Cognitive Dissonance

[Totenkindly]

I should mention that this is not necessarily something for us to brag about; our beliefs often conflict because one or the other is simply wrong (possibly because of faulty reasoning), forcing us to constantly acknowledge our moral and intellectual shortcomings. This in turn often leads to chronic self-esteem and motivation issues, which subsequently influences everything about our lives. In short, by trying to avoid being wrong about anything, we often lack the ability to be (mostly) right about anything.

That sounds about right, and is why people with those personality traits tend not to be as effective in life as they could be until they get past the need to resolve those sorts of dissonances in order to act.

(I do not want to call it the "the hell with it" strategy, but in general at some point, you just learn to make choices rather than waiting too long or shooting yourself in the foot over whether you might potentially make an error.)

I'll respond to other stuff later (including that dear woman who keeps beating me in the head for ignoring her... ), I'm beat tonight.

[The_Liquid_Laser]

I suffer a lot of cognitive dissonance trying to make sense of politics. I go to a conservative website and the consensus is that liberals are ignorant and have all the facts wrong. I go to a liberal leaning website and they say the same thing about conservatives. I have to wonder if these two groups are even on the same planet sometimes.

I think what drives me nuts is that I see very little agreement about facts. I can understand people can form different opinions from the same facts, but these two groups can't even agree on the facts. How can a person expect to make an informed opinion if there is so much doubt about what is the correct information?

[Ilah]

Victor,

I am not disagreeing (or agreeing) with you. All I am saying is that in order to debate something with you I need to have details. If I don't have details I don't have anything to craft an argument aaround.

For example, why is it concidered invalid and unreliable? I don't want any circular logic. By that I mean things like "it is concidered unreliable because it is unreliable." These are statements that don't really explain or add any more information.

I get the impression you hold your beliefs based on what qualified psychometricains believe (or don't believe). What I want to know is why they feel it is unreliable and invalid. Something more that "because it is." Surely the must have good reasons for believing this, but so far you haven't given us any.

What specifically is wrong with it? Is it the idea that everyone fits into one of 16 categories? Is it the idea that personality is constant? The choice of function? The descriptions of the functions? The way the functions alternate between i and e? Is it the test itself (rather than the personality type theory) you find flawed? All of the above? Something else?

And for the parts you object to, I want to see the "why" behind it, was is the reasoning? Is it based on logic, personal experience, ideals, something else?

An aside about astrology: I don't believe in astrology, but that decision was not based on astronomers not believing in it. I am simply agreeing with them, not believing something because they convinced me.

Ilah

I think you are rationalizing but you do it very well.

But the fact is that those who design personality tests are called psychometricians. They are trained in Universities.

So far all qualified psychometricians say that, as personality test, MBTI is invalid and unreliable.

They go further and say, MBTI has the same truth value as astrology.

You can confirm this yourself by ringing the Psychology Department of your local University.

Oddly enough you believe astronomers when they say that astrology has no truth value, but not qualified psychometricians when they say that MBTI has no truth value.

[Mole]

Victor,

I am not disagreeing (or agreeing) with you. All I am saying is that in order to debate something with you I need to have details. If I don't have details I don't have anything to craft an argument aaround.

For example, why is it concidered invalid and unreliable? I don't want any circular logic. By that I mean things like "it is concidered unreliable because it is unreliable." These are statements that don't really explain or add any more information.

I get the impression you hold your beliefs based on what qualified psychometricains believe (or don't believe). What I want to know is why they feel it is unreliable and invalid. Something more that "because it is." Surely the must have good reasons for believing this, but so far you haven't given us any.

What specifically is wrong with it? Is it the idea that everyone fits into one of 16 categories? Is it the idea that personality is constant? The choice of function? The descriptions of the functions? The way the functions alternate between i and e? Is it the test itself (rather than the personality type theory) you find flawed? All of the above? Something else?

And for the parts you object to, I want to see the "why" behind it, was is the reasoning? Is it based on logic, personal experience, ideals, something else?

An aside about astrology: I don't believe in astrology, but that decision was not based on astronomers not believing in it. I am simply agreeing with them, not believing something because they convinced me.

Ilah

I try to base my beliefs on the evidence - what do you do?

For instance, just now, an extensive test of astrology has been published. And found there is no connection between star sign and compatibility.

Psychometricians write personality tests that rigourously follow the principles of validity and reliability. Then they rigourously test them against the evidence.

MBTI was written without any concern for validity and reliability and was not tested against the evidence.

Unfortunately when you or I compare MBTI against our personal experience we get false positives. And we take this as evidence when it is merely anecdotal.

This is exactly what happens with astrology - we compare astrological predictions against our own experience and get false positives - this is very reinforcing so we keep coming back again and again, like millions of others, to astrology. But astrology is simply a confidence trick like MBTI.

