KS wrote:I am charmed by your experience. It means that you are both willing to follow the truth and question the surface, "spin" versions. I would like to believe most of us Americans prefer truth over error. And since much of the buy-in by real conspiracists is to get some social acceptance and belonging, that same motivation to get the truth has been skewed toward whatever reinforces the prejudices of their social group. So, if you find the people who are willing to, at least on one issue and at least for a time, put truth first, that kind of deep dive sounds promising. The person is getting social reinforcement on an open-ended basis.
Sometimes I wonder what amount of untruth(or cognitive dissonance?) people are willing to accept. I think that large swaths of belief within someone's worldview can withstand a decent amount of dissonance. Sort of like the slow buildup of contrary evidence in a scientific paradigm before it changes, there usually isn't any single piece of evidence or argument that changes minds. Rather, it's constant exposure to reasonable criticism. Sometimes there is a straw that breaks the camel's back, but I think more often it's gradual. Unfortunately, it's also uncommon for webs of belief to change at all. With respect to social media, I think the social groups keep people from being exposed to enough reasonable criticism to meet the critical mass of contrary evidence. And the feeling of social acceptance and belonging prevent people from seeking or accepting it, as you mention.
A few recent conversations I've had reminded me of inner turmoil I had perhaps two decades ago, when I first joined booktalk. I remember plenty of conversation with a personality named MadArchitect, and he was frustratingly brilliant. It wasn't any one thing he said, but over time, after calling me out repeatedly, he helped me identify when I was defending a belief based on emotion rather than reason. Naturally, most any belief is defended with a mixture of the two, but sometimes it's held together more by emotion than reason. The epiphany was that it hurts to admit when a belief is held together more by emotion than reason. In a sense, the emotion is a shield as well as a glue for that belief.
One of my friends was mentioning voter fraud, and how he believed it was happening. He kept mentioning the chain of custody, and gave quite a few examples of where he thought there could be issues. I pointed out a few safeguards that prevented the issues. We went back and forth for a time, and he kept returning to his summary argument - complex chains of custody are complex and exploitable, and when combined with votes popping up in the middle of the night, it's suspicious. I agreed, but suggested that after having gone through the details, he's still holding onto his summary argument because of feeling rather than reason.
The crucible test, I mentioned, was to consider instantly and wholeheartedly changing his mind. If there was a pang of some mysterious, hard to identify, negative emotion... as if something is lost or he's committing some sort of minor betrayal to something nebulous, then emotion is obviously involved in that belief. And if the scaffolding of reason was systematically removed through our conversation, then emotion could be the only thing holding him to that belief. Often when emotion is recognized as a shield, a person can then see through that shield to contemplate whether the glue for that belief is reason or emotion. A glimpse into metacognition. In my experience, that's often just the seed for change, and only germinates when many such seeds are planted across the swath.
Sorry for the long train of through. I've always been curious about the emotion of belief. It's so maddeningly difficult to recognize and identify and describe.
RT wrote:I recently listened to Brene Brown's "Dare to Lead" (while exercising - love audiiobooks
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I'm addicted to audiobooks. I listen to them for hours per day. Driving, exercising, manual labor, while building stuff, etc. I'm an introvert, so I have a lot more alone-time style activities than social.