{"id":9347,"date":"2020-07-12T17:01:27","date_gmt":"2020-07-13T00:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=9347"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:37:31","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:37:31","slug":"links-and-comments-psychology-trumps-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2020\/07\/12\/links-and-comments-psychology-trumps-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Links and Comments: Psychology Trumps All?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two items came up today on very similar topics. They both play to my interest in the psychological underpinnings of belief and apprehension of the world. As I\u2019ve alluded, this is one of my major themes (as on my Principles page), and perhaps I haven\u2019t emphasized how recent a development this is. None of this was generally realized two decades ago. Yes, I knew about logical and rhetorical fallacies from way back (e.g. https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2013\/09\/12\/the-one-book-id-have-every-college-student-read\/<\/a>), and there was a taste of psychological issues in Shermer\u2019s 1997 book, but it wasn\u2019t until Jesse Bering\u2019s 2011 book, then especially the 2011 and 2013 books by David McRaney, and then Jonathan Haidt\u2019s foundational 2012 book (though I didn\u2019t read it until 2015), that I began to appreciate how forcefully human psychology overrides logic and evidence (in favor of group cohesion, alliance with friends and family, mostly). If physics explains chemistry, and chemistry explains biology, well\u2026 psychology overrides them all, in terms of what humans think they know about the world.<\/p>\n

In the latest issue of The Week<\/a> (a terrific magazine that gathers news and opinions from across the political spectrum; its website is only OK), dated July 10\/July 17, the \u201ceditor\u2019s letter\u201d on the table of contents, focuses on a review in the issue of a book by Maria Konnikova (https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Maria_Konnikova<\/a>), called THE BIGGEST BLUFF: HOW I LEARNED TO PAY ATTENTION, MASTER MYSELF, AND WIN. She applies her psychological understanding, and uses her discipline, to learn to play expert poker. Here\u2019s the key part of the editorial intro:<\/p>\n

One of the great paradoxes of psychology\u2014maybe the<\/i> great one\u2014is that while being wrong should make us question our assumptions, it regularly has the opposite effect. Presented with signs that we have made a mistake, we very often choose to discard the evidence and dig in on our prior beliefs. So it is that once they\u2019d committed to reopening, governors across the country chose to ignore every early signal that they were wrong and push onward into the cresting wave of a resurgent epidemic. And when what is involved are questions not of just policies but also of values, people retreat even further into their certainties.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s obviously more to the US situation than this \u2013 because virtually every other country on the planet (except for those led by similar to Trump authoritarian leaders, Brazil and Russia), and human psychology is the same everywhere \u2013 have done better at managing the pandemic than the US has.<\/p>\n

\\\\<\/p>\n

Next, a big substantial article in The Atlantic, The Role of Cognitive Dissonance in the Pandemic<\/a>; Subtitled, \u201cThe minute we make any decision\u2014I think COVID-19 is serious; no, I\u2019m sure it is a hoax<\/i>\u2014we begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative.\u201d<\/p>\n

This takes the idea of motivated reasoning — where one finds reasons to dismiss evidence against beliefs one has made on emotional grounds \u2013 up a notch, to the idea of cognitive dissonance. How humans are able to make sense, and accept, views that contradict each other. Every scientist, like Francis Collins, who claims religious faith while doing science is doing this.<\/p>\n

Opening of the article:<\/p>\n

Members of Heaven\u2019s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth in 1997, a spaceship would be traveling in its wake\u2014ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When the manager asked why, they complained that the telescope was defective, that it didn\u2019t show the spaceship following the comet. A short time later, believing that they would be rescued once they had shed their \u201cearthly containers\u201d (their bodies), all 39 members killed themselves.<\/p>\n

Heaven\u2019s Gate followers had a tragically misguided conviction, but it is an example, albeit extreme, of cognitive dissonance, the motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to admit mistakes or accept scientific findings\u2014even when those findings can save our lives. This dynamic is playing out during the pandemic among the many people who refuse to wear masks or practice social distancing. Human beings are deeply unwilling to change their minds. And when the facts clash with their preexisting convictions, some people would sooner jeopardize their health and everyone else\u2019s than accept new information or admit to being wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They discuss how Leon Festinger\u2019s notion of \u201ccognitive dissonance\u201d in 1950 \u201cinspired more than 3,000 experiments that have transformed psychologists\u2019 understanding of how the human mind works.\u201d (Which is how psychology has become a science, far surpassing the intuitive, largely-unverified by experiement, notions of Freud and Jung.)<\/p>\n

The essay goes on with examples of reactions to the pandemic. With a final note about how scientists change their minds, because evidence. That\u2019s how science works.<\/p>\n

This nasty, mysterious virus will require us all to change our minds as scientists learn more, and we may have to give up some practices and beliefs about it that we now feel sure of. The alternative will be to double down, ignore the error, and wait, as Trump is waiting, for the \u201cmiracle\u201d of the virus disappearing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two items came up today on very similar topics. They both play to my interest in the psychological underpinnings of belief and apprehension of the world. As I\u2019ve alluded, this is one of my major themes (as on my Principles … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9347"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9363,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9347\/revisions\/9363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}