Stephen Kinzer draws to a close his brilliant biography of the Dulles brothers by applying to their decision-making processes "twenty-first century discoveries about how the brain works." These discoveries include:
1. People are motivated to accept accounts that fit with their preexisting convictions; acceptance of those accounts makes them feel better, and acceptance of competing claims makes them feel worse.
2. Dissonance is eliminated when we blind ourselves to contradictory propositions. And we are prepared to pay a very high price to preserve our most cherished ideas.
3. Moral hypocrisy is a deep part of our nature: the tendency to judge others more harshly for some moral infraction than we judge ourselves.
4. Groupthink leads to many problems of defective decision making, including incomplete survey of alternatives and objectives, failure to examine the risks of the preferred choice, poor information search, selective bias in processing information, and failure to assess alternatives.
5. We are often confident even when we are wrong...Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.
6. Certain beliefs are so important for a society or group that they become part of how you prove your identity...The truth is that our minds just aren't set up to be changed by mere evidence.
[Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their Secret World War, New York: Times Books (2013), 321-322].
No comments:
Post a Comment