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THE THEORY OF RESISTANCE

informal observations of everyday life indicate that encounters with contradic-
tory information are common: Argue with a friend, open a newspaper or read
the latest analysis of a moderately familiar topic, and the likelihood of encoun-
tering information that contradicts some prior belief is high. if conversions
are rare, it is because people do not respond to contradictory information by
negating the contradicted beliefs in the logical manner. The question is how
people process contradictory information instead. Works by philosophers,
psycholinguists, psychologists and social scientists combine seamlessly into a
satisfactory theory of resistance, organized around the three core principles of
knowledge-dependent processing, center-periphery structure and dissonance
reduction through peripheral change.

Knowledge-Dependent Processing
Many of our beliefs are formed in response to discourse: We read or hear
something about a topic outside our personal experience. The proper-
ties of discourse comprehension are likely to play a central role in belief
formation. 13
Discourse is necessarily incomplete. A text or a speech that tried to be
completely explicit would be so studded with asides and explanations, defini-
tions and explications that it would, paradoxically, be unreadable. To sharpen
his message, an author or speaker has to leave most of it unstated. This obser-
vation applies with particular force to fundamental assumptions. They are
rarely stated explicitly. Consider the statement: Ann is born in January and
Bill in December of the same year, so she is older than he is. The fundamental
assumptions behind this statement are that time is linear and that people age
as time goes by. However, a storyteller is unlikely to begin, in a galaxy far, far
away, time was linear. … Deep principles of this sort are typically left implicit,
in part because the writer or speaker might not be fully aware of them, and in
part because general principles are assumed to be shared between sender and
receiver and so not in need of explicit statement. 14
The question arises as to what happens when this assumption is not true.
if an author writes a text with a particular set of assumptions, what happens
to readers who do not share those assumptions? Will readers identify the dif-
ferences and reflect on them, or will they find the text incomprehensible?
neither of these is the typical outcome. instead, the reader’s prior knowledge
will be brought to bear, creating a coherent and connected interpretation of