My question is: who is deciding what is the correct reality to perceive?
For example, this from their questionnaire:
>Kim’s friends told her that she could not come to the concert with them because
they were unable to get enough tickets for everyone. Kim knows they probably
didn’t exclude her on purpose, but she feels rejected. Therefore, part of her
believes she was rejected
What in such a scenario gives the impetus to the charitable interpretation (that they simply could not get tickets)? which they seem to indicate would be what a 'well-adjusted' person free of cognitive distortion would assume.
Secondly, while intentionality can be important, why is there so much weight seemingly being placed on it these days (or is that just my perception?) People can intend one thing and harmful outcomes still result. One could drive drunk without any intention of anything bad happening and still get into an accident. One could fire a gun randomly into the air with no intention of harming anyone and the bullets still come down and hit someone.
The main intent, it seems to me, at least by some, is to obscure the notion that humans and systems may act in ways contrary to their expressed intent. Much atrocity and discrimination has been predicated on actions justified by philanthropic intent, ie 'elevating the savages'.
And I wonder if a person free of cognitive distortions would even be referred to as human, as the quote goes:
"Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions." --David Hume
> What in such a scenario gives the impetus to the charitable interpretation (that they simply could not get tickets)?
The cognitive distortion is taking uncertainty and replacing it with the worst possible interpretation.
Or, inserting artificial uncertainty into a direction and using that opening to pretend that an alternate explanation is true.
> People can intend one thing and harmful outcomes still result. One could drive drunk without any intention of anything bad happening and still get into an accident. One could fire a gun randomly into the air with no intention of harming anyone and the bullets still come down and hit someone.
Your examples aren't really relevant, though, because they have concrete and definitive harms.
The article is about imagined harms that only arise from different subjective interpretations of something. There is no subjective interpretation of getting hit by a bullet or killed by a drunk driver in which the person isn't harmed. Claiming good intent doesn't bring someone back from the dead.
You're making the mistake of equating speech with violence, which is explicitly discussed in the paper.
The cognitive distortion is taking uncertainty and replacing it with the worst possible interpretation.
Nah, it seems the designers of this test, along with X percentage of HN, suffer from "low social intelligence". If there's an event where you expect to go with your friends and they call and say they you can't come, they have dissed you. There are no good reasons. If there's an event where I'd normally go with friends and we can't get enough tickets, we go elsewhere. That's how actual friends behave. If we can't get enough tickets and we want to go, we just don't tell the person, called a "white lie" - it's shitty but not as shitty as just saying "oh sorry, this event matters more than you".
The article is about imagined harms that only arise from different subjective interpretations of something.
Human society is based on a lot of subjective but well established interpretations of actions. The people who don't know or understand these are generally considered socially inept.
In the real world, I have friends who couldn't get enough tickets for me to go see Hamilton with them, or even a better example, for us all to go to Playa Del Fuego (US east coast mini burning man), who then later ended up giving me their tickets. Both examples true stories, different circles of friends.
Your theory of human behavior arising from your claimed superior "social intelligence" does not explain this.
In the real world, I have friends who couldn't get enough tickets for me to go see Hamilton with them, or even a better example, for us all to go to Playa Del Fuego (US east coast mini burning man), who then later ended up giving me their tickets.
This seems like "what decent people do". "Social intelligence" might not have been the best word but the point is that people-who-function-society, people with actual friendships, make equality in those friendships important. These would be normal people with normal social abilities/intelligence/whatever.
Remember the point of the original is your friend calls you to say "you're coming to the show 'cause we couldn't get tickets" with no alternate plans/apologies explanations etc. And test was a "rational" person was supposed to see this an event having no impact on the friendship. I think it's someone with moderate social skills that this isn't the way things work and it seems like your example demonstrates. But oppositely, the people chiming in to say "what's the problem, things happen that way" likely just aren't tuned in this stuff.
Edit: I'll admit I mostly chose the term "social intelligence" to wave in the face of the HN fans of things like the anti-social "logic" of this study, since these types really value their competence and they tend to be very incompetent at the skill of being-a-decent-person, which might a better synonym for "social intelligence".
Yeah if I made plans with a group to go see a yet to be specified show and then got left out because they later decided on Hamilton, with no additional show planned for the full group, that is a sign about the friendship IMO. But it's completely different if the intent all along was to go see Hamilton. Everyone understands it is competitive to get tickets. If you waited to be able to go with your entire friend group you would never see the show.
