| ashu |
Posted
on 13-Mar-04 06:00 PM
What follows has NOTHING to do with Nepal per se.
But it's about one resource we all tend to use little of: psychological immune system.
Enjoy this very fascinating article that talks about concepts at the forefront of
both psychology and economics.
Some extracts appear below, and there's the link too.
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
First, people have a tremendous talent for changing their views of events so that they can feel better about them. We're not immediately delighted when our wife runs away with another guy, but in fairly short order most of us start to realize that "she was never really right for me" or that "we didn't have that much in common."
Our friends snicker and say that we are rationalizing—as if these conclusions were wrong simply because they are comforting. In fact, rationalization doesn't necessarily mean self-delusion. These conclusions may actually have been right all along, and rationalization may be the process of discovering what was always true but previously unacknowledged. But it really doesn't matter from my perspective whether these conclusions are objectively true or not.
What matters is that human beings are exceptionally good at discovering them when it is convenient for them to do so. Shakespeare wrote "'tis nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," and in fact, thinking is a remarkable tool that allows us to change our views of the world in order to change our emotional reactions to the world. Once we discover how wrong our wife was for us, her departure is transformed from a trauma to a blessing.
Now, it's not big news that people are good at this. What is news is that people don't know they're good at this. Rationalization is largely an unconscious process. We don't wake up in the morning and say, "Today I'm going to fool myself."
Rather, soon after a bad event occurs, unconscious processes are activated and these processes begin to generate different ways of construing the event. Thoughts such as "Maybe I was never really in love" seem to come to mind all by themselves, and we feel like the passive recipients of a reasonable suggestion. Because we don't consciously experience the cognitive processes that are creating these new ways of thinking about the event, we don't realize they will occur in the future.
One of the reasons why we think bad things will make us feel bad for a long time is because we don't realize that we have this defensive system—something like a psychological immune system, if you will. If I were to ask you to predict how healthy you would be if you encountered a cold germ and you didn't know that you had a physical immune system, you'd expect to get very sick and perhaps even die.
For more:
An interview with psychologist Daniel Gilbert
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert03/gilbert_index.html
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