Cognitive Dissonance

I'm reading a book on behavioral psychology called "Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). Fascinating stuff. We all think we're in control but we're all sadly mistaken. A few nuggets follow . . .

The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on its owner the comforting delusion that he or she does not have any.

Selective Remembering

Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.  When researchers ask wives what percentage of the housework they do, they say: “Are you kidding?  I do almost everything, at least 90 percent.”  And when they ask husbands the same question, the men say: “I do a lot, actually, about 40 percent.”  Although the specific numbers differ from couple to couple, the total always exceeds 100 percent by a large margin.

Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension the occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitude, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.”

People who receive disconfirming or otherwise unwelcome information often do not simply resist it; they may come to support their original (wrong) opinion even more strongly - a backfire effect.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy

When researchers ask people standing in line to place a bet how certain they are of their choice the bettors express a lot of uncertainty.  However, when people who have just placed a bet are asked the exact same question they express a great deal of confidence in their decision.

People become more certain they are right about something they just did if they can’t undo it.

Behavioral economists have shown how reluctant people are to accept these sunk costs - investment of time or money that they’ve sunk into an experience or relationship.

You know who knows this? Casinos, that's who. If you ask a losing gambler before he starts losing when he quit if he loses too much you'd get a rational answer. But in the throes of the losing, the excitement, the adrenaline takes over and people double down. I sense that alcoholics who are active alcoholic-ing do the same thing: "I'll get sober . . . tomorrow."

Venting Your Anger

Decades of experimental research have found that when people vent their feelings aggressively, they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.

Restraint of tongue and pen, anyone? As a man with a temper I share, with a twinkle in my eye and a bounce in my step and more than a modicum of dryness, that on the rare occasions that I let my anger dude out of his cage it feels so fucking great when he's coming out even as I'm listening to my other dude saying: "This is not going to work out for you - a minute of pleasure and a whole lot of crap to clean up." That's why my anger dude rarely gets to roam freely.