When we keep getting false positives, we intuitively feel them to be true just as for 200,000 years we believed the earth was flat because our senses gave us false positives.

But with the Enlightenment we started to ask for evidence for belief. This has been deeply unsettling for intuitive belief. And so a reaction set in called the Romantic Movement and the New Age Movement is part of the Romantic Movement.

And it is nice and comfortable and even exciting to be Romantic but it is not scientific - anymore than MBTI is scientific.

I understand this is unsettling for you, particularly as you have found MBTI to be personally helpful.

I don't like to unsettle you. But Galileo was unsettling by looking through his telescope and concluding the earth went round the sun. Pasteur was unsettling with his discovery of germs. The discovery of the periodic table was unsettling. Darwin's discovery of the origin of species was extremely unsettling. Einstein unsettled our whole view of the universe. And we can be further expected to be unsettled by the evidence as it is discovered.

Adam Smith completely unsettled our view of economics. Politics was completely unsettled by liberal democracy and the limitation of power. Why, our own Germaine Greer unsettled our gender relations. Our relations with children have been unsettled by the discovery of the damage to the sense of self by child sexual abuse. And so it goes on.

We don't like to be unsettled because it brings cognitive dissonance which is painful - and we intuitively avoid pain and seek pleasure and comfort. We are human after all.

But the price we pay for comfort is blindness.

[Ilah]

MBTI was written without any concern for validity and reliability and was not tested against the evidence.

So are you saying it has been tested and found false? And if so I would like to see the test. This is not a matter of not wanting to let go of MBTI specifically. Rather this is just the way my brain works. Anything is concidered possible, till proven otherwise. And I need to see the proof myself, a study or at least an excerpt from it. Saying that you have seen the study is not sufficient for me. This does not mean I believe in everything. Short of proof, I use a combination of logic and intuition to determine whether I believe and/or find the information usable.

And if your complaint is that there was no study, then I have no proof that it is true, but also not proof that it is not true.

You see my mind works in strange ways, I am a bit like the opposite of a skeptic. I need something very firm to make be give up the belief in the possibility of something. Again this is not about MBTI specifically. I would do the same tactic if you were trying to prove that God is dead or that low carb diets are bad.

Now short of hard proof, I am willing to debate the likelihood of something being true on the basis of logic. I am not sure if it possible to debate something based on intuition.

You also speak of being true v. useful for me, i.e. the possibility that something could false, but still be useful for me. How do you define true in that sense. Hypothetically, say the theory only fits half the population but I am one of the half it fits. [Not saying I believe it only applies to half the population, just giving an example to illustrate my reasoning.] Doesn't that mean that the theory is true for me? In this case it would not be right to apply it to other people, but could still be a useful tool for self understanding.

By the way: maybe this skipped your notice the previous times I mentioned it, but I am a New Ager, so talking about Jung being New Age doesn't exactly make me less likely to accept his theories.

Ilah

[Totenkindly]

I like to believe, say in the case of child abuse, that parents are trying to do the best they can to raise a well-adjusted child, but they don't have the tools.

This gives me comfort because my homelife was wretched at times and it made it easier for me to heal from some of the things that happened to believe that my parents were doing the best they could.

Then I may read of an incident so diabolically sadistic that it shakes my belief that all are trying to do their best. But I still want to hang on to my generosity of spirit so there I sit wondering what to do with that clash between what I want to believe and what seems obviously opposite.

Yes, the dichotomy is in wanting to believe that people would be kind/giving to others if they only knew how... and yet viewing acts of emotional and physical violence so strong that they cause visceral repulsion inside when we view them.

Can we maintain a positive view of someone who simultaneously sickens us? Some people seem better at that; others seem worse and have to "change the facts" a bit or put up blinders in order to lessen one of the two feelings.

Why is that? Is it merely personality? Choice? Upbringing? What makes it easier for some to hold two seemingly opposing ideas in their heads at once?

Do Eastern cultures have it easier than Western?

It's an existential dilemma. The ancient good/evil dichotomy. I prefer to use the words health and dis-ease.

Does that make it easier for you to accept/mesh together the discordant ideas?

(Actually, I really like the health/dis-ease model as well.)

Since I see that cafe reads the Bible, which I also do on occasion, I will borrow from it the best answer to your question I can manage. I often cannot tell what someone's intentions are but "by their fruits you will know them." Matthew 7:16

So if there is a disjunct between observable behavior and expectation, then you propose to resolve by laying aside current observation and looking at the end result of the actions in question? (i.e., postponing evaluation of the opposing ideas until perhaps the discord can be justified by a convergence of end result?)

I equate health with growth/internal order and disease with decay/internal and external chaos. So it's often after the fact that I can determine what is positive and what is negative. What consistently follows in the path of a person?

So that seems to be one effective coping strategy for avoiding cognitive dissonance?

Perhaps the word "intention" is the hang-up. Because good intentions don't always produce good results.

