Is Stubbornness Hardwired Into the Brain?

When you think about someone stubborn, chances are you attribute their unwillingness to bend to their personalities. They may be arrogant, narcissistic, or just plain “contrarian,” but in any case, it’s something about the way their traits line up that causes them to be so rigid.

What if it wasn’t personality at all? Is it possible that people who seem to be stubborn just are unable to take in all the relevant data from the situations in which they find themselves? Perhaps they let their internal assessment override the information that more flexible people can use as guides to their behavior.

Neuroscience Looks at Stubbornness

A 2019 review paper by the University of London’s Daniel Yon and colleagues (2019) analyzed the tendency that people have to engage in “top-down” processing, in which people base expectations about what will happen on their own previous experience. Your brain learns to be stubborn, in this sense, because it needs to guide your actions in the most efficient way possible. “Predictive coding,” or “PC,” suggests that “we infer the most likely state of the outside world by minimizing prediction errors about its contents” (p. 6). Ideally, the brain updates its predictions based on what happens, but sometimes it doesn’t.

In these cases, the brain engages in stubborn predictions in which it directs reflexive activities so that the predictions come true. Using one of the Yon et al. examples, through PC you might reach for a glass of water in the middle of the night that you “think” is there, and your brain will move your hand accordingly. But maybe the glass isn’t exactly where you thought it should be. A stubborn prediction would lead you either to knock it over or just reach out into empty air.

Stubborn predictions are resistant to learning, the UCL team goes on to note and therefore could play a role in psychological disorders such as depression. People who view their situations as confirming the negative biases they hold about their self-worth will continue to regard even good experiences as evidence that people don’t like them.

How Predictive Coding Operates in Everyday Life

Taking the PC approach to the next level, Alessandro Bartolotti of the University “G. d'Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara and colleagues (2024) note that the PC framework “has been exceptionally successful at explaining low-level perceptual abilities and the neural processes that underlie them.” In other words, when you’re unsure how to interpret or unable to see the details of a visual display (such as where that glass is), your brain fills in the blanks. When prediction errors fail to lead people to adjust their expectations, you’re left with stubbornness.

In exploring the PC model and its relevance to a broad array of social and cultural phenomena, the Italian team notes the importance of play as a way to break up a stubborn PC system. They also point out that the search for novelty is almost as universal as the tendency to view the world from a stable set of structures, citing previous authors who claim that “humans are intrinsically motivated in seeking novelty in their experiential sphere.” Play trains the brain to look at things in novel ways, and exposure to the arts can be a “primary experimental space tailored to exercise social cognition.”

All of these attempts to see things differently must operate within a social world that also values sameness and routine. Your cultural background sets out certain parameters of what is acceptable, and these feed into your brain’s PCs. Rituals, such as those associated with cultural traditions, further bake those PCs into immutable entities. Maybe you suggested to your family that you spend a holiday at a vacation spot instead of home. “What, skip Thanksgiving dinner this year? How could you even suggest that?” As Bartolotti et al. note, “Ritual gatherings provide regular opportunities to synchronize and entrench model parameters guiding inferences.”

It's not all that easy to avoid stubborn predictions, then, given the universality of routines, norms, and shared cultural activities. The challenge is made even more difficult by the findings that some of the brain’s top-down activities start at the “shallower,” sensory areas, and level of processing. The visual cortex is downstream of the frontal cortex, and expectations that build up based on visual experience can start right there instead of having to travel upward. They’re faster than frontal-based expectations and therefore needed in emergencies that demand immediate action (keeping that glass from falling to the ground). In either case, however, Bartolotti et al. maintain that “decoupled imaginary worlds” can keep your brain from settling into a state of inertia when it comes to new experiences.

Employing Creativity to Overcome Stubbornness

If indeed stubbornness is so hardwired into various circuits of the brain, shaking those circuits up through exposure to new ideas and imaginative activities seems to be the remedy. You might not get to that vacation spot for the holiday, but just thinking that things don’t always have to be the same from year to year can give you a little “experimental” play space.

Neuroscience Essential Reads

How Your Brain Recognizes Emotion Through Brain Circuitry

In the “I” of the Beholder: How Art Speaks to an Individual

How about dealing with the stubborn individual whose personality, you assume, underlies their rigidity? Taking them to a museum or concert probably will not provide a permanent fix. However, based on the PC approach as expressed in both of these studies, you can at least realize that the problem may be one involving the way they use their experiences to confirm their beliefs.

It is not always fun to have a debate with someone whose views are indeed baked into their brain. You’re likely to face a great deal of blowback, some of which may be highly personal and insulting (i.e., they attack your own less-than-traditional views on life). However, the Italian research team believes it may be possible to shift things a little with “counterfactual scenarios and unconventional narratives encountered in fictional worlds.” The “what-if” thinking of a counterfactual scenario may help people think about events that have happened from a slightly different perspective. The fictional world may be one in a TV series or movie that both of you enjoy. How a “stubborn king” in a fantasy world handles the defection of his children might provide a safer basis for debate than accusing this person of failing to yield to changing circumstances.

To sum up, the brain’s constant search for sameness can be highly adaptive. However, turning that search into one for novelty, at least some of the time, can help pave an even more adaptive path toward tuning into new experiences.