Cognitive dissonance
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The related phenomena of causation, correlation, confirmation 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 force ranking wirh HR. This kind of arguments is utterly fruitless, but thoroughly entertaining for the protagonists, at least until one pushes one hot button too far, and it's all-out war.
It is fruitless to argue across divides because everyone who holds a view will accept as immutable proof any contention, however wan, which seems to support it, and will explain away, dissemble or, at the limit, flat-out ignore any assertion which tends to contradict it.
We apply a rose-tinted filter, that is to say. Our acceptance of incoming information is biased in favour of what we want to hear - which confirms our existing narrative - and against information which undermines it. Hence confirmation bias.
Where defence is even needed (much of the time, ignoring will do just fine), classic approaches include ad hominem arguments, reductio ad 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. Science - indeed, any specialist knowledge - is acquired by gaining entry to a heavily fortified citadel of knowledge - a series of ideas and predicates built upon a basic narrative architecture. Entry to the citadel is jealousy guarded by acolytes to ensure members of the fraternity are suitably indoctrinated in those predicates. One cannot reach a position of influence in that narrative architecture - paradigm - without first making a commitment to its precepts so fundamental that to later resile from it would be to sacrifice all credibility.
They have compromising photos, that is to say.
See also
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn's magical book.