwhelming weight of the facts presented.