Yeah. Another dissonance there.

I'm going to have to think further on this before I say more. Because I surely don't believe that mistakes are evil.

Evil to me implies intent. Mistake implies accident.

I do think it is in observation of a personal pattern that I determine what a person's intentions are.

As an aside, I think that's what I do too. I recognize patterns in behavior, having witnessed many of them before, couple them with 'result of choices' and the person's pre-awareness of those outcomes, and use a lot of those factors to triangulate intent.

This discussion isn't just interesting from an abstract POV but a personal one -- I'm getting a better idea of myself and how I think through these things as well. I'm realizing I can pretty easily accept opposing viewpoints without disbelieving either... but only because I've considered them and perceive their internal consistencies and don't give one more credibility than the other if they're equal... regardless of whether or not they conflict. To me, "reality" doesn't exclude dissonance, it embraces it as necessity. Therefore I can accept dissonance when it occurs without fretting much like I did before... and much of the only reason I fretted in the past was because of the religious beliefs I was brought up in that put pressure on me to not accept dissonance.

[Mole]

Anything is considered possible, till proven otherwise.
Ilah

Well then, why not believe in Unicorns?

Why not believe in Zeus?

It is not possible to prove a negative, so you have a free hand.

What we can do, though, is falsify a positive. This is what scientific enquiry does.

Much of the New Age can't be falsified.

And so you think it is true - you might as well believe that God controls the weather or that prayers are answered or that we deserve our own karma.

None of these beliefs can be falsified, but it doesn't make them true.

You can, as you say, believe anything is possible until proven otherwise - but this doesn't make any of your beliefs true.

Look, I love the imagination because you can imagine anything is possible - it is delightful and comforting.

But it is still just imagination - and wishing doesn't make it true.

You have a wonderful imagination - and I think it was Einstein who said imagination is more important than knowledge.

The whole world of poetry and art is based on imagination - and if you believe Einstein, so is science.

You can, of course, imagine anything about me but it is more satisfying to find if it is true.

[Totenkindly]

I suffer a lot of cognitive dissonance trying to make sense of politics. I go to a conservative website and the consensus is that liberals are ignorant and have all the facts wrong. I go to a liberal leaning website and they say the same thing about conservatives. I have to wonder if these two groups are even on the same planet sometimes.

That drives me batty too.

I still haven't quite figured out why the disparity exists. Because I'm not knowledgeable enough to know ALL the facts and see where they're each deriving their set of facts from.

Although I suppose we could look at models here online. I don't want to debate the qualitative nature of last weekend event's with Zerg, but we see it even in that thread. People disagree about what the "facts" are, whether it's the contents of the PM, or the true context of the contents of the PM, or the people's personalities who were mentioned in the PM... lots of various collections of "facts" that all put a shading on one's perspective of what happened. We each have a subset of facts, and weigh them accordingly, and then draw conclusions. Even the personalities of the evaluators impact the conclusions that are drawn, although all are drawn from subsets of the full set of "facts."

Then we get a lot of cognitive dissonance. "This <behavior> is evil... but I know <this person> to be good. How could they do this? Did they do what I thought? Did I misinterpret? Did I just not know them before? Where is the flaw in perception that is creating these competing ideas?" And everyone needs to resolve things at some level.

I think what drives me nuts is that I see very little agreement about facts. I can understand people can form different opinions from the same facts, but these two groups can't even agree on the facts. How can a person expect to make an informed opinion if there is so much doubt about what is the correct information?

That's probably why I don't bother much with detailed arguments in politics anymore. I can't speak intelligently, there's too much I don't know and have no way to figure out.

[Mole]

To me, "reality" doesn't exclude dissonance, it embraces it as necessity. Therefore I can accept dissonance when it occurs without fretting much like I did before... and much of the only reason I fretted in the past was because of the religious beliefs I was brought up in that put pressure on me to not accept dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is an absolutely essential part of the intellectual life.

Cognitive dissonance is sign that we are learning something new.

And we tolerate the mental pain of cognitive dissonance for the satisfaction of learning something new.

Most rarely, if ever, have the satisfaction of learning something new, and so very naturally they avoid the pain of cognitive dissonance.

So it is very difficult to lead anyone into cognitive dissonance when all they feel is the pain.

I have tried to lead MBTIc into cognitive dissonance and you can see the understandable resistance I receive.

How can I, how can I seduce you into the satisfaction of learning something new?

I use all the rhetoric at my disposal - but it is like trying to get my pony, Trixy, to cross a wooden bridge to the grass on the other side - she can't see the grass, only feel her fear of the bridge.

[Ilah]

Victor,

Most of life cannot be proved true or untrue, so we are free to believe or not believe.

I have no proof of truth; you have no proof of falsehood. So we are both free to make our own choices.

I take the most satisfaction at being open to the infinate possibilities of the universe.