Chemical Reactions. Love is just this…….

I believe that many things attributed to the supernatural, or ‘Unknown,’ are automatically given special powers and considerations by the less than educated, and those who try to pad their understandings with fluff, because the cold, hard truth is just too much for an evolved ape brain to handle. I believe in the strict science because I have observed the evidence and have seen the validation process first hand, therefore, I do not have to imagine the unprovable to explain that which I cannot comprehend, because I actually DO comprehend the thing of which I speak.

I shall attempt to use a personal reference in which to illustrate the facts and evidence regarding the situation to which I refer. I am speaking, of course, to decisions made by human brains which defy logic and reason, but demonstrate the chemical process that is actually in control of all aspects of human decision making. We are the sum of the chemicals in our brains and nothing will interfere with this, not even the notion of romantic love which is, as I have said, just a chemical reaction in the brain of an evolved ape.

The science of love

When do you know if you fancy someone? What does love do to your brain chemicals, and is falling in love just nature’s way to keep our species alive?

We call it love. It feels like love. But the most exhilarating of all human emotions is probably nature’s beautiful way of keeping the human species alive and reproducing.

With an irresistible cocktail of chemicals, our brain entices us to fall in love. We believe we’re choosing a partner. But we may merely be the happy victims of nature’s lovely plan.
It’s not what you say…
Psychologists have shown it takes between 90 seconds and 4 minutes to decide if you fancy someone.
Research has shown this has little to do with what is said, rather
55% is through body language
38% is the tone and speed of their voice
Only 7% is through what they say

The 3 stages of love
Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in the States has proposed 3 stages of love – lust, attraction and attachment. Each stage might be driven by different hormones and chemicals.

Stage 1: Lust
This is the first stage of love and is driven by the sex hormones testosterone and oestrogen – in both men and women.

Stage 2: Attraction
This is the amazing time when you are truly love-struck and can think of little else. Scientists think that three main neurotransmitters are involved in this stage; adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin.

Adrenaline
The initial stages of falling for someone activates your stress response, increasing your blood levels of adrenalin and cortisol. This has the charming effect that when you unexpectedly bump into your new love, you start to sweat, your heart races and your mouth goes dry.

Dopamine
Helen Fisher asked newly ‘love struck’ couples to have their brains examined and discovered they have high levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. This chemical stimulates ‘desire and reward’ by triggering an intense rush of pleasure. It has the same effect on the brain as taking cocaine!

Fisher suggests “couples often show the signs of surging dopamine: increased energy, less need for sleep or food, focused attention and exquisite delight in smallest details of this novel relationship” .
Serotonin
And finally, serotonin. One of love’s most important chemicals that may explain why when you’re falling in love, your new lover keeps popping into your thoughts.

Does love change the way you think?
A landmark experiment in Pisa, Italy showed that early love (the attraction phase) really changes the way you think.

Dr Donatella Marazziti, a psychiatrist at the University of Pisa advertised for twenty couples who’d been madly in love for less than six months. She wanted to see if the brain mechanisms that cause you to constantly think about your lover, were related to the brain mechanisms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

By analysing blood samples from the lovers, Dr Marazitti discovered that serotonin levels of new lovers were equivalent to the low serotonin levels of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder patients.

Love needs to be blind
Newly smitten lovers often idealise their partner, magnifying their virtues and explaining away their flaws says Ellen Berscheid, a leading researcher on the psychology of love.

New couples also exalt the relationship itself. “It’s very common to think they have a relationship that’s closer and more special than anyone else’s”. Psychologists think we need this rose-tinted view. It makes us want to stay together to enter the next stage of love – attachment.

Stage 3: Attachment
Attachment is the bond that keeps couples together long enough for them to have and raise children. Scientists think there might be two major hormones involved in this feeling of attachment; oxytocin and vasopressin.

Oxytocin – The cuddle hormone

Oxytocin is a powerful hormone released by men and women during orgasm.
It probably deepens the feelings of attachment and makes couples feel much closer to one another after they have had sex. The theory goes that the more sex a couple has, the deeper their bond becomes.
Oxytocin also seems to help cement the strong bond between mum and baby and is released during childbirth. It is also responsible for a mum’s breast automatically releasing milk at the mere sight or sound of her young baby.

Diane Witt, assistant professor of psychology from New York has showed that if you block the natural release of oxytocin in sheep and rats, they reject their own young.