It's also not necessarily even a "friend ranking" who does get picked when the goal is to see Hamilton. When choosing who to prioritize you're going to consider who would appreciate seeing Hamilton the most, who (of your close friends) it's been the longest since you did something with, who might have recently invited you to a similarly in-demand event, etc.
Nobody (that matters in psychology) considers "social intelligence" as an official metric. Most (minus maybe the genetic researchers) agree that various childhood traumas usually explain strange behavior.
What if Kim had a traumatic childhood, and had common issues with this like abandonment anxiety and poor boundaries? She could not see how her group could make decisions without her and her negative childhood experiences are projected onto the situation causing anxiety.
What if Kim was a healthy adult? She would maybe not have negative experiences projected onto the scenario and perhaps could easily switch to making plans by herself without her group with healthy boundaries.
What if the group was traumatized as well? The group would probably treat Kim like they were forced to treat their parents: giving Kim their full focus and emotional libido in order to avoid a fallout. This group would certainly project their insecurity onto Kim and assume her devastation.
What if the group was healthy and had healthy boundaries? The group would, perhaps, know they could not assume how the other individual would react and video call her to see if she was OK and negotiate on-call. (Any assumption of Kim's response is just projection - and studies show that the older and more experienced with social situations a person becomes the more they know they can't accurately assume how a person reacts) Positive feelings are projected onto the situation and no one projects negative experiences.
"Low social intelligence" isn't considered by most people, but childhood trauma is - and childhood trauma would clearly affect what happens. Childhood trauma causes negative affective emotions in social situations, good-enough parents cause positive affect in social situations - *NOT* social intelligence pseudoscience.
I think your response kind of shows that you aren’t grasping the pretty standard social construct that she likely got dissed by her friends by most socialized peoples metrics (within the confined context of the original papers scenario). The person you replied to laid it out as clearly as possible.
Also, by referring to emotional intelligence as pseudoscience, do you mean to dismiss it as a valid concept? Surely you realize some people are better in social situations than others.
>Surely you realize some people are better in social situations than others
Absolutely, and the cause of poor social function is almost only childhood trauma.
Being sensitive to others emotions (pop-culture empathy) is not equal to actually knowing another person's emotions. There are many many such studies that prove this, here is a random one I found on page 1 of Google: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c5968c1 Many more actually negatively correlate being sensitive to others emotions with accurately gauging others' emotions. I also mentioned there's a study that correlates age (accumulated social experience?) with the knowledge of how little they themselves can infer from other people (can't remember the exact topic, but it goes something like that). Side note, emotional sensitivity is linked with childhood trauma.
Therefore we can say being sensitive to, or thinking we know, other people's emotions has nothing to do with being good at social situations (at worst it actually impairs social function). At best being sensitive to others' perceived (not real: projected) emotions is poor boundaries.
This counter-intuitive reality needs to be clear when the topic of emotional intelligence is brought up. Emotional Intelligence is not a virtue, but yes, we can agree it exists and people that are healed (unfortunately, not all) can posses it. To tie it all in, would a truly emotionally intelligent person (in the academic and psychotherapeutic sense) know how Kim would respond, or would the emotionally intelligent Kim respond negatively or positively? It is not clear, and thinking one knows the objective answer to this scenario is suspect. We can obviously say "if I was Kim, I would feel..." but I argue nothing more can be said.
I think you have interesting points to make, but the conclusion is a cop-out. There's various useful ways you can answer beyond "if I were Kim".
In faithful observance of commenting praxis, I have not read TFA. But it seems TFA expects an answer instead of taking the opportunity to dig into the way different groups answer and their reasonning for doing so.
If the finding were that .75 of trauma-free people agree it's reasonable for Kim to feel like she wasn't included in the decision (the perception that the choice was made by her friends), would that change your mind?
I know I'd be interested to know why, if data showed the opposite interpretation is popular :)
I've plagarized Alice Miller here before, here are her thoughts on the subject of psychological surveys on the subject of childhood trauma in the book For Your Own Good:
Those who swear by statistical studies and gain their psychological knowledge from those sources will see my efforts to understand the children Christiane and Adolf [Hitler] as unnecessary and irrelevant. They would have to be given statistical proof that a given number of cases of child abuse later produced almost the same number of murderers. This proof cannot be provided, however, for the following reasons. Alice Miller lists off 1) child abuse takes place in secret 2) testimony of victims on their own suffered child abuse is often very flawed to protect their parents 3) experts in criminology have already noted this trend in their scientific research
Even if statistical data confirm my own conclusions, I do not consider them a reliable source because they are often based on uncritical assumptions and ideas that are either meaningless (such as "