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Does one create a balanced view about something by being repeatedly exposed to it?

Ghost of the dead horse

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I got the idea for the question from some womanizing manual I found from the interwebs. The claim being, the more you try to pick up women and fail miserably, the more you get accustomed to the rejection and until you can be "cool" with both being rejected and accepted.

The reason I'm telling this is because I told someone yesterday they could afford being less extreme about their trust in people's words. This someone usually believes a person if they're on a trusting mood, and disbeliefs them if they're on a distrusting mood. Seeing anyone's words come true puts them in a trusting mood, and seeing anyone's words being untrue puts them in a distrusting mood. Keeping this womanizing example in mind, I encouraged her to develop some analysis skills or "coolness" to her trust instead of dismissing or approving someone blindly. (edit: not in situation when someone is trying to flirt with them, but in situations of contracts and deals.)

But.. is the advice good? What conditions are needed for a person to form a balanced view about distressing situations where the outcome may be success as well as a disaster?

My theory being, if a person keeps a mental record of the conditions related to every situation, they will lose their attachment to any particular situation (and hence the wildly 2-polar opinion) and will instead start to see it as a numbers game, with odds of success being this and odds of disaster being that. That is, if they can win over their personal drama-factor that makes them see everything in extremes.

Ideas?
 

Such Irony

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I think one can be become desensitized to certain fearful or distressing situations by exposure. You live through it, it's not the end of the world and you know how to cope even better next time. I guess it depends on the situation and the number of exposures and whether or not you have some positive experiences as well. If you repeatedly get rejected without ever achieving success even though you are doing the right things, you might just give up. I think you'd become more desensitized to rejection if you had some successes as well.
 

sprinkles

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Exposure doesn't inherently do anything itself. So, I have to say no. This depends on your state of mind and receptiveness.


This is evidenced by the fact that some people become WORSE through increased exposure, and moreso by the fact that some don't need exposure - they get it right with little exposure, or even on the first try.
 

Lily Bart

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I'd think more of an attitude of openness and receptiveness to any social situations you might find yourself in with a short-term goal of assessing which ones were good possibilities and a longer-term goal of only engaging in those that you think are good possibilities would be less discouraging. In other words, I wouldn't enter into every situation with the goal of either getting accepted or rejected so rejection doesn't hurt so much -- that seems somewhat limiting!
 

Coriolis

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If the imbalance comes from ignorance, and the fear that often results, then exposure can provide the knowledge and familiarity needed to correct that. Then you can evaluate the situation for what it really is, in the context of your own values.
 

Beorn

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It depends on whether or not you're dealing with a situation where you can have moral or ethical certainty without familiarity or experience. It reflects poorly on someone's character if they play a numbers game with morality and ethics. Thus, familiarity might be something to be avoided if it would reveal a low likelihood of suffering negative consequences for certain unethical actions and draw someone to take the chance.
 

Coriolis

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Moral and ethical certainty cannot be established when factual and rational certainty are lacking. Familiarity with the facts is thus always a good thing. If your values are not strong enough to withstand this knowledge, that is a serious but different problem, and cannot be addressed through willful ignorance. Ignorance is never preferable to knowledge, and in fact is one of the roots of prejudice as well as poor decisions.
 

Beorn

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Moral and ethical certainty cannot be established when factual and rational certainty are lacking. Familiarity with the facts is thus always a good thing. If your values are not strong enough to withstand this knowledge, that is a serious but different problem, and cannot be addressed through willful ignorance. Ignorance is never preferable to knowledge, and in fact is one of the roots of prejudice as well as poor decisions.

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of acts that I have predetermined immoral where I'm plenty satisfied with being ignorant of all the facts and rationalizations. I don't need to be familiar with explicit material documenting what happened during different human experiments by the nazis to gain more knowledge and the ability to make a full assessment. I don't need to know what valuable information could be gained from such experiments. Some things are so obviously heinous that deep analysis is unneccessary for a moral determination and potentially desensitizing.

Frankly, I'm glad those priests or monks or whoever destroyed the records of Nero's evils.
 

Coriolis

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I'm pretty sure there are plenty of acts that I have predetermined immoral where I'm plenty satisfied with being ignorant of all the facts and rationalizations. I don't need to be familiar with explicit material documenting what happened during different human experiments by the nazis to gain more knowledge and the ability to make a full assessment. I don't need to know what valuable information could be gained from such experiments. Some things are so obviously heinous that deep analysis is unneccessary for a moral determination and potentially desensitizing.
I had no idea your life required you to contemplate the performance of such grave acts. In any case, I prefer to retain knowledge of what the Nazis did, as a lesson for future generations lest it be repeated. Knowledge of something does not lead automatically to its approval, and can frequently put disapproval on a much sounder and better documented footing. Ignorance is never preferable.
 

