To change or not to change?

Mental maps
We all use mental maps to navigate our world. We have a geographic mental map, our memory of places and routes, that helps us get where we need to go. And we have a societal, or behavioural mental map, our personal blueprint of who is who and how to get things done.
 
Geography is objective and mostly constant: things are where they are. Occasionally new routes or buildings appear. These are easily assimilated into our existing map with a few small changes. We don’t lose sleep over them.
 
Our view of people, procedures and society, on the other hand, is subjective and constantly being challenged. Everyone’s experiences are different and every day brings new ones that we must incorporate into our maps to help us predict how best to handle tomorrow. 

Assimilate or accommodate?
As with geography, we assimilate minor changes easily. When we learn who to ask to order a reagent, or some new detail about a protocol, these are not sources of anguish. The map is recognisably the same, just with a minor tweak. 

​But some new experiences are so far-reaching they challenge our fundamental beliefs and upset us. When someone we trusted exploits us, presenting our idea as their own, or gossiping about something we told them in confidence, it shatters our trust in them and may even force us to review our trust in others too. Our first experience of a grant or paper rejection can throw us into turmoil, bedevilled by the question of whether it was us, or the decision process that failed. And each time we experience overwhelm we are forced to stop and question how it happened and what we could change to avoid it.  

Confusion and doubt
These are double hits: not only do we have to deal with the setback itself but it throws us into mental confusion about why we got it so wrong and what else we might be misinterpreting.
 
The mismatch between our beliefs and experience is known as cognitive dissonance. It feels bad, even if we don’t acknowledge it consciously, because it suggests something about our mental map is fundamentally wrong. A minor tweak won’t resolve it this time: it needs completely redrawing to accommodate this new experience. Only then can we decide how to move forward.
 
But does it have to feel bad? What if we can understand and accept the process and see it as a path to growth?

How our minds change – and whether they change
David McRaney’s book ‘How minds change’, especially the chapter titled ‘Disequilibrium’, and two episodes of his podcast ‘You are not so smart’ provide an excellent explanation of cognitive dissonance, which resonate strongly with how I find I have approached challenges like those described above.
 
He reasons that we evolved to be deeply reluctant to change our views on important topics. To do so would be to build our lives on shifting sand, unable to make progress on anything if we don’t hold on to some kind of strong beliefs. Shankar Vedantam in his deeply thought-provoking book ‘Useful Delusions’ also describes how our beliefs are tied up with our identities, a fundamental part of our social standing with our families, friends and colleagues. Changing too much risks exclusion by the people we most care about.  
 
McRaney explains that we need a ‘social safety net’ to change them – someone we respect and trust who aligns with our new beliefs. It can be hard for example to put forward a bold, new hypothesis unless we know our colleagues or collaborators support it because we fear the consequences if it turns out to be wrong. 

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​Stability or change?
Fundamentally redrawing our societal mental map is destabilising. In addition to the social risk, it needs a lot of time and energy so our minds tend to avoid doing so unless absolutely necessary. How we do that is fascinating and explains a lot about research life.
 
One approach is to deny or trivialise the conflicting information. If a paper we know to be good is desk-rejected by the journal, it immediately throws our belief in our own competence into conflict with our faith in peer review. This is painful either way so we often dodge the issue, explaining it away as: “At least they told us quickly”. As though kicking out years of our best work without so much as an expert opinion is somehow OK! 
 
Another is to rationalise the conflict away, distorting or inventing facts if necessary: “The editor is biased” we may say, however little evidence we have.
 
Third, our unconscious minds grasp around for other information that increases consonance with our existing belief to outweigh the one that doesn’t fit: confirmation bias. “They reject lots of people’s papers”, we tell ourselves. This may be true, which may make us feel better about our paper but it still doesn’t mean the publication process identifies the best papers.
 
Eventually, however, there is so much conflicting evidence, or perhaps one event that is so strong, that we have to change our view to accommodate it. “In crisis, we become radically open to changing our mind”, writes McRaney. 

Shattering illusions
If we have a paper desk-rejected that eventually goes on to substantially advance the field, or the plans we proposed in old grants turn out, in hindsight, to have been transformative when someone is finally able to carry them out, this starts to question the validity of decision process itself. This might not be so painful if it wasn't a decision process with such consequences for our career prospects.
 
Like many who have been in this business for long enough, I’ve had these experiences repeatedly. But I have also had the opposite: projects that were funded but then floundered (hint: please don't stop funding our grants; I'm just being honest and pointing out that luck acts in both directions!). The remarkable story of Katalin Kariko, whose Nobel Prize winning research underlying the COVID-19 vaccine was repeatedly rejected both for funding and publication, eventually driving her out of academia altogether, further highlights that such decision making is imperfect.
 
Eventually, I found it hard to escape the thought that publication and funding decisions are not as effective as I had thought. Perhaps many researchers, especially in early career, still think this. 

Epiphanies
There is a reason we use the word ‘disillusioned’ for situations like this. But which one is the problem: our new insight or the illusion we carried in the first place?
 
The surprise for me has been that once I accepted how flawed these systems actually are, processes I had trusted throughout my career, and when I stopped looking for people to blame because I’ve also seen from the decision-maker’s side how hard it is to be sure, my motivation actually increased. This reminds me of the Stockdale paradox, originally described for a situation of far greater hardship. The moment we admit to ourselves the full brutality of the situation is the same moment we can begin to engage with finding our way forward.

It is not the paradigm shift that is hard to live with, it's the dissonance that precedes it!

​For balance I should add that I have also received many peer review comments that have improved our work.  At its best, peer review is a vital process that overcomes the unavoidable self-serving bias that all authors have by bringing new perspectives from people unconnected with the work. I also believe that grant committees do enrich for (as opposed to specifically select) the best projects, and their members try extremely hard to do so. But these decisions are themselves riskier and noisier than many of us imagine. 

Letting go of dissonance to move forward
The mechanisms underlying cognitive dissonance, and our inherent resistance to changing our beliefs, probably evolved in our tribal ancestors, keeping them loyal to their tribe unless all was lost. In today’s ever-changing world it is everywhere, with modern challenges constantly straining those ancient impulses. As scientists, we encounter it every day when our love for research comes up against our dislike of much that comes with it: the funding uncertainty, the administrative burden, some personalities and the limitations of peer review, for example. Once we accept these flaws, however, we can fully appreciate the positives of a research life of which there are many. In the end, the autonomy to follow our curiosity while actually getting paid for it is a privilege shared by few in our society. Only then can we find our way around these frustrations instead of wasting energy anguishing about them.