Comment by rossant
2 years ago
This is spot on. This psychological barrier is probably the number one obstacle to a wider recognition of the existence and extent of this problem.
People like me who challenge the science behind the diagnoses of SBS face an absolutely unprecedented and unreasonable pushback, like I've never seen in any other area. Basically everyone who has worked on this side has faced threats, insults, personal attacks, cancellations, boycotts, and so on. The "cognitive bias" you mention (does it have a name? perhaps cognitive dissonance?) is a likely reason for this amount of antagonism.
Closest name I can think of is "commitment and consistency". People tend to behave as they have behaved in the past, doing so is both a cognitive shortcut and a source of positive emotion. We go to great lengths to maintain consistency (see also: confirmation bias), and being consistent even in the face of conflicting evidence feels better than being inconsistent but right.
From Cialdini: "Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision."
In my head -- and I'm no doctor, believe you me! -- I call this "emotional inertia", which is a phrase I've borrowed from one of the many doctors who has treated me for depression.
It certainly would be a form of cognitive dissonance, but that's much more general; I experienced cognitive dissonance hearing the word "nicht" pronounced by a native German speaker yesterday evening, because it wasn't at all like what I expected it to sound like.
"Confirmation bias", where you tend to see what you expect to see, is narrower; but still I think doesn't capture what we're talking about. We're specifically talking about resistance to accepting the idea because accepting it would mean reclassifying actions you yourself had taken from "very good" to "very bad". It's kind of weird that it doesn't have a name -- I'm convinced it plays a pretty big part of human behavior, much more than is commonly acknowledged.
> We're specifically talking about resistance to accepting the idea because accepting it would mean reclassifying actions you yourself had taken from "very good" to "very bad".
That's exactly it. I'd love to discover scientific literature about this phenomenon, and I'd also be surprised if it doesn't already have a name and an extensive literature. But if that's the case: I think there are research carriers in psychology to make here...
Edit: ChatGPT found "belief perseverance" [1] but, again, that's not exactly what we're talking about, which also relates to a personal sense of morality and "being one of the good guys".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance
You could call it "moral self-image maintenance bias": A bias towards maintaining your self-image as an upright, moral person.
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It's the sunk cost fallacy.
This is why Max Planch (German physicist) has quipped that science advances one funeral at a time.
I think the related term, the escalation of commitment, suits this better.