Cognitive dissonance
|
|
The related phenomena of causation, correlation, cognitive bias come together in the idea of cognitive dissonance - how one person can hold separate ideas in her head whose underlying values, premises and assumptions contradict each other.
Confirmation bias
You will be familiar with the experience of the futile argument with to someone who holds a contrary idea to yours. If you're not, what the hell were you doing at university? The atheist who heckles the born-again preacher - or vice versa - will know this feeling. So will Marxists who engage capitalists, climate deniers who take on eco warriors and anyone who's tried to querying an HR policy. This kind of arguments is utterly fruitless, but thoroughly entertaining for the protagonists until one pushes one got button too far, and it's all out war.
It is fruitless because everyone who holds a view will accept any fact which seems to support it as immutable proof, and will explain away, dissemble or at the limit flat-out ignore any fact which tends to contradict it. Their acceptance of incoming information is biased in favour of what they want to hear - stuff that confirms your existing narrative and against information which undermines it. Hence confirmation bias. Sample arguments include as hominems, reductio as absurdams, analogising to the Third Reich and if you're really rattled, the old correlation does not imply causation chestnut, but the most reliable of the lot is just ignoring utterly.
You won't notice you're doing it. You won't even believe' you're doing it. There are plenty of pragmatic reasons you should do this. This is how scientific progress works .