Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
In continuing our series “The Human Mormon Mind,” I just talked with Mica McGriggs and Benjamin Knoll about an incredibly important aspect of human psychology and group dynamics. The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight describes our tendency to view ourselves and the things that we do charitably while viewing others and the things they do more critically. This asymmetry arises from intimately knowing the complexity of thought within ourselves and judging others merely through external information.
We drew this topic from David McRaney’s book You are now Less Dumb (Chapter 12 for those interested).
Additionally you can listen to David McRaney read the chapter here (transcript included).
Or you can read an academic article on the subject here.
Also we had breifly mentioned a thought by Elder Oaks and I dug up the quote from a 2006 Ensign.
“As a General Authority, I have the responsibility to preach general principles. When I do, I don’t try to define all the exceptions. There are exceptions to some rules. For example, we believe the commandment is not violated by killing pursuant to a lawful order in an armed conflict. But don’t ask me to give an opinion on your exception. I only teach the general rules. Whether an exception applies to you is your responsibility. You must work that out individually between you and the Lord.”
Music Note: Intro Minor Swing by the Rosenberg Trio, background music from bensound.com, and outro Flight of the Ginker by Doug Martin.
Very much enjoyed the discussion. I've read "Being Wrong" a few times, and I recommend it all the time (it speaks to my centrist nature). I'm finally comfortable remaining Mormon while rejecting orthodoxy. Excuse the long quote, but Ms Schulz's conclusion is sublime…
“This unshakable conviction of rightness represents the logical outcome of everything we’ve heard about so far. Our sense of certainty is kindled by the feeling of knowing; that inner sensation that something just “is”, with all of the solidity and self-evidence suggested by that most basic of verbs. Viewed in some lights, in fact, the idea of knowledge and the idea of certainty seem indistinguishable. But to most of us certainty suggests something bigger and more forceful than knowledge. The great American satirist Ambrose Bierce defined it as, “being mistaken at the top of one’s voice.” And it is this shouted-from-the-rooftops quality that makes certainty distinctive. Compared to the feeling of knowing, which is by definition a feeling and inner state, certainty seems both amped up and externalized. It is, we might say, a more public, action oriented analog to knowledge. The feeling of knowing, then, is less a synonym to certainty than a precondition for it; and we have encountered other pre-conditions as well. There are our sensory perceptions, so immediate and convincing that they seem beyond dispute. There is the logical necessity, captured by the “‘cause its true” constraint, of thinking that our beliefs are grounded in the facts. There are the biases we bring to bear when we assess the evidence for and against those beliefs. And there is the fact that our convictions and our communities are mutually reinforcing, so that we can’t question our beliefs without running the risk of losing the support, status, and sense of identity that comes with belonging to a particular society. All of these factors conduce to the condition of certainty, even as they should caution us against it.
We have seen, after all, that knowledge is a bankrupt category, and that the feeling of knowing is not a reliable indicator of accuracy. We have seen that our senses can fail us, our minds mislead us, our communities blind us; and we have seen too that certainty can be a moral catastrophe waiting to happen. Moreover, we often recoil from the certainty of others even when they aren’t using it to excuse injustice or violence. The certainty of those with whom we disagree, whether the disagreement concerns who should run the country or who should run the dishwasher, never looks justified to us, and frequently looks odious. As often as not, we regard it as a sign of excessive emotional attachment to an idea, or an indicator of a narrow, fearful, or stubborn frame of mind. By contrast, we experience our own certainty as simply a side effect of our rightness; justifiable because our cause is just. And, remarkably, despite our generally supple, imaginative, extrapolation-happy minds, we cannot transpose this scene. We cannot imagine, or do not care, that our own certainty, when seen from the outside, must look just as unbecoming and ill-grounded as the certainty we abhor in others. This is one of the most defining and dangerous characteristics of certainty. It is toxic to a shift in perspective