Dan Ariely's book, Misbelief, explores solution aversion — a cognitive bias where people deny or minimize problems when they dislike the likely solutions. Reading it, I kept thinking about museums.
A leadership team might minimize declining school visits when addressing it would mean questioning their exhibition philosophy. Museum professionals might downplay evidence that diversifying a collection has not attracted the audiences they expected. Taking that evidence seriously could mean questioning whether collections are the main source of value and paying more attention to what communities actually want. If that threatens their expertise and professional identity, dismissing the evidence offers a way to avoid the change.
When fixing an issue would require accepting something that threatens core values or beliefs, the brain's easier path is to decide the problem isn't really a problem. Psychologists see this across domains: people reject climate science when solutions feel politically threatening, dismiss health research when it demands lifestyle changes they're unwilling to make.
In museums, the pattern appears whenever institutional identity becomes inseparable from the practices causing the problem.
The pattern emerges when solutions require acknowledging past mistakes, challenge institutional identity narratives, or feel imposed when decision-makers lack agency over alternatives. The longer it persists, the worse the underlying problem may become.
What Sometimes Shifts It
Evidence alone may fail when the implications threaten professional identity. What may work (per Ariely): expanding the solution space so museums see options beyond one threatening path, reframing solutions as mission extensions rather than departures, starting with low-stakes experiments, or showing peer precedent that solutions don't destroy institutional identity.
Connects to: Action Gaps vs. Information Gaps.