Cognitive Inertia

Cognitive inertia is the tendency for a person's established way of thinking about a matter, belief or strategy to resist change, often described in the clinical and neuroscientific literature as a lack of motivation to generate the cognitive processes needed to attend to a problem. The term borrows the physics idea of inertia to describe resistance to changing a mode of processing that has already been used for some time, and it is often confused with belief perseverance, though cognitive inertia is specifically a perseverance in how information is interpreted rather than in the belief itself. It has been causally linked to disregard for looming threats to a person's health or environment, to enduring political values, and to difficulty switching between tasks, and economic and industrial psychologists have studied it to explain resistance to change in brand loyalty, group brainstorming and business strategy; in clinical settings it has also been used as a diagnostic tool for neurodegenerative disease, depression and anxiety, though critics argue the term oversimplifies resistant thought processes and that a fuller account should also draw on motivation, emotion and developmental factors.