Comment by gwd
2 years ago
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.
I think it's probably just a kind of "avoidance" or "denial."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiential_avoidance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_(Freud)
HN and software engineers have bias to over-focus on the cognitive, but I think the key experience here is emotional distress.
6 replies →