Beorn

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I had no idea your life required you to contemplate the performance of such grave acts. In any case, I prefer to retain knowledge of what the Nazis did, as a lesson for future generations lest it be repeated. Knowledge of something does not lead automatically to its approval, and can frequently put disapproval on a much sounder and better documented footing. Ignorance is never preferable.

Ok, I'll give you an everyday example where ignorance is preferable. There are all sorts of different professions with ethical codes. Where there is an ethical requirement (that doesn't run the risk of violating a more fundamental moral value) set by an authority certain further knowledge may not be necessary or preferable. The reason is that at their worst people are purely consequentialist and further information might tempt them to break the code based on weighing probabilities and consequences. So let's say I become familiar with people who regularly dip into their client's funds and return the money without ever getting caught or losing their client's money. I learn exactly how and when to do this to reduce the risk of getting caught significantly. With that knowledge I'm now more tempted to break the ethical code should I have a sudden need for money. This may or may not cause me a problem. But, such professional ethical standards are set not to just protect the individual, but to protect clients and the collective professionals. So, if everybody in the profession does what I do then on the whole it will cause more damage to more clients and the reputation of the profession than if everyone remained ignorant of exactly how to go about breaking the rule to minimize individual risk.

In other words the affect of knowledge on temptation should be taken into account.
 

Coriolis

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You seem unable to acknowledge that someone can be well aware of how to accomplish something unethical, but still recognize it as wrong, and have enough self-discipline (or perhaps self-respect) to refrain from doing it. I have always been far more tempted by lack of knowledge than knowledge, however. Once I know and understand, that is satifaction enough. Moreover, as in your example, having the knowledge might enable me to recognize when someone else is doing it, so I can try to intervene. My values are still my values, and I feel little compulsion to do those things that violate them.
 

Beorn

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You seem unable to acknowledge that someone can be well aware of how to accomplish something unethical, but still recognize it as wrong, and have enough self-discipline (or perhaps self-respect) to refrain from doing it. I have always been far more tempted by lack of knowledge than knowledge, however. Once I know and understand, that is satifaction enough. Moreover, as in your example, having the knowledge might enable me to recognize when someone else is doing it, so I can try to intervene. My values are still my values, and I feel little compulsion to do those things that violate them.

Well, then I think you're just a better person than me and most people.
 

Coriolis

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Well, then I think you're just a better person than me and most people.
I know my own imperfections well enough to find that thought disappointing, and I know you far too little for comparison. As cynical as I can be sometimes, I suppose I just have a higher estimation of the average person's inclination to do the right thing. The question of whether human nature is essentially good or evil, however, is fundamental in philosophy, and not surprisingly unresolved.
 

sprinkles

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I did not mean that it LITERALLY does nothing. It doesn't do what the OP expects as a rule.

Even in that PDF it says:
Besides, an additional psychological experiment demonstrated that the exposure to
pictures of people the subjects did not like made them dislike them even more.

So no. The mere exposure effect does not as a rule make you better able to deal with things.

Not everyone accepts rejection based on exposure. Some just absolutely flip out the more they are rejected.
 

sprinkles

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Or put it this way - exposure without skills does not help you get better at being balanced in different situations.

If you have the correct mindset you can make exposure work for you perhaps, but exposure in itself will not help someone balance their life out.

If mere exposure can fix things then there would not be any whacked out people.
 

Within

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I did not mean that it LITERALLY does nothing. It doesn't do what the OP expects as a rule.

Even in that PDF it says:


So no. The mere exposure effect does not as a rule make you better able to deal with things.

Not everyone accepts rejection based on exposure. Some just absolutely flip out the more they are rejected.

It's a perfect example actually. Apply it to a song that you really dislike the first time you heard it, you know the one who won't let off, the one that keeps running through the hallways of your mind. Speaking from my own point of view, not always, not even that often but a few slips through the cracks and you start to enjoy hearing it. (Combo with the setting, external stimuli.) I think that you're too focused on what's good or bad in 'dealing with things' as you said. The same exact thing applies to relationships and what you search for. Think for yourself and look, what kind of models have you been imprinted with growing up? There's people who actually go out of their way to search out potential partners that would reject them at first because that's how a certain aspect of them has been molded. Once you reach the peak of understanding that about yourself you can change it or if you're comfortable with it continue along the same path.

That's a fact, and a very well known one. Even if that only partially describes the point I was making. I'm too indolent to take you to school right now.

If mere exposure can fix things then there would not be any whacked out people.
I can only assume that this is not supposed to be taken LITERALLY either. The apple of my eye.
 
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