The ability to stick to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence.

by nicolaou 11 Replies latest jw friends

  • jgnat
    jgnat

    Normal.

    We observed a number of interesting response patterns in the videos, which we coded, and which are analyzed in the bottom half of Table 3. First, it often happened that participants made “unsupported declarations”, e.g., “It’s just wrong to do that!” or “That’s terrible!” They made the fewest such declarations in Heinz, and they made significantly more such declarations in the Incest story. Second, participants often directly stated that they were dumbfounded, i.e., they made a statement to the effect that they thought an action was wrong but they could not find the words to explain themselves. Participants made the fewest such statements in Heinz (only 2 such statements, from 2 participants), while they made significantly more such statements in the Incest (38 statements from 23 different participants), Cannibalism (24 from 11), and Soul stories (22 from 13). Third, participants often said “I don’t know,” sometimes several times in a row. There was a marginal effect of task in which participants said “I don’t know” least often in the Roach and Heinz tasks, and more often in the other three tasks. Fourth, we observed an interesting pattern in which participants would start giving an argument but as they were talking they realized that the argument was not going to work and they stopped in the middle of it, without any prompting from the experimenter. We called this pattern a “dead end”....excerpt, page 12,

    http://www.commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Haidt-Moral-Dumfounding-When-Intuition-Finds-No-Reason.pdf

  • CyrusThePersian
    CyrusThePersian

    Cognitive Dissonance

    As jgnat says, it's entirely normal. We look at the evidence and say,"Yeah, that's right." but we hold on to our beliefs anyway, in effect, trying to believe two things at once-the facts as borne out by the evidence- and our own internal belief system. We all have beliefs we find difficult to shake despite evidence to the contrary. Myself, it took years to shed JW beliefs and belief in the Bible, but the more the evidence piled up, the more obvious it became that my long held beliefs were mistaken.

Share this

Google+
Pinterest
Reddit