(February 22, 2016 at 4:10 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Re: cognitive dissonance. Well, yes, but why do some people resolve the dissonance by abandoning the dissonant belief, and others by compartmentalizing and building up defenses for the belief? I don't get it either, unless it's primarily a random process. Most people being aligned with resolving their dissonance by going deeper into belief, as opposed to a few who are oriented toward reconciling their beliefs with the facts. I just don't get it either.
It may seem random but if you could set up a lab experiment you could literally measure the brain activity as people think about certain things.
For most people they ignore change because because our brains evolved to gap fill and once we perceive a pattern as working for us, it can be a totally false perception, but we will protect it as a coping mechanism. In laypersons terms it is simply trying to make sense of what is around us, but for most humans, we don't have the benefit of a PHD evolutionary understanding of how notoriously flawed our perceptions of reality can be.
It is simply easier for most to go with the flow, and most humans are indoctrinated from birth and since their neurological pathways are still developing growing up so false information is literally stamped in their brains before they can develop adult reasoning skills, so when they do grow up they either fight different people, or they work to retrofit their new knowledge to what they were first sold.
