Psychological interlude - Authority in Science

 Mistakes Were Made: Cognitive Dissonance

Carol Tavris, social psychologist, and Elliot Aronson, classified as one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20^th Century, wrote in their bestselling book “Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)”¹

Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as "Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me" and "I smoke two packs a day." Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it.

“Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)”

They also wrote:

Naturally, not all scientists are scientific, that is, open-minded and willing to give up their strong convictions or admit that conflicts of interest might taint their research. But even when an individual scientist is not self-correcting, science eventually is.

It seems to me that our psychologists have made two mistakes here (though they can say: perhaps mistake were made, “but not by us”). First, when they wrote that science is “eventually self-correcting”, that was based on their wishful thinking, not on data. Some science is self-correcting, but there is no rational reason for believing that all science is such. Second, when they wrote about cognitive dissonance that “people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it”; that was also their wishful thinking plus lack of knowledge. They did not know about “Authoritarian Personalities”. Or they knew, but they suffered from cognitive dissonance and couldn’t deal with the idea that billions of people can hold contradictory ideas in their minds and feel no discomfort at all.

Right Wing Authoritarianism

Let me quote from the Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology²: “Authoritarian personality”, and “Authoritarian followers”. According to the dictionary:

Authoritarian followers have the psychological characteristic known as right-wing authoritarianism. This personality trait consists of authoritarian submission, a high degree of submission to the established authorities in one’s society; authoritarian aggression, aggression directed against various persons in the name of those authorities; and conventionalism, a strong adherence to the social conventions endorsed by those authorities.

Right-wing authoritarianism (“right” comes from “lawful”) is measured on so called RWA scale. The Dictionary tells us that:

…. persons who get high RWA scale scores quite readily submit to the established authorities in their lives and trust them far more than most people do. They supported Richard Nixon to the bitter end during the Watergate crisis. High RWAs also believed George W. Bush when he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they supported the war in that country long after others had signed off. High RWAs also are relatively willing to let authorities run roughshod over civil liberties and constitutional guarantees of personal freedom. They seem to think that authorities are above the law. (Italics, mine.)

The Cognition of Authoritarian Scientists

It seems that quite a number of scientists would score rather high on the RWA scale. Bob Altemeyer, one of the champions in the psychology of authoritarians, notices³ that authoritarians are characterized by a certain specific cognitive behavior:

Compared with others, authoritarians have not spent much time examining evidence, thinking critically, reaching independent conclusions and seeing whether their conclusions mesh with the other things they believe. (...) They carry a list of ‘false teachings’ and rejected ideologies in their heads. But they usually learned which ideas are bad in the same way they learned which are good – from the authorities in their lives. Highs are not prepared to think critically.

The Neural Basis of Motivated Reasoning

Let us take a look at the neural mechanisms of the Authoritarian Personality:

A recent imaging study by psychologist Drew Westen and his colleagues at Emory University provides firm support for the existence of emotional reasoning. Just prior to the 2004 Bush-Kerry presidential elections, two groups of subjects were recruited - fifteen ardent Democrats and fifteen ardent Republicans. Each was presented with conflicting and seemingly damaging statements about their candidate, as well as about more neutral targets such as actor Tom Hanks (who, it appears, is a likable guy for people of all political persuasions). Unsurprisingly, when the participants were asked to draw a logical conclusion about a candidate from the other - 'wrong' - political party, the participants found a way to arrive at a conclusion that made the candidate look bad, even though logic should have mitigated the particular circumstances and allowed them to reach a different conclusion. Here's where it gets interesting.

When this 'emote control' began to occur, parts of the brain normally involved in reasoning were not activated. Instead, a constellation of activations occurred in the same areas of the brain where punishment, pain, and negative emotions are experienced (that is, in the left insula, lateral frontal cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Once a way was found to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted, the neural punishment areas turned off, and the participant received a blast of activation in the circuits involving rewards - akin to the high an addict receives when getting his fix.

In essence, the participants were not about to let facts get in the way of their hot-button decision making and quick buzz of reward. 'None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,' says Westen. 'Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones'...

Ultimately, Westen and his colleagues believe that 'emotionally biased reasoning leads to the "stamping in" or reinforcement of a defensive belief, associating the participant's "revisionist" account of the data with positive emotion or relief and elimination of distress. The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,' Westen says. Westen's remarkable study showed that neural information processing related to what he terms 'motivated reasoning' ... appears to be qualitatively different from reasoning when a person has no strong emotional stake in the conclusions to be reached.

The study is thus the first to describe the neural processes that underlie political judgment and decision making, as well as to describe processes involving emote control, psychological defense, confirmatory bias, and some forms of cognitive dissonance. The significance of these findings ranges beyond the study of politics: 'Everyone from executives and judges to scientists and politicians may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret "the facts."'⁴

1Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, “Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)”, HARCOURT, INC, 2007

2David Matsumoto, “Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology”, Cambridge University Press, 2009

3Bob Altemeyer, “The Authoritarian Specter”, Harvard University Press, 1996

4Cited by Barbara Oakley in “Evil Genes”. Study found here: 

To be continued

P.S.1. An example of non-authoritarian thinking

A Stanford University professor and renowned ufologist confidently declared that not only have aliens visited Earth, but they have “been here a long time.”

P.S.2. Worth repeating

P.S.3. 

Frankel ("Geometry of Physics" and "Gravitational Curvature") is good but not mathematically precise enough. Walking upon my rope I stumbled upon Georges de Rham, "Differentiable manifolds. Forms, Currents, Harmonic Forms." Walking along right now. So much to learn!

P.S.4. The monograph Gross, P. Robert Kotiuga - "Electromagnetic theory and computation_ a topological approach-Cambridge University Press (2004)" has a nice mathematical Appendix:

Mathematical Appendix: Manifolds, Differential Forms, Cohomology,

Riemannian Structures 215

MA-A Differentiable Manifolds 216

MA-B Tangent Vectors and the Dual Space of One-Forms 217

MA-C Higher-Order Differential Forms and Exterior Algebra 220

MA-D Behavior of Differential Forms Under Mappings 223

MA-E The Exterior Derivative 226

MA-F Cohomology with Differential Forms 229

MA-G Cochain Maps Induced by Mappings Between Manifolds 231

MA-H Stokes’ Theorem, de Rham’s Theorems and Duality Theorems 232

MA-I Existence of Cuts Via Eilenberg–MacLane Spaces 240

MA-J Riemannian Structures, the Hodge Star Operator and an Inner

Product for Differential Forms 243

MA-K The Operator Adjoint to the Exterior Derivative 249

MA-L The Hodge Decomposition and Ellipticity 252

MA-M Orthogonal Decompositions of p-Forms and Duality Theorems 253

To be read next.

P.S.5. Started writing "Notes on Aether Theory". Will be making them available, piece by piece. The idea is to write one page a day. First we need some tools. Here is the first page.

P.S.6. It came to my attention that some Readers trying to access my blog are getting the message

 "website blocked due to reputation... "

That means someone must have denounced my blog to the "authorities". Someone doesn't like my writings? Or some other reason?

P.S.7.  Robert Malone, The New Inquisition of Scientism