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Cognitive Dissonance

Totenkindly

@.~*virinaĉo*~.@
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This statement could be considered irrational but it is very close to the essence of acceptance that sometimes things appear contradictory while still appearing to be true! A sort of fourth dimension of feeling.

Yes. My rationality moved from the binary either/or sort into a sense that in an ambiguous world some things SEEM to overlap. Whether they truly do, or whether the overlap itself is fabricated because it's all truly one individual entity, or whether it's merely the inadequacies of the human perception system (or even the human cognitive process) at work here is still debatable.

"Bittersweet" is a perfect word for some feeling states I experience. Neither poles but a blend of apparent opposites - sweet and sour.

Sweet and sour (asian food), sweet and salty (chocolate covered pretzels), etc... big yums. :) But I know some people don't like the combination of seemingly opposing tastes.
 

Totenkindly

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posts moved

Superfluous three-way dialog over brit/amer punctuation moved here
 

redacted

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My dear Dissonance,

This is silly.

I trust qualified Psychometricians in the same way I trust qualified Astronomers.

I am not a qualifed Psychometrician nor a qualified Astronomer, but when every Astronomer tells me that astrology has no truth value, I read their article to see if I am persuaded by their empirical evidence and logic.

And when every qualified Psychometrican tells me that MBTI is neither Valid nor Reliable, I read their articles to see if I am persuaded by their empirical evidence and logic.

I certainly do not rely on the cult of astrology to tell me whether it is true, any more than I rely on the cult of MBTI to tell me it is true.

I seek corroborative evidence - and there is none.

How about if you list some points you read in those articles and engage in discussion over them?

No one is going to care that you claim you've read something somewhere unless you replicate the information.
 

EJCC

The Devil of TypoC
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How about if you list some points you read in those articles and engage in discussion over them?

No one is going to care that you claim you've read something somewhere unless you replicate the information.

Yes, exactly. One other thing on that topic - Why have you (Victor, I mean) posted on this site 862 times if you don't think MBTI holds merit?

With regard to cognitive dissonance, though, I always feel like everything has to make sense. If it doesn't, I assume that there's sense behind it somehow that I just don't understand. I guess that's my way of dealing with it - forgetting about it and moving on.
 

Ism

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In short, by trying to avoid being wrong about anything, we often lack the ability to be (mostly) right about anything.

Agreed, most certainly.

At times, and not frequently, I've debated the concept of God/No God/Creator/Passive Being/Entity on a very superficial level. I've always just skimmed the surface, and haven't really worked with any facts, details or layered theories to prove or disprove any one argument, but maybe that's because of this 'cognitive dissonance' the OP brought up.

A brief background. My mother raised me, and taught me to believe in God, though very loosely. It was basically a matter of 'God exists', and nothing more. Sure, she's told me some things, they were pretty vague, however, and weren't very substaintial. We hardly ever went to church, and hardly ever attend church now, so those ideals never fully embeded in my mind. When we actually did go to a sermon, I fell asleep out of boredom (when I was under ten), and didn't want to participate in the little youth sessions they had 'cause I wanted to stick with my mom and the adults. (Plus, they always seemed to make you do work, and pray afterwards. Not that that's a bad thing, but it made me sort of uncomfortable, especially when I had to say something.) The point is, those religious morals never stood firmly and rigidly, and were and are quite weak, instead.

So, with that, I started to explore the possibility of other alternatives to a higher power, or if there was even one at all. That, however, was, again, done so very shallowly and without much persistence. Now, with the idea of the possibility of another religious belief, and the one I was raised to believe (very loosely), I'm at ends with myself. Why? Because I don't want to be wrong. If I choose to go without a god, or towards another religion, and it turns out that a heaven and God do exist, I burn in Hell. If I go with God, and it turns out to not be true, I can either suffer in limbo from some other religion, would have unnecessarily believed a concept that wasn't true, and would realize I may not be too great a person if the only reason I didn't stave from the 'right path' was for a not so good intention (which was so I wouldn't suffer the consequences.)

I just want to make the right(correct?) decision. D8

Does that help any, at least as far as purpose goes?
 

Nocapszy

no clinkz 'til brooklyn
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How about if you list some points you read in those articles and engage in discussion over them?

No one is going to care that you claim you've read something somewhere unless you replicate the information.

Maybe not, but some of us obviously care what he believes.
I'm not a psychometrician.

