Posted:
So I've been trying to think how can Uma Shankar's character possibly come out of his religious delusions? His ideas of the role of women vs men in society (wife needing to have xyz qualities), the restrictions with which women should live (they shouldn't go out alone), and the other religious rituals he believes in (shuddi if women gets touched by a stranger stuff) are so outdated it's a joke (except that people like this still probably exist in society).
Kanak has attempted numerous times to debate him on it, but Uma Shankar refuses to discuss them saying it's not the time or place or citing some other excuse. For him they're literally beyond discussion. Which is fairly realistic.
Humans have a tendency to rationalise everything that does not agree with the way they view the world. Uma Shankar's an exceptional case of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Some excerpts about this from Wikipedia:
CONFIRMATION BIAS
Confirmation bias [...] is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.
People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
A series of psychological experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way.
Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in political and organizational contexts.
MOTIVATED REASONING
The processes of motivated reasoning are a type of inferred justification strategy which is used to mitigate cognitive dissonance. When people form and cling to false beliefs despite overwhelming evidence, the phenomenon is labeled "motivated reasoning". In other words, "rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe". This is "a form of implicit emotion regulation in which the brain converges on judgments that minimize negative and maximize positive affect states associated with threat to or attainment of motives
So back to the original question... how can one possibly get someone to "discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime" with new snippets of information which are of no real benefit to them because believing them would mean acknowledging their entire life is a sham?
Dramatically speaking, I feel there has to be something absolutely irrefutable that occurs which forces him to re-examine that entire belief system... like realising the cause of his father's death, his mother's paralysis, his brother running away and other miseries is the very same ritualistic way of living that he has been blindly following all this time.
Realistically speaking though, here's some ideas on how to change someone's mind IRL (if that is a task that you feel up to!):
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-risky-is-it-really/201007/why-changing-somebody-s-mind-or-yours-is-hard-do
"Self-affirmation conditioning studies find that if, before you start to try to change somebody's mind, you first ask them to remember something that gave them a positive view of themselves, they're more likely to be open to facts and to change their opinions. [...] It appears that the less threatened we feel, the more flexible our opinions are likely to be.
So the next time you want to have a truly open-minded conversation on a contentious topic with someone who disagrees with you, don't launch right into the facts. Ask them to tell you about some wonderful thing they did, or success they had, or positive feedback they got for something. And try to remember something like that about yourself. Then you might actually have a conversation, instead of the argument you're headed for instead."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/denial-science-chris-mooney/
"The question then becomes: What can be done to counteract human nature itself?
Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.
This theory is gaining traction in part because of Kahan's work at Yale. In one study, he and his colleagues packaged the basic science of climate change into fake newspaper articles bearing two very different headlinesScientific Panel Recommends Anti-Pollution Solution to Global Warming and "Scientific Panel Recommends Nuclear Solution to Global Warmingand then tested how citizens with different values responded. Sure enough, the latter framing made hierarchical individualists much more open to accepting the fact that humans are causing global warming. Kahan infers that the effect occurred because the science had been written into an alternative narrative that appealed to their pro-industry worldview.
You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a dtente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact. In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the valuesso as to give the facts a fighting chance."
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