It’s a lot more pleasant to hear “yes.” That, in a nutshell, is why so many people struggle with this problem.
Confirmation Bias
This disappointment is a version of what psychologists and economists call confirmation bias. Not only are people more likely to believe information that fits their pre-existing beliefs, but they’re also more likely to go looking for such information. This experiment is a version of one that the English psychologist Peter Cathcart Wason used in a seminal 1960 paper on confirmation bias.
Most of us can quickly come up with other forms of confirmation bias — and yet the examples we prefer tend to be, themselves, examples of confirmation bias. If you’re politically liberal, maybe you’re thinking of the way that many conservatives ignore strong evidence of global warming and its consequences and instead glom onto weaker contrary evidence. Liberals are less likely to recall the many incorrect predictions over the decades, often strident and often from the left, that population growth would create widespread food shortages. It hasn’t.
We’re much more likely to think about positive situations than negative ones, about why something might go right than wrong and about questions to which the answer is yes, not no.
Sometimes, the reluctance to think negatively has nothing to do with political views or with a conscious fear of being told no. Often, people never even think about asking questions that would produce a negative answer when trying to solve a problem. They instead restrict the universe of possible questions to those that might potentially yield a “yes.”
-David Leonhardt, NY Times
I saw this article on Facebook this morning and I tried it out. Pretty interesting to think about how we can only see through our own lenses. And how we don't care to attempt to look through any other.
It makes me think how Atheists only look at information that continues to prove there is no God.
How Christians only look at information that continues to prove there is a God.
How do we honestly seek truth? How do we see it in it's truest form without a limited lens of senses like not seeing the color blue or hearing the words of another language?
Each day I grow closer and closer to death. Each day I learn more and more. The more I know the more I know I don't know. I don't know what I don't know. But I do know that I am getting older as each year passes me by and I do know that with death comes all the answers.
My hope is in You Jesus. This much is true. No matter what the evidence points to, no matter the lenses that look at the evidence. My hope, my hope is in You Jesus. I hope you defeated death. I hope you made a way. I hope for life after death. My hope in that life is in You Jesus.
Bear's Den - Elysium
Confirmation Bias
This disappointment is a version of what psychologists and economists call confirmation bias. Not only are people more likely to believe information that fits their pre-existing beliefs, but they’re also more likely to go looking for such information. This experiment is a version of one that the English psychologist Peter Cathcart Wason used in a seminal 1960 paper on confirmation bias.
Most of us can quickly come up with other forms of confirmation bias — and yet the examples we prefer tend to be, themselves, examples of confirmation bias. If you’re politically liberal, maybe you’re thinking of the way that many conservatives ignore strong evidence of global warming and its consequences and instead glom onto weaker contrary evidence. Liberals are less likely to recall the many incorrect predictions over the decades, often strident and often from the left, that population growth would create widespread food shortages. It hasn’t.
We’re much more likely to think about positive situations than negative ones, about why something might go right than wrong and about questions to which the answer is yes, not no.
Sometimes, the reluctance to think negatively has nothing to do with political views or with a conscious fear of being told no. Often, people never even think about asking questions that would produce a negative answer when trying to solve a problem. They instead restrict the universe of possible questions to those that might potentially yield a “yes.”
-David Leonhardt, NY Times
I saw this article on Facebook this morning and I tried it out. Pretty interesting to think about how we can only see through our own lenses. And how we don't care to attempt to look through any other.
It makes me think how Atheists only look at information that continues to prove there is no God.
How Christians only look at information that continues to prove there is a God.
How do we honestly seek truth? How do we see it in it's truest form without a limited lens of senses like not seeing the color blue or hearing the words of another language?
Each day I grow closer and closer to death. Each day I learn more and more. The more I know the more I know I don't know. I don't know what I don't know. But I do know that I am getting older as each year passes me by and I do know that with death comes all the answers.
My hope is in You Jesus. This much is true. No matter what the evidence points to, no matter the lenses that look at the evidence. My hope, my hope is in You Jesus. I hope you defeated death. I hope you made a way. I hope for life after death. My hope in that life is in You Jesus.
Bear's Den - Elysium