Conversely, injecting oxytocin into female rats who’ve never had sex, caused them to fawn over another female’s young, nuzzling the pups and protecting them as if they were their own.
Vasopressin
Vasopressin is another important hormone in the long-term commitment stage and is released after sex.

Vasopressin (also called anti-diuretic hormone) works with your kidneys to control thirst. Its potential role in long-term relationships was discovered when scientists looked at the prairie vole.

Prairie voles indulge in far more sex than is strictly necessary for the purposes of reproduction. They also – like humans – form fairly stable pair-bonds.

When male prairie voles were given a drug that suppresses the effect of vasopressin, the bond with their partner deteriorated immediately as they lost their devotion and failed to protect their partner from new suitors.

And finally … how to fall in love
Find a complete stranger.
Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour.
Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes.

York psychologist, Professor Arthur Arun, has been studying why people fall in love.
He asked his subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married.

These and other studies are factual and in to prove the chemical reaction that is LOVE. It is nothing more and it is only those who use pseudoscience that try to make chemicals more than they actually are. We skeptics are sure, I just will never show this post to a potential sex partner due to the inability of HER to face the scientific fact of the nature of romantic love.

The Sad, Conflicted Lives of America’s Gay Mormons

The Sad, Conflicted Lives of America’s Gay Mormons
By Scott Bixby January 15, 2015 

 
A man who made major news by publishing a survey of hundreds of gay members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints now faces excommunication for his advocacy of same-sex marriage.

John Dehlin, a doctoral student of clinical and counseling psychology at Utah State University and LGBT activist, working with Bill Bradshaw, a retired professor of molecular biology at Brigham Young University, published a historic 1,612-person survey of LGBT/same-sex attracted members of the Mormon church, producing statistics that further bolster the argument that, however complicated human sexuality may be, “praying away the gay” does more harm than good — and bringing a spouse along for the ride can be even more damaging. The survey was the largest of its kind, soliciting responses through the Internet from Mormons in 48 states and 22 countries.

The results? Married gay Mormons are three times as likely to get divorced.

The study, combined with Dehlin’s outspoken advocacy, has led to the commencement of excommunication proceedings against him on charges of apostasy for supporting same-sex marriage and the ordination of women.

Dehlin told the New York Times that his regional church leader had scheduled a disciplinary hearing later this month. “I would prefer for them to leave me alone,” he said in an interview with the Times, “but if given the choice between denying my conscience and facing excommunication, I’d much rather be excommunicated.”

The numbers behind his study tell a depressing story for gay Mormons. Between 51% and 69% of so-called “mixed-orientation marriages” between Mormons end in divorce; in comparison, roughly 26% of all Mormon marriages end in divorce. More than 70% of LGBT or “same-sex attracted” — the term used by those who acknowledge they are sexually and/or romantically attracted to members of the same sex but don’t identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual — Mormons end up leaving the church, either on their own volition or through excommunication.

A staggering 80% of respondents said they had undergone attempts to “change” their sexual orientation — 85% of those attempts were through a combination of religious and personal efforts, 31% were private efforts exclusively, 40% were through so-called “reparative therapists” and 21% were through group efforts.

The tactics used in reparative therapy — dismissed as dangerous quackery by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Counseling Association, among many other medical and mental health organizations — can range from masturbatory reconditioning and creative visualization to aversive treatments that pair electric shocks or nausea-inducing drugs with the presentation of homoerotic stimuli.

According to an American Psychological Association study, although some participants in the therapy report experiencing a lessening of same-sex attraction, these instances are “rare” and “uncommon,” and concluded that “given the limited amount of methodically sound research, claims that [reparative therapy] is effective are not supported.” Treatment in action is hard to watch:

These mixed-orientation marriages are driven by a struggle between faith and sexuality. The attempts to rewire human sexual desire are closely tied to the Mormon subjects’ desire to get married within the church, one of the nine “saving ordinances,” or rituals required for exaltation after death. According to a national religious survey conducted by Trinity College in 2008, 86% of Mormons are either married or have been married, the highest rate for any religious group in the United States.

This comports well with the experience of Jared Fronk, an economics Ph.D. in Washington D.C. and former member of the church.

“Not getting married is not an option. Unwed members are looked down upon with pity by all and contempt by more than a few,” Fronk told Mic. “Since heterosexual marriage is the purpose of life, it is assumed that anyone who does not get married (barring any obvious impediment) must therefore be secretly sinful or otherwise unworthy of the Lord’s blessings. It surpasses my skill with words to describe the sheer weight of cultural norms and religious dogma that drives gay men and women into heterosexual Mormon marriages.”

Although Gordon B. Hinckley, the 15th president of the church, declared in 1987 that “marriage should not be viewed as a therapeutic step to solve problems such as homosexual inclinations or practices,” he did subtly endorse reparative therapy by announcing that marriage would be attainable once an LDS member overcame same-sex attraction “with a firm and fixed determination never to slip to such practices again.”

“Not getting married is not an option. Unwed members are looked down upon with pity by all and contempt by more than a few.”
That “firm and fixed determination” has led to mixed relationship results for LGBT Mormons: 42% of respondents in the historic survey are single, and 16% say they are one-half of a heterosexual marriage; just more than twice that percentage are in committed same-sex relationships. Peer-reviewed studies of mixed-orientation marriages have shown that many such relationships are rooted in religious approval of the “traditional” nuclear family — but these arrangements seldom work out. According to one German study, most of these marriages collapse due to infidelity as wife and lover compete for exclusivity: “The ‘love triangle’ can rarely be closed.”

“There is talk of lifelong celibacy as an option for gay men and women,” Fronk says, “but I have never heard of a success story. Every case of which I have heard has ended with either a mixed-orientation marriage or the man or woman ‘falling away’ from the LDS church, which in Mormondom is a fate far, far worse than death. I think most Mormon parents would rather their child die in righteousness — and thus be assured a place in heaven — than live in sin.”

The survey backs up Fronk’s assertions. The cognitive dissonance for those Mormons who came to discover their feelings of same-sex attraction were intractable pushed more than half to reject their faith entirely: 53% of the survey’s respondents rejected their LDS identity, compared with only 6% who rejected their LGBT identity.

Although there are a few organizations that aim to bridge the divide between LGBT and Mormon identity, only 4% of the people surveyed say they have “integrated” the two, like Jimmy Hales, star of a viral coming-out video wherein he declares that being a gay Mormon means he’s “going to lead a celibate life. Sucks.” But there’s no way around it. After all, “the doctrine of the Mormon church isn’t going to change.”

The lives behind the numbers are even more complicated. While most Americans know the Mormon church hasn’t exactly been a champion of gay rights, its history with homosexuality in principle and gay church members in practice is more complicated.

In a briefing on homosexuality, the LDS church states that “the church firmly believes that all people are equally beloved children of God and deserve to be treated with love and respect,” quoting apostle Elder Quentin L. Cook in stating that “as a church, nobody should be more loving and compassionate. Let us be at the forefront in terms of expressing love, compassion and outreach. Let’s not have families exclude or be disrespectful of those who choose a different lifestyle as a result of their feelings about their own gender.” The church has tepidly supported statutes protecting LGBT Americans from workplace and housing discrimination. Mormon.org features a biography of a gay Mormon as part of its “I’m a Mormon” campaign, and the church has even created a website to address its relationship with the LGBT community.

But as LGBT people around the world have learned from Pope Francis, kind words haven’t always translated into kind actions. Hinckley himself stated in Ensign, the church magazine, that “we cannot stand idle if they indulge in immoral activity, if they try to uphold and defend and live in a so-called same-sex marriage situation. To permit such would be to make light of the very serious and sacred foundation of God-sanctioned marriage.”

The church has also flexed its muscle on LGBT-rights issues in the public sphere. Involvement by the church and proxy organizations in the Proposition 8 battle in California is widely seen as key to the initiative’s passage, with as much as half of the $40 million raised on behalf of the measure contributed by Mormons. The church has also historically maintained uncomfortably close ties with organizations that practice reparative therapy, including experiments at Brigham Young in the 1970s that delivered powerful electric shocks to the genitals of men experiencing arousal while watching gay pornography.

According to Fronk, the thin line between homosexual attraction and homosexual actions is blurrier than some church officials make it out to be. “In official discourse, same-gender attraction is often likened to a short temper or a problem with drugs: a weakness to be overcome but not a sin in itself. Acting on those impulses is what incurs God’s wrath.

“All that said, my experience growing up as an active member of the LDS church was that there was no fine distinction made between the two. Being gay was a sin. Full stop. In the pantheon of mortal sins, only murder out-eviled homosexuality.”

The feeling of failure was as devastating as the feeling of same-sex attraction itself. “I grew up thinking gays were the worst of sinners,” Fronk said. “Murderers you could kind of respect, but gays were just disgusting. I fought against acknowledging my own homosexuality for years, cycling through periods of intense depression and zealotry, convinced each time that through sheer force of prayer I could become straight and devastated anew at each failure.”

“In the pantheon of mortal sins, only murder out-eviled homosexuality.”
When same-sex attraction isn’t being described as a moral flaw, Fronk says, church members refer to it as a “disease,” a status homosexuality held in official doctrine until 1992. Blessings of healing are one of the principle sacraments of the Mormon faith, leading to the widely held belief that sufficient faith, prayer and fasting can cure anyone of the gay “disease.” Anyone failed to be cured is judged to have been insufficiently righteous.

“I served my full-time mission for the church entirely confident that for my unwavering devotion to God, He would surely heal me of my affliction,” Fronk said. “After honorably completing my service, I returned home to promptly fall in (unrequited) love with one of my best male friends, which only made me think that I had somehow failed to purge some blight of wickedness from my own soul, if God were willing to allow my curse of same-gender attraction to continue.”

Mixed-orientation marriages are just as difficult for straight spouses. According to a University of Chicago study, between 2% and 4% of ever-married American women have either knowingly or unknowingly married a gay man. According to the Straight Spouse Network, an online forum for the heterosexual spouses of LGBT men and women, “the process straight spouses go through is often described as being similar to the grieving process after the death of a loved one … however, in the case of a straight spouse, frequently the LGBT spouse is still around and involved in your life to some degree, and thus there is no clear point at which grieving ends.”

Prominent sexologist and social worker Joe Kort has controversially stated that “straight individuals rarely marry gay people accidentally,” a common narrative that leaves many heterosexual wives of gay men blaming themselves, often too embarrassed to seek support from family or friends. A Journal of Homosexuality report suggests that the side affects of the revelation that your spouse is gay — social isolation, stigma and a dearth of support — can be even more damaging than the end of a marriage.

These are real people and real marriages. The comic trope of the flamboyant husband and the clueless wife has been bandied about in popular culture forever, from Arrested Development and Parks and Recreation to TLC’s execrable My Husband’s Not Gay, a “special event” from the clogged toilet of American culture that brought you America’s Worst Tattoos and I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant.

My Husband’s Not Gay, the latest in TLC’s long line of exploitative, voyeuristic freakshows masquerading as documentaries, follows four men who experience same-sex attraction but don’t want to live a “gay lifestyle.” It’s been slammed as “downright irresponsible” by Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of GLAAD, and more than 130,000 people have signed an online petition claiming that the show promotes “reparative therapy” and calling for its cancellation.

The decisions made by the men in My Husband’s Not Gay and by the 1,612 people in the Dehlin-Bradshaw survey are, largely, their choices to make, although many of those subjected to reparative therapy are children, treated through coercion or downright force. Rather than laughing at their own delusion and their spouses’ misfortune, we should be making the world a safer place for LGBT people to live full lives with authenticity and honesty.

For Fronk, the journey to self-acceptance took years — and the concerted efforts of people who loved him for who he was. “In the end, I was one of the lucky ones. One day I finally had the courage to begin praying to understand God’s will rather than ask him to change me. I then had my own spiritual experiences that convinced me that God had been trying to guide me all along: I had simply been asking the wrong questions.

“There was nothing wrong with me to fix. God loved me. And he wanted me to be truly happy, which for me meant accepting who I am.”

h/t Salt Lake Tribune

Minimum Wage

MYTH: We will always be able to remain fully employed as a nation and it is desirable to do so.

TRUTH: We need massive underemployment to get rid of trivial unnecessary jobs in the economy and make it more efficient in the future by offering free education in a technical field as a realistic hope of future employment to those unemployed and destitute who have a desire to put in the effort and who have the ability and who will try to achieve a greater level of quality education.

With a safety net for the unemployed and destitute there will be no need for a minimum wage because if it is too low then citizens will remain unemployed and destitute supported with basic needs delivered door to door but no vehicle transportation.

Instead without a minimum wage employers will be able to hire teenage offspring to do fast food, clerical help, custodial work, deli work, urban farming, safe factory jobs, and other safe jobs at minimal hourly rates for about 4 hours a day so that they get training in the work ethic on the job with financial help from the family. Children of the employed will have the opportunity to learn basic job and people skills which will be very useful in the employment world where it is frequently said that you can’t get a job without experience.

Transportation to an from work can be done by specialty van, bicycles, and scooters with parental permission.

Teenage offspring of the employed will get all the job experience which they need and then some! We will also be once again in a competitive position with developing countries like China and Russia.

There may be some that feel that there would be less time for school if they worked. Shorten the school day by four hours a day because offspring aren’t learning useful job skills in school anyway and a liberal arts education is overrated and is largely an inefficient trivial pursuit expensive bureaucracy to boot.

Teenage offspring of the unemployed and destitute should not qualify for part time work because it would motivate the adults to have more offspring and send them out to earn spending money for the unemployed and destitute. Instead the teenage offspring of the unemployed and destitute should be spending more time on education which will benefit them later in life.

I don’t believe in using profane language but I use fuck here to get the message across to those working people that I love so much such as furniture movers. Those people have bodily difficult jobs carrying heavy furniture every day and it is a hard boring job. Many of them use fuck and motherfucker every forth word or so and I empathize with them.

I am a man for the working people because I have been there and seen it and experienced it with my own body sweat. Yea, I can also move medium weight furniture. I am not afraid of dirty difficult jobs or any job because different jobs are necessary and to be admired. I worked my butt off doing a speedy job by moving speedily with about three to five boxes at a time strapped to my back. Did I get rewarded for that extra work? No! I was working for minimum wage and there was no incentive to work efficiently and make the customer happy with a speedy move.

The truth is that most of those minimum wage jobs are unjust and in about 10 to 20 years there should be very few minimum wage jobs that robots can’t do better. Most of those minimum wage workers should be educating themselves on the internet for better technologically based jobs. Education retraining in science and technology over the internet at home or in school should be financed by the federal government and the instruction for the audio visual education should be provided by private firms also potentially funded by foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. All the recipients of this free internet education would be the unemployed and destitute and all students in public schools and community colleges and universities.

The truth is that most minimum wage jobs should be robotized and humans should not be trapped into working at minimum subsistence levels for long durations. That kind of work is truly dehumanizing and an unjust exploitation and minimization of the full potential of the human body and mind!!!!!!

WE DON’T NEED A MINIMUM WAGE IF WE PASS LAWS GUARANTEEING A SAFETY NET FOR ALL UNEMPLOYED AND DESTITUTE ADULTS AND THAT INCLUDES RECENT SCHOOL GRADUATES WHO CAN’T FIND EMPLOYMENT IN THE WORKPLACE. ONLY FOOD STAMPS ARE NOT ENOUGH HELP FOR THE UNEMPLOYED AND DESTITUTE STRANGERS AND FAMILY OFFSPRING!!!!!!

READ MY BOOK CHANGES IN WELFARE LAWS WHICH ARE NEEDED TO STOP OR KILL THE MINIMUM WAGE MYTH OR HISTORICAL LIE!!!!!!

If you liked this evergreen truth blog then read more of them, about 1200 so far, or read one or more of my evergreen truth books, especially COMMON SENSE, rays of truth in a human world filled with myths and deceptions.

For a complete readily accessible list of blogs and titles go to twitter.com/uldissprogis.

Enjoy!!!!!!

If you enjoyed this blog then here is a list of my most popular ones which you may also enjoy!!!

http://uldissprogis.com/zlist-of-my-most-popular-blogs/

Read this person’s blog. I reposted this because I believe in the hard science that has placed animals in environments where they receive 3 hots and a cot for no effort. The end result is that they begin to expect this every day and will quit working as long as it is given to them. Humans are no different and the excuses do not hold because they all cede personal responsibility to someone else and assume that everyone is fucking mindless. Hate fucking Wall Street? Then quit cooperating, stop watching the fucking Kardashians and do something about your own predicament! 

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.
Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study.
Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis.
As such, it can be thought of as a form of selection bias in collecting evidence.

I encounter this most often when someone is displaying a condescending tone towards scientific evidence that is available with a simple Google search. These individuals will resist the simple act of pulling back a sheet covering an answer written in 10 foot letters that goes against their worldview. No matter how obviously wrong they are, these people prefer the ‘head in the sand’ approach over gathering simple information that would invalidate information that they hold to be true. In the psychological field of study, these people are revealed as to be at a greater predisposition to compulsive routines, blind faith and religious adherence. This is only a few of many reasons that this bias exists. Many people who lack the ability to examine and refute their own knowledge are very knee-jerk in opinion and comprise the extreme political views of both Right and Left. They lack the ability to take super charged emotion out of decision making and generally act first before weighing the consequences of their actions.

Cognitive Dissonance, very much ingrained in religion.

Cognitive Dissonance
by Saul McLeod published 2008, updated 2014

Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors.

This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance etc.

For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition).

Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance).

Attitudes may change because of factors within the person. An important factor here is the principle of cognitive consistency, the focus of Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory starts from the idea that we seek consistency in our beliefs and attitudes in any situation where two cognitions are inconsistent.

Leon Festinger (1957) proposed cognitive dissonance theory, which states that a powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior.

According to Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement).

Cognitive dissonance was first investigated by Leon Festinger, arising out of a participant observation study of a cult which believed that the earth was going to be destroyed by a flood, and what happened to its members — particularly the really committed ones who had given up their homes and jobs to work for the cult — when the flood did not happen.

While fringe members were more inclined to recognize that they had made fools of themselves and to “put it down to experience”, committed members were more likely to re-interpret the evidence to show that they were right all along (the earth was not destroyed because of the faithfulness of the cult members).

How Attitude Change Takes Place
According to cognitive dissonance theory, there is a tendency for individuals to seek consistency among their cognitions (i.e., beliefs, opinions). When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance.

Dissonance can be reduced in one of three ways:

First, individuals can change one or more of the attitudes, behavior, beliefs etc. so as to make the relationship between the two elements a consonant one. When one of the dissonant elements is a behavior, the individual can change or eliminate the behavior. However, this mode of dissonance reduction frequently presents problems for people, as it is often difficult for people to change well-learned behavioral responses (e.g. giving up smoking).

A second (cognitive) method of reducing dissonance is to acquire new information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs. For example, thinking smoking causes lung cancer will cause dissonance if a person smokes. However, new information such as “research has not proved definitely that smoking causes lung cancer” may reduce the dissonance.

A third way to reduce dissonance is to reduce the importance of the cognitions (i.e. beliefs, attitudes). A person could convince themself that it is better to “live for today” than to “save for tomorrow.” In other words, he could tell himself that a short life filled with smoking and sensual pleasures is better than a long life devoid of such joys. In this way, he would be decreasing the importance of the dissonant cognition (smoking is bad of ones health).

Notice that dissonance theory does not state that these modes of dissonance reduction will actually work, only that individuals who are in a state of cognitive dissonance will take steps to reduce the extent of their dissonance. One of the points that dissonance theorists are fond of making is that people will go to all sorts of lengths to reduce dissonance.

The theory of cognitive dissonance has been widely researched in a number of situations to develop the basic idea in more detail, and various factors that been identified which may be important in attitude change.

Cognitive Dissonance, very much ingrained in religion.

Cognitive Dissonance
by Saul McLeod published 2008, updated 2014

Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors.

This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance etc.

For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition).

Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance).

Attitudes may change because of factors within the person. An important factor here is the principle of cognitive consistency, the focus of Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory starts from the idea that we seek consistency in our beliefs and attitudes in any situation where two cognitions are inconsistent.

Leon Festinger (1957) proposed cognitive dissonance theory, which states that a powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior.

According to Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement).

Cognitive dissonance was first investigated by Leon Festinger, arising out of a participant observation study of a cult which believed that the earth was going to be destroyed by a flood, and what happened to its members — particularly the really committed ones who had given up their homes and jobs to work for the cult — when the flood did not happen.

While fringe members were more inclined to recognize that they had made fools of themselves and to “put it down to experience”, committed members were more likely to re-interpret the evidence to show that they were right all along (the earth was not destroyed because of the faithfulness of the cult members).

How Attitude Change Takes Place
According to cognitive dissonance theory, there is a tendency for individuals to seek consistency among their cognitions (i.e., beliefs, opinions). When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance.

Dissonance can be reduced in one of three ways:

First, individuals can change one or more of the attitudes, behavior, beliefs etc. so as to make the relationship between the two elements a consonant one. When one of the dissonant elements is a behavior, the individual can change or eliminate the behavior. However, this mode of dissonance reduction frequently presents problems for people, as it is often difficult for people to change well-learned behavioral responses (e.g. giving up smoking).

A second (cognitive) method of reducing dissonance is to acquire new information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs. For example, thinking smoking causes lung cancer will cause dissonance if a person smokes. However, new information such as “research has not proved definitely that smoking causes lung cancer” may reduce the dissonance.