I'm not even a scientist. Fuck the scientific community.
 

Anja

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This is a saying within the United States of America.

And it is a pregnant saying for the US makes the distinction between fakery and sincerity.

In the US it is compliment to be called sincere and an insult to be called a fake.

And the US is a constant struggle beween fakery and the sincere - and fakery often wins - and phoniness has been raised to a high art.

So everyone tries to appear sincere in the eyes of others but there is the constant, ever present, temptation to fake it for personal advantage.

And this temptation is so common that it has given rise to the truism or saying, "In America when you can fake sincerity, you've got it made".

I see. I'm not familiar with that. Seems a bizarre concept. My initial thought is that only others who attempt to fake sincerity would recognize the game and play along with it.
 

m a r r o k

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But MBTI looks just like a cult. It has its own jargon. It has its own Guru. It is impervious to evidence. And cults are in a cleft stick. As the evidence piles up against them, they answer it with nastiness. And sometimes it can get very nasty.

Bion's "Experiences in Groups" explores groups dynamics. He says "Freud's view of the dynamics of the group seems to me to require supplementing rather than correction." He accepts Freud's claim that the family group is the basis for all groups but adds that

this view does not go far enough... I think that the central position in group dynamics is occupied by the more primitive mechanisms which Melanie Klein has described as peculiar to the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. In other words, I feel... that it is not simply a matter of the incompleteness of the illumination provided by Freud's discovery of the family group as the prototype of all groups, but the fact that this incompleteness leaves out the source of the main emotional drives of the group (ibid.)

Further investigation shows that each basic assumption contains features that correspond so closely with extremely primitive part objects that sooner or later psychotic anxiety, appertaining to these primitive relationships, is released. These anxieties, and the mechanisms peculiar to them, have already been displayed in psychoanalysis by Melanie Klein, and her descriptions tally well with the emotional states

of the basic assumption group. Such groups have aims

far different either from the overt task of the group or even from the tasks that would appear to be appropriate to Freud's view of the group as based on the family group. But approached from the angle of psychotic anxiety, associated with phantasies of primitive part object relationships... the basic assumption phenomena appear far more to have the characteristics of defensive reactions to psychotic anxiety, and to be not so much at variance with Freud's views as supplementary to them. In my view, it is necessary to work through both the stresses that appertain to family patterns and the still more primitive anxieties of part object relationships. In fact I consider the latter to contain the ultimate sources of all group behavior.

In Bion's view, then, what matters in individual and group behaviour is more primitive than the Freudian level of explanation. The ultimate sources of our distress are psychotic anxieties, and much of what happens in individuals and groups is a result of defences erected against psychotic anxieties, so that we do not have to endure them consciously. Bion says of the group,

My impression is that the group approximates too closely, in the minds of the individuals composing it, to very primitive phantasies about the contents of the mother's body. The attempt to make a rational investigation of the dynamics of the group is therefore perturbed by fears, and mechanisms for dealing with them, which are characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position. The investigation cannot be carried out without the stimulation and activation of those levels... the elements of the emotional situation are so closely allied to phantasies of the earliest anxieties that the group is compelled, whenever the pressure of anxiety becomes too great, to take defensive action.

The psychotic anxieties in question involve splitting and projective identification and are characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, now as group processes. According to Bion, the move from the individual to the group does not raise new issues about explanation. He says a little further on, "The apparent difference between group psychology and individual psychology is an illusion produced by the fact that the group brings into prominence phenomena which appear alien to an observer unaccustomed to using the group." At the heart of his ideas about groups is the observation that although groups are normally set up to pursue sensible and realistic goals -- he calls this the 'work group' -- they inevitably from time to time fall into madness, which he calls 'basic assumption' functioning. Bion specified three types of basic assumption functioning - dependency, pairing and fight-flight. You can read about these in his book.

From time to time each group would fall into a species of madness and start arguing and forming factions over matters which, on later reflection, would not seem to justify so much passion and distress. More often than not, the row would end up in a split or in the departure or expulsion of one or more scapegoats. According to Klein, our minds are always in one or the other of two positions. One involves extreme splits, brittle guilt, blaming, hating, scapegoating, paranoia and the tendency to aggression and fighting, whether verbal or physical. The other involves granting that life is not just extremes but consists of things all mixed up, some good, some bad: the middle ground. In this frame of mind guilt is not punitive but reparative. One is not in a manic state but a rather subdued, depressive (not to say depressed) one. Miracles don't happen. Hard graft is one's lot. You have to sit on your extreme feelings and live and let live.

