Gas hits $4.42 while the base defends $2.79. Facts do not break motivated belief, they build bridges. How defection cascades shatter the Festinger Trap.
I have found a great deal of value in this essay as an additive resource for my own self-perspectives’ evolution.
As a Christian believer over the past 50 years, I have had to make multiple framework-adjustments to my understanding of my belief system. I must say that changing “the fact to align with the belief” has not been an option, as it is impracticable. Non sequiturs prevent ongoing inculcations.
Adding new cognitions to bridge the gap has usually come from the same spring of misalignments which share space with trying to change facts. This doesn’t work too well either.
That leaves changing my beliefs to fit the facts. And, yes, there is a cost, but in the case of my Christianity, there hasn’t been a change in identity, rather an enhancement of it. Saying I was wrong gains any ground that would have been lost by thinking I was right.
Most Christian fundamentalists I know place a huge value on being right. I learned that lesson the hard way when I once confronted a translator of the NIV version of the Bible on a passage in Isaiah where the translator demonstrated five different interpretations of the same passage, and I raised my hand and demanded to know “Which one was right?”
He smiled, looked at me squarely and replied, “They ALL are…”
Lesson learned. I had no reputation to lose and I had no emotion to jeopardize; but my world view expanded at little cost of aligning my beliefs to the facts.
Thank you. This is the rarest resolution described from the inside, and you have named the variable the essay only circles. The cost of changing a belief is not fixed. It scales with what the belief is holding up.
When identity is staked on being right — on owning the correct reading — revision reads as collapse or betrayal, and the bridges go up. When identity is staked on the search itself, the same fact that would humiliate one believer enriches another. Your translator understood it. "They all are" is only a threat to someone whose self is built on the single right answer.
Two models of a mind: stone and water. Stone keeps its shape until the pressure finds the flaw, and then it breaks. Water has no shape to defend, so there is nothing to break. Certainty is stone. Devotion to the truth is water.
That is why fifty years of adjustment cost you so little: you had, as you put it, nothing in reputation or emotion staked on the answer. The trap closes hardest not on the devout but on the certain. Faith held as a question survives almost anything. Faith held as a possession cannot afford a single contradiction.
I have found a great deal of value in this essay as an additive resource for my own self-perspectives’ evolution.
As a Christian believer over the past 50 years, I have had to make multiple framework-adjustments to my understanding of my belief system. I must say that changing “the fact to align with the belief” has not been an option, as it is impracticable. Non sequiturs prevent ongoing inculcations.
Adding new cognitions to bridge the gap has usually come from the same spring of misalignments which share space with trying to change facts. This doesn’t work too well either.
That leaves changing my beliefs to fit the facts. And, yes, there is a cost, but in the case of my Christianity, there hasn’t been a change in identity, rather an enhancement of it. Saying I was wrong gains any ground that would have been lost by thinking I was right.
Most Christian fundamentalists I know place a huge value on being right. I learned that lesson the hard way when I once confronted a translator of the NIV version of the Bible on a passage in Isaiah where the translator demonstrated five different interpretations of the same passage, and I raised my hand and demanded to know “Which one was right?”
He smiled, looked at me squarely and replied, “They ALL are…”
Lesson learned. I had no reputation to lose and I had no emotion to jeopardize; but my world view expanded at little cost of aligning my beliefs to the facts.
Thanks for this essay.
William,
Thank you. This is the rarest resolution described from the inside, and you have named the variable the essay only circles. The cost of changing a belief is not fixed. It scales with what the belief is holding up.
When identity is staked on being right — on owning the correct reading — revision reads as collapse or betrayal, and the bridges go up. When identity is staked on the search itself, the same fact that would humiliate one believer enriches another. Your translator understood it. "They all are" is only a threat to someone whose self is built on the single right answer.
Two models of a mind: stone and water. Stone keeps its shape until the pressure finds the flaw, and then it breaks. Water has no shape to defend, so there is nothing to break. Certainty is stone. Devotion to the truth is water.
That is why fifty years of adjustment cost you so little: you had, as you put it, nothing in reputation or emotion staked on the answer. The trap closes hardest not on the devout but on the certain. Faith held as a question survives almost anything. Faith held as a possession cannot afford a single contradiction.
Grateful you read it this way.
— J.