pound of cure.” What Franklin is here indicating, in part, is that

Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency makes it much easier to prevent a habit than to

change it.

 

Also tending to be maintained in place by the anti-change tendency of the brain

are one’s previous conclusions, human loyalties, reputational identity,

commitments, accepted role in a civilization, etc. It is not entirely clear why

evolution would program into man’s brain an anti-change mode alongside his

tendency to quickly remove doubt. My guess is the anti-change mode was

significantly caused by a combination of the following factors:

 

It facilitated faster decisions when speed of decision was an important

contribution to the survival of nonhuman ancestors that were prey. It

facilitated the survival advantage that our ancestors gained by cooperating in

groups, which would have been more difficult to do if everyone was always

changing responses. It was the best form of solution that evolution could get to

in the limited number of generations between the start of literacy and today’s

complex modern life.

 

It is easy to see that a quickly reached conclusion, triggered by

Doubt-Avoidance Tendency, when combined with a tendency to resist any change in

that conclusion, will naturally cause a lot of errors in cognition for modern

man. And so it observably works out. We all deal much with others whom we

correctly diagnose as imprisoned in poor conclusions that are maintained by

mental habits they formed early and will carry to their graves.