In the paranoid-schizoid position anxieties of a primitive nature threaten the immature ego and lead to a mobilisation of primitive defences. Splitting, idealisation and projective identification operate to create rudimentary structures made up of idealised good objects kept far apart from persecuting bad ones. The individual's own impulses are similarly split and he directs all his love towards the good object and all his hatred against the bad one. As a consequence of the projection, the leading anxiety is paranoid, and the preoccupation is with survival of the self. Thinking is concrete because of the confusion between self and object which is one of the consequences of projective identification. The depressive position represents an important developmental advance in which whole objects begin to be recognized and ambivalent impulses become directed towards the primary object. These changes result from an increased capacity to integrate experiences and lead to a shift in primary concern from the survival of the self to a concern for the object upon which the individual depends. Destructive impulses lead to feelings of loss and guilt which can be more fully experienced and which consequently enable mourning to take place. The consequences include a development of symbolic function and the emergence of reparative capacities which become possible when thinking no longer has to remain concrete.

Quite a lot of what happens in a Bionian group is strange, quite a lot (for the outside observer) is funny. It may begin with a long silence. Something is expected of the leader or of someone. This finally gets said, and the leader may say, "It appears that something is expected of me" and revert to a silence which sorely tries the patience of the group members. A member may offer a hypothesis about what is supposed to happen, and this is likely to be contradicted by another. People who have not spoken are challenged and do or don't speak. Some speak too soon and too often. There is often a search for something, something believed to be hidden and meant to be discovered. Members seek the approval of the leader, others seek alliances, some have strong feelings of love or hate or comradeship; others get cross or cry. Occasionally someone leaves, usually to return, sometimes not.

Someone bids for the role of leader and gets sniped at. And so it goes: anxieties expressed, a process with no definitive end point, reflecting upon and hopefully learning from experience. In particular, one is invited to notice how much of what one feels and concludes comes from the inside, from projection. What one projects often has an external target, and the target usually responds and displays some degree of what he or she is accused of. This is the psychological mechanism called projective identification. The projector is vindicated. In the group, however, there is an opportunity to notice this process, reflect upon it and take back the projection. Learning to take responsibility for one’s projections and take them back is the essence of successful psychotherapy and of the experiential learning that occurs in Bionian groups. People have often marvelled at Bion's apparently gnomic or off-the-wall utterances in groups. Was he simply declining projections by not taking up whatever the projecting person was trying to put into him? He would thereby be inviting them to think about their projection and perhaps take it back into themselves and stop casting him in a role that he was unwilling to play.
 

Mole

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Bion's "Experiences in Groups" explores groups dynamics. He says "Freud's view of the dynamics of the group seems to me to require supplementing rather than correction." He accepts Freud's claim that the family group is the basis for all groups but adds that

of the basic assumption group. Such groups have aims

In Bion's view, then, what matters in individual and group behaviour is more primitive than the Freudian level of explanation. The ultimate sources of our distress are psychotic anxieties, and much of what happens in individuals and groups is a result of defences erected against psychotic anxieties, so that we do not have to endure them consciously. Bion says of the group,

The psychotic anxieties in question involve splitting and projective identification and are characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, now as group processes. According to Bion, the move from the individual to the group does not raise new issues about explanation. He says a little further on, "The apparent difference between group psychology and individual psychology is an illusion produced by the fact that the group brings into prominence phenomena which appear alien to an observer unaccustomed to using the group." At the heart of his ideas about groups is the observation that although groups are normally set up to pursue sensible and realistic goals -- he calls this the 'work group' -- they inevitably from time to time fall into madness, which he calls 'basic assumption' functioning. Bion specified three types of basic assumption functioning - dependency, pairing and fight-flight. You can read about these in his book.

From time to time each group would fall into a species of madness and start arguing and forming factions over matters which, on later reflection, would not seem to justify so much passion and distress. More often than not, the row would end up in a split or in the departure or expulsion of one or more scapegoats. According to Klein, our minds are always in one or the other of two positions. One involves extreme splits, brittle guilt, blaming, hating, scapegoating, paranoia and the tendency to aggression and fighting, whether verbal or physical. The other involves granting that life is not just extremes but consists of things all mixed up, some good, some bad: the middle ground. In this frame of mind guilt is not punitive but reparative. One is not in a manic state but a rather subdued, depressive (not to say depressed) one. Miracles don't happen. Hard graft is one's lot. You have to sit on your extreme feelings and live and let live.

