The Belief Gap and Its Effects

As a medtech innovator, you’ve probably had the experience of presenting your product to potential stakeholders, only to have them walk away uninterested. When you can’t get the traction you need from investors, clinicians, and KOLs, the problem is often caused by the Belief Gap. 

What is the Belief Gap? It’s the space between the quality of your innovation and your ability to inspire genuine belief—the emotional conviction combined with knowledge that drives action—in every stakeholder who matters. Your new device and its potential impact sit on one side of the Belief Gap, and the stakeholders whose support you need are on the other side. Even if you have all the credibility in the world, including powerful data, strong IP, and a great team, you may fail to persuade. Your willingness to take risks, try new things, and push the envelope made your product development possible, but your approach to stakeholders needs to show confidence, certainty, and clarity in order to convince them to back you. The key to closing the gap lies in the science of belief.

In this article, we’ll explore the role that emotion plays in stakeholders’ decisions, and discuss three independent ideas from researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, applied to a medtech context for the first time. 

Emotion is Necessary for Belief

Antonio Damasio, Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, and Antoine Bechara, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology, created the Somatic Marker Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, somatic markers—feelings in the body that relate to emotions—affect a person’s decision-making. Damasio said, “The key idea in the hypothesis is that 'marker' signals influence the processes of response to stimuli, at multiple levels of operation, some of which occur overtly (consciously, 'in mind') and some of which occur covertly (non-consciously, in a non-minded manner).” In other words, decisions are not only made based on thinking, but also on an emotional response that happens automatically, what we might call a “gut reaction.”

Damasio, Bechara, and other researchers, during their studies to test the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, found that patients whose emotional circuitry was severed in the brain became incapable of making decisions entirely. The implication is unambiguous. Without emotion, a person’s decision apparatus doesn't just underperform. It fails.

Damasio's clinical neuroscience established the foundational claim: emotion is not a soft influence on decision-making—it is the mechanism by which decisions get made. For medtech innovators, this means you must appeal to stakeholder emotions on both a conscious and subconscious level if you want them to believe in you and your product.

Belief is a Type of Emotion

In her 2025 Oxford University Press book, Belief as Emotion, philosopher Miriam Schleifer McCormick established her claim that belief is not merely influenced by emotion. She says, “Belief is actually a type of emotion—an irreducibly blended state containing cognitive, motivational, and phenomenological elements.” Dr. McCormick is Lewis T. Booker Professor in Ethics, Department of Philosophy, University of Richmond. Her research focuses on the nature and norms of belief. She states, “Emotion is such a wide tent, encompassing everything from fear and anger to curiosity and contentment; I propose that ‘belief’ be added to the list.”

McCormick says the standard view is that “beliefs are evidence-sensitive, meaning that they are revisable in the face of counterevidence.” But she points out that many people hold beliefs that make no sense given their awareness of evidence that proves they are wrong. These people don’t change their beliefs even though they know the facts. She advocates that a theory of belief “should preserve the idea that humans have many beliefs, including some deeply irrational ones.” Her theory is that “we view belief as a type of emotion where emotions are understood as blended states that transcend the cognitive/non-cognitive divide.”  

To earn someone’s belief, McCormick suggests thinking about the person. Who are they? What do they care about? What might be the source of their resistance? That understanding can be an entry into persuading stakeholders to believe in what you’re saying. Acknowledge where they’re coming from and that it can be hard to take on something new, especially if it involves change. The variety of stakeholders in medtech makes this challenging: whether it’s an investor, a clinician, or a hospital administrator, you need to understand where each one is coming from and gear your presentation, not just the facts but also the emotional appeal, towards their concerns, drivers, and experiences. 

McCormick says, “Try to figure out where is the resistance coming from, where is the friction coming from. That's the first step. This means being able to talk at a deeper level than our culture is used to. We don't talk to each other regularly in those ways that take conversations beyond just ‘Look at this list of all the great things [the product] can do. Look at all the evidence. Look at all the facts.’” Instead, she advocates, “Relate to other people as people. McCormick adds, “According to standard philosophical theories of belief, an ideal believer is a flawless information-processing system. Of course, we fail to live up to this ideal because of our human limitations.” (M.S. McCormick, personal communication, August 3, 2026).

If Damasio proposes that emotion is necessary for any decision, McCormick proposes that belief itself is an emotional state—not a cognitive conclusion that emotion happens to color. This bolsters the idea that medtech leaders seeking belief from stakeholders must reach them at an emotional level.

Belief is Constructed in Real Time

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Theory of Constructed Emotion adds the most operationally significant claim of the three: the emotional state a person experiences is not a fixed biological response to external stimuli. Instead, she argues that emotion is actively constructed by the brain in real time, from prior concepts, context, and the signals the surrounding environment provides. 

Based on the fact that the brain is a complex network in which “instances of an emotion (e.g., fear) are created by multiple spatiotemporal patterns in varying populations of neurons,” she argues that emotion is highly variable. Research has shown that emotion cannot be pinpointed as coming from one area of the brain or one type of neuron. 

Essentially, Barrett says that the brain builds emotion from multiple sources, based on not only previous experiences but also in reaction to external input from whatever materials are available. This includes every element of how a medtech founder communicates with potential stakeholders.

The Emotional Responses of Stakeholders

Taken together, these three frameworks do something that no single one of them accomplishes alone. Damasio establishes that emotion is necessary for belief. McCormick establishes that belief itself is an emotional state. And Barrett establishes that the emotional conditions for belief are constructed from both experience and context—which means they can be shaped, or undermined, by how a MedTech innovator communicates.

What does this mean for medtech companies as you strive to close the Belief Gap? The implications are precise and a bit uncomfortable.

First, every element of your communication—the brand, the deck, the language, the materials, and the people involved—actively contributes to the belief that stakeholders construct in real time. 

Second, all communications that you hope will persuade stakeholders to believe must appeal to their emotions—their context, their experiences, their gut reactions. 

Third, the emotional state that you want to evoke in your stakeholders is necessary to make belief possible. There is no neutral ground; without the emotional response, they will not choose you and your product.

If the emotional conditions for stakeholder belief are constructed by the stakeholder’s brain based on their reactions and past experiences while influenced by the context you provide, you must ask yourself: 

• Do I understand what my stakeholders need/want/fear/care about and have experienced?

• What context do my materials build?

• Am I creating an emotional state that will help stakeholders to believe?

A deep understanding of the answers to these questions can help you to close the Belief Gap. The belief you seek is not blind faith in you and your product. The key is giving people enough evidence to feel that you’re saying something true, while also creating a gut feeling about you that combines with their cognition to result in belief—and the all-important decision to support your journey.

References

1. Damasio, A.R. (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Random House.

2. Damasio, A.R. (1996, October 29). The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1996 Oct 29;351(1346):1413-20. doi: 10.1098/rstb.1996.0125. PMID: 8941953. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8941953/

3. McCormick, M.S. (2025). Belief as Emotion. Oxford University Press.
   

4. McCormick, M.S. (2025, October 21). The divide between belief and emotion is an illusion. https://iai.tv/articles/the-divide-between-belief-and-emotion-is-an-illusion-auid-3396?_auid=2020

5. Rutledge, D. (Host). (2025, May 22). Belief, emotion and trust. The Philosopher’s Zone. ABC Radio National. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/philosopherszone/belief-emotion-and-trust/105281060

6. Barrett, L.F. (2017, January 1). The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Jan 1;12(1):1-23. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsw154. Erratum in: Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Nov 1;12(11):1833. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx060. PMID: 27798257; PMCID: PMC5390700. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27798257/