The Basic Idea
If you took a physics class in high school, you may remember learning about inertia, an object’s tendency to resist change in motion.1 If the object is resting, it tends to stay at rest. If the object is moving, it will stay at its pace unless interrupted by an external force. Only with external resistance will the state of the object change.
Humans also experience inertia.2 We prefer to keep behaving as we already are; we stick with the default option unless we are specifically motivated to change it. Inertia also applies to our beliefs; we tend to resist changes in our ways of thinking. After all, relying on predetermined mental models appears an efficient method for managing behaviors and decisions.3 However, there is danger in overreliance on these defaults.
Before exploring inertia, there is an important distinction to be made between it and belief perseverance. Belief perseverance, also known as conceptual conservatism, is the tendency to maintain a belief despite being confronted with explicitly contradictory information.4 5 Belief perseverance relies on justifying invalidated information, and is thus the perseverance of the belief itself, while inertia is the perseverance of how one interprets information.2
Silence is the language of inertia.
– Margaret Heffernan, business management expert and author of Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