In the paranoid-schizoid position anxieties of a primitive nature threaten the immature ego and lead to a mobilisation of primitive defences. Splitting, idealisation and projective identification operate to create rudimentary structures made up of idealised good objects kept far apart from persecuting bad ones. The individual's own impulses are similarly split and he directs all his love towards the good object and all his hatred against the bad one. As a consequence of the projection, the leading anxiety is paranoid, and the preoccupation is with survival of the self. Thinking is concrete because of the confusion between self and object which is one of the consequences of projective identification. The depressive position represents an important developmental advance in which whole objects begin to be recognized and ambivalent impulses become directed towards the primary object. These changes result from an increased capacity to integrate experiences and lead to a shift in primary concern from the survival of the self to a concern for the object upon which the individual depends. Destructive impulses lead to feelings of loss and guilt which can be more fully experienced and which consequently enable mourning to take place. The consequences include a development of symbolic function and the emergence of reparative capacities which become possible when thinking no longer has to remain concrete.

Quite a lot of what happens in a Bionian group is strange, quite a lot (for the outside observer) is funny. It may begin with a long silence. Something is expected of the leader or of someone. This finally gets said, and the leader may say, "It appears that something is expected of me" and revert to a silence which sorely tries the patience of the group members. A member may offer a hypothesis about what is supposed to happen, and this is likely to be contradicted by another. People who have not spoken are challenged and do or don't speak. Some speak too soon and too often. There is often a search for something, something believed to be hidden and meant to be discovered. Members seek the approval of the leader, others seek alliances, some have strong feelings of love or hate or comradeship; others get cross or cry. Occasionally someone leaves, usually to return, sometimes not.

Someone bids for the role of leader and gets sniped at. And so it goes: anxieties expressed, a process with no definitive end point, reflecting upon and hopefully learning from experience. In particular, one is invited to notice how much of what one feels and concludes comes from the inside, from projection. What one projects often has an external target, and the target usually responds and displays some degree of what he or she is accused of. This is the psychological mechanism called projective identification. The projector is vindicated. In the group, however, there is an opportunity to notice this process, reflect upon it and take back the projection. Learning to take responsibility for one’s projections and take them back is the essence of successful psychotherapy and of the experiential learning that occurs in Bionian groups. People have often marvelled at Bion's apparently gnomic or off-the-wall utterances in groups. Was he simply declining projections by not taking up whatever the projecting person was trying to put into him? He would thereby be inviting them to think about their projection and perhaps take it back into themselves and stop casting him in a role that he was unwilling to play.

I attended a Bion group once every week or two weeks for two years. It was a life changing experience.

I would be happy to discuss it with you. And the most interesting question is, should MBTI Central aim at becoming a mature group or should we remain a paranoid-schizoid and depressive group?

In other words, should we remain a cult or should we own our projections?

Victor.
 

Mole

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I see. I'm not familiar with that. Seems a bizarre concept. My initial thought is that only others who attempt to fake sincerity would recognize the game and play along with it.

We are surrounded by it on TV. People on TV are acting. We know they are good actors, when they can fake sincerity.

So you have it made on TV when you can fake sincerity.

It seems really obvious unless you believe that the people on TV are real.

And of course TV itself plays into this juvenile fantasy by holding, "Reality Shows".

And look how popular they are - people want to be fooled - and they want to fool other people.

Faking sincerity is big business.
 

Mole

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The Pseudo and the Real

Of course the people on TV are acting. So they are pseudo people.

But we spend many hours each day, from an early age, watching them. So how natural for us to think pseudo people are real people.

So how natural for us to be drawn to pseudo psychology like MBTI.

A pseudo psychology like MBTI resonates with the pseudo people we spend our lives with on TV.

So how natural for us to give ourselves a pseudonym - look, up to your left.

And when everything around us, including ourselves, are pseudo - nothing is pseudo.

And so we become blind to the distinction between the pseudo and the real.

And we can't tell the difference - and we don't want to tell the difference - between the pseudo and the real.

We can't tell the difference between pseudo sincerity and real sincerity.

Irony will show us the difference - but we have lost our sense of irony.
 
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