A third way to reduce dissonance is to reduce the importance of the cognitions (i.e. beliefs, attitudes). A person could convince themself that it is better to “live for today” than to “save for tomorrow.” In other words, he could tell himself that a short life filled with smoking and sensual pleasures is better than a long life devoid of such joys. In this way, he would be decreasing the importance of the dissonant cognition (smoking is bad of ones health).

Notice that dissonance theory does not state that these modes of dissonance reduction will actually work, only that individuals who are in a state of cognitive dissonance will take steps to reduce the extent of their dissonance. One of the points that dissonance theorists are fond of making is that people will go to all sorts of lengths to reduce dissonance.

The theory of cognitive dissonance has been widely researched in a number of situations to develop the basic idea in more detail, and various factors that been identified which may be important in attitude change.

Psychology Today

 

The New Brain

How your brain—and our understanding of it—are constantly changing.

by R. Douglas Fields

Religion and Reason

Analytic thinking decreases religious belief.

Published on April 26, 2012 by R. Douglas Fields in The New Brain

analitic thinking promotes religious disbelief

Your answer to the following riddle can predict whether you are a believer in religion or a disbeliever:

Q:  If a baseball and bat cost $110, and the bat costs $100 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

A:  If you answered $10 you are inclined to believe in religion.  If you answered $5 you are inclined to disbelieve.

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            Why? Because, according to new research reported in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science, the $10 answer indicates that you are an intuitive thinker, and the $5 answer indicates that you solve problems analytically, rather than following your gut instinct.

Psychologists William Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, predicted that people who were more analytic in thinking would tend not to believe in religion, whereas people who approach problems more intuitively would tend to be believers. Their study confirmed the hypothesis and the findings illuminate the mysterious cognitive process by which we reach decisions about our beliefs.

Cognitive theory of decision making supports the hypothesis that there are two independent processes involved in decision making. The first process is based on gut instinct, and this process is shared by other animals. The second cognitive process is an evolutionarily recent development, exclusive to humans, which utilizes logical reasoning to make decisions. Their study of 179 Canadian undergraduate students showed that people who tend to solve problems more analytically also tended to be religious disbelievers. This was demonstrated by giving the students a series of questions like the one above and then scoring them on the basis of whether they used intuition or analytic logic to reach the answers. Afterward, the researchers surveyed the students on whether or not they held religious beliefs. The results showed that the intuitive thinkers were much more likely to believe in religion.

To test whether there is a causative basis for this correlation, the researchers then used various subtle manipulations to promote analytic reasoning in test subjects. Prior research in psychology has shown that priming stimuli that subconsciously suggest analytical thinking will tend to increase analytic reasoning measured on a subsequent test. For example, if subjects are shown a picture of Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker” (seated head-in-hand pondering) they score higher in measures of analytic thinking in tests given immediately afterward. Their studies confirmed this effect but also showed that those subjects who showed increased analytic thinking also were significantly more likely to be disbelievers in religion when surveyed immediately after the test.

Three other interventions to boost analytic thinking had the same effect on increasing religious disbelief. This included asking subjects to arrange a collection of words into a meaningful sequence. If the words used for the subconscious prime related to analytic thinking, such as “think, reason, analyze, ponder, rational,” rather than control words “hammer, shoes, jump, retrace, brown,” subjects scored higher on tests of analytic thinking given immediately afterward, and they were also much more likely to be disbelievers in religion. This demonstrates that increasing critical thinking also increases religious disbelief.

Norenzayan emphasizes that “Analytical thinking is one of several factors that contribute to disbelief.  Belief and disbelief are complex phenomena that have multiple causes.  We have identified just one factor in these studies.”

Professor and Chairman Terrence Reynolds of the Department of Theology at Georgetown University finds it plausible that analytic thinking could make religious belief more difficult. “If one assumes that all rationality is tied to what we know directly through the five senses, that limits our understanding of meaning questions. Religion tends to focus on questions of meaning and value, which may not be available through analytic verification processes… by definition God is a being that transcends the senses.”

Reynolds and Norenzayan agree that analytic reasoning is not superior to intuitive reasoning. “They both have their costs and benefits,” Norenzayan says. One of the consequences of the costs and benefits is one’s tendency to believe in religion. So whether you answered $5 or $10 provides insight into what you believe and how your beliefs are formed.