October 23, 2016 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Belief Perseverence: Concenputal Inflexibility
Belief Perseverence: Concenputal Inflexibility
Beside the
obedience to authority explanation, Milgram also came along with a parallel
explanation which could also account both by itself and along the obedience
theory the strange outcome of his experiments.
He beseeched
upon the idea of belief persiverence, one of the most ubiquitous cognitive
fallacies and mental biases of human apes.
He wrote, “What
people cannot be counted on is to realize that a seemingly benevolent authority
is in fact malevolent, even when they are faced with overwhelming evidence
which suggests that this authority is indeed malevolent.”
Why the
phenomenon of belief persiverence is so rife and pervasive in us apes is not
known, but many claim that we have a deep-rooted requirement of continuity
combined with a powerful instinct to resist the unpredictability that is innate
to both life and nature.
This, of course is just petitio
principii, or begging the question.
Many thinkers
of past yore have mocked this tendency of ours.
Willard Quine,
the great American philosopher and logician had to say this:
“The desire to
be right and the desire to have been right are two desires, and the sooner we
separate them the better off we are.
“The desire to
be right is the thirst for truth.
“On all
accounts, both practical and theoretical, there is nothing but good to be said
of it.
“The desire to
have been right, on the other hand, is the pride that goeth before a fall.
“It stands in
the way of our seeing we were wrong, and thus blocks the progress of our
knowledge.”
Both these
human tendencies, videlicet obedience to authority and belief persistence led
to the savage and vicious night of November 9, 1938 that is infamously known as
Kristallnacht, the night of the Broken Glass.
Hans Bethe’s
mother who had remained in Germany rightly feared for her life as Kristallnacht
led to the inception of the Final Solution and The Holocaust.
Even though it
was very well known that the German economic crisis following World War I was
the result of war borrowings of the Weimar Republic and the London Ultimatum of
the Treaty of Versailles (50 billion gold marks), yet one whole race was blamed
for it without any rhyme nor reason.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night and my fellow cousin ape.
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an IIT graduate and
a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, may I
suggest this large collection of Kids Songs:
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