you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[+] 161 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)
  • [–] 113 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Smells strongly of retrofitted justification BS to me.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 62 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah. The dude that came up with the term cognitive dissonance described this process in his book When Prophesy Fails. Basically when you are in a cult and your doomsday ends up being a normal day you have a freak out of cognitive dissonance. This isn’t great because people don’t like having their strongly held beliefs shown to be invalid. So they must come up with a post hoc rationalization as to why their doomsday didn’t come true and why they are still right.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Yep, and the more they do it, the easier it becomes until it's second nature.

    Republicans understood this, which is why they tapped into the Christian demographic. People who have already been primed to ignore constant cognitive dissonance.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    When you receive information that proves you wrong you can do 1 of 2 things. You can admit you were wrong, or you can double down and twist the situation to avoid admitting it. "This is actually what I thought would happen and I wanted this". I actually think its cowardly. It takes courage to stand up and admit they were wrong.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments