Defending the Truth - View Single Post

Katczinsky · 03-24-2008, 03:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Scott

You pro-Apollo people are not moved by evidence. I wonder if this is why.

Cognitive Dissonance and learning
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Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it to develop so that we become "open" to them. Neighbour (1992) makes the generation of appropriate dissonance into a major feature of tutorial (and other) teaching: he shows how to drive this kind of intellectual wedge between learners' current beliefs and "reality".

Beyond this benign if uncomfortable aspect, however, dissonance can go "over the top", leading to two interesting side-effects for learning:

if someone is called upon to learn something which contradicts what they already think they know — particularly if they are committed to that prior knowledge — they are likely to resist the new learning. Even Carl Rogers recognised this. Accommodation is more difficult than Assimilation, in Piaget's terms.
and—counter-intuitively, perhaps—if learning something has been difficult, uncomfortable, or even humiliating enough, people are less likely to concede that the content of what has been learned is useless, pointless or valueless. To do so would be to admit that one has been "had", or "conned".

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Nice try Scott, but your self-proclaimed evidence is very flimsy, controvertible, and at best, circumstantial.

You suffer at what psychiatrists call delusion.

de·lu·sion /dɪˈluʒən/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[di-loo-zhuhn] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
"4. Psychiatry. a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact: a paranoid delusion."

People under a delusion often have the common characteristic of a strong will to believe a certain way. Consequently, under this frame of mind they desperately search for anything, even the most flimsy of evidence in a false rationalization, painted by the deluded in question as incontrovertible. The deluded often recognize the "hits" instead of the "misses", even if the "misses" significantly overshadow the "hits". This is why the deluded abroad are able to continue to think visiting holy cites in the Middle East and Europe will heal the sick or that the holocaust never happened, despite the incontrovertible scientific evidence to the contrary in both cases.