Sunday, June 6, 2010

But, but, but.. Self affirmation REALLY did help!

Here are some mind traps and human reasoning errors that may contribute to an improper skew of the myth at hand throughout society:

POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC: Translated to English from Latin this translates to “After this, therefore because of this.” This is a primary fallacy that traps people into believing in this myth because it so strongly relates to it. So let’s break this one down. Say an event, A happens, and because of A, B happens. How about we fill in the blanks? Say, someone has been really depressed for a long time, and then they watch a video on YouTube about self affirmation and they feel a transformation in the way that they live their life.. you can probably fill in the rest. So there HAS to be a relationship between A and B right? This implies that A CAUSED B. The example cited in Lilienfield is that most serial killers eat cereal as a child (14). Of course, we can not assume that EVERY child that eats cereal is going to be a serial killer. So the reason that I cited that example to disprove this myth is because having a positive attitude is one aspect of being able to improve your quality of life. A positive attitude can give you a mental boost, but it is not the only thing necessary, because only thinking a positive thought does not get anything done.

CONFIRMATION BIAS: This reasoning error states that you only look for evidence that proves your statement, in this case only proves the self affirming myth. This is also a primary reason that people fall victim to the self affirming myth because it is similar to the myth that “positive attitude cures cancer.” My psychology class disproved this myth earlier on the quarter by stating that the reason that it is a myth is because we only look at people who say that they have been cured by their own positive attitude and use them as examples. The self affirming myth reiterates itself here by appealing to the sentimental side of us. In order for us to be logical we have to look at the bigger frame of the myth though. We can look at many different cases of one achieving success, but at some point we have to ask what really caused it? Was it really only the individual’s positive attitude?  We can not look at success as the direct, and only, result of positive attitude and self affirmation.

--SEEING WHAT WE WANT TO SEE: We each look at life our own unique and awesome way. With every way different, each of us has opinions on how things work. This means that due to our personal opinions we may lean one way on an issue and another way on a different issue. Some of those issues we may be biased on. For some of those issues we may research it and only take information that we can use to prove our side of an issue. For this myth, we may see only what we want to see because we only want to prove our point and this can lead to a heavy distortion of the myth itself.

CAUSATION vs. CORRELATION: This may seem very similar to Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc, but it is different in the sense that it casually implies a relationship between A and B. This implies that the relationship between A and B is either that: A caused B, B caused A, or there is a third variable C. Many people jump to the conclusion that A causes B, but where is C in this equation? Is it plausible to say that A directly caused B?  The answer is no, because we do not know all of the factors that can be taken into account to get to the final result of B.

1 comment:

  1. Daniel, this was a really well covered post! If I had known these reasoning errors from class, I would totally understand them now. Another one might be lack of data. I posted on Mike's blog about the same one. It would explain why so many people believe and support this myth. No one has information on it, whether or not they realize it.

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