Confabulation
The Happiness Hypothesis said:
The point of these studies is that moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment. When you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you to explain your judgment, you confabulate. You don’t really know why you think something is beautiful, but your interpreter module (the rider) is skilled at making up reasons, as Gazzaniga found in his split-brain studies. You search for a plausible reason for liking the painting, and you latch on to the first reason that makes sense (maybe something vague about color, or light, or the reflection of the painter in the clown’s shiny nose). Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.
Haidt, Jonathan (2006-12-26). The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (p. 21). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
Wikipedia said:
Confabulation is distinguished from lying as there is no intent to deceive and the person is unaware the information is false.[4] Although individuals can present blatantly false information, confabulation can also seem to be coherent, internally consistent, and relatively normal.[4]
Most known cases of confabulation are symptomatic of brain damage or dementias, such as aneurysm, Alzheimer's disease, or Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome (a common manifestation of thiamine deficiency caused by alcoholism).[5] Additionally confabulation often occurs in people who are suffering from anticholinergic toxidrome when interrogated about bizarre or irrational behavior.[6][7]
Confabulated memories of all types most often occur in autobiographical m emory, and are indicative of a complicated and intricate process that can be led astray at any point during encoding, storage, or recall of a memory.[3] This type of confabulation is commonly seen in Korsakoff's syndrome.[8]
The main difference between between Haidt's description and Wikipedia's is that the Wikipedia article is concerned with the pathological issues w/r to confabulation. As Haidt explains, the confabulation is always there. It's just that for a healthy person, the confabulation isn't only invisible to the individual, but it's pretty much invisible to everyone else, too, because it often results in a completely plausible (and perhaps even close to factual) explanation of shared reality.
Awesome summary of confabulation:
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/what-is-a-mind/0/steps/9266
I think this is a very significant insight for understanding the human psyche. When you understand that to the degree that any sort of cognitive dissonance occurs, people will confabulate to account for the dissonance. This isn't a "wrong" behavior of the mind, it's just occasionally maladaptive. Normally, we confabulate, then confabulate again, and again, iteratively, as we get closer to a more and more true understanding of things. Confabulation is just the mind doing its job of trying to understand the world. When that understanding is incomplete, it is easy to see how the confabulation doesn't work right, but it's not working right because something is missing (the man's memory, in the case of the link, for example). But you can see that even in that extreme case of the man's missing memory, the confabulation is doing its very best to make sense of reality. It just happens to be wrong.
We can see confabulation at work in our dreams. We can awake from a dream that makes perfect sense while we are dreaming, but upon reflection, the dream makes no sense at all. While we are dreaming, we are confabulating all the random thoughts that occur while we are asleep, turning them into a narrative. Only under the cold light of reality does the narrative become revealed as being complete fantasy.
But because confabulation is always at work, because it is an essential part of the process of how our mind makes sense out of the world, we need to understand how it can fail. We need to be able to see the difference between a conspiracy theory and a realistic analysis of systemic problems, for example. We can develop tools to catch ourselves when we confabulate, spotting the nonsense before we start asserting it as truth to others. And, finally, we rely on other people to point out our confabulations to ourselves, being called out on our BS helps us tune our interpretations of the world to be more accurate.
So yes, those people who morally disagree with you are confabulating when they explain their logic to you, just as you are confabulating when you explain your moral principles to them. Each of you can see how the other is stretching their principles to fit the facts, as opposed to coming up with principles that actually fit the facts.
This is the essence of confirmation bias, and it is the key thing that we need to get past if we're going to discuss morality civilly with one another.
One thing I really like about the concept, and the video I link highlights this: people who confabulate are stating falsehoods, but
they are not lying. There is no intent to deceive. Once you realize this, then the temptation to regard your moral opponent as evil or stupid (mostly) goes away. You then have the tools to explain your understanding in their terms, understanding their belief system and how your beliefs map to theirs.
We are all hypocrites, not because we are morally bankrupt, but precisely because we are all trying to understand the world, and we simply do not have access to enough information or processing power to truly understand everything about the world.
