"...cognitive dissonance - the way we change facts in our mind until they fit the theory."
I'm not sure you've defined cognitive dissonance correctly, Daniel.
More accurately, it is simply the anxiety people feel when holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously.
One extension of the concept, but not the concept itself, is that anxiety leads some sufferers to avoid information that increases dissonance. The argument for this extension of the basic concept is that sufferers exposed to information which increases their sense of dissonance will dismiss it.
The expression has become a favorite contemporary one, rather faddish like “deconstruction,” in second-rate social science dissertations and pop literature, giving a high gloss to undistinguished thinking.
The basic concept is actually nothing new. It really is a restatement, more than sixty years later, of Freud’s profound discovery of human ambivalence.
The extension of the basic concept is a highly questionable proposition. As Freud showed, our mental lives are simply filled with such stuff. It is the human condition.
The example you offer by Oliver Kamm seems only to confirm my skepticism about the extension. People like the reporter in the example very often form their impressions of guilt or innocence on the basis of impressions the accused makes on them. We all know that a really good detective works this way, from hunches, as we say, and this process often leads to piecing together a convincing case. Every good trial lawyer understands this and works on the jury’s psychological vulnerabilities.
The reporter sounds a simple soul, likely the victim of obsessive-compulsive behaviors, the foundation for all addictions and quixotic quests. Saying anything more is unwarranted by the facts. Giving that “anything more” a fancy name is just silly.
As I wrote before, Oliver Kamm is a distinctly unexciting addition to the paper.
Now, if you really want to put on display Oliver Kamm’s thinking, why not give readers his lamentable column on Bush’s having made the world a safer place?
It was, quite simply, pathetic. He is little more than a propagandist in the camp of the Neocons, not to be taken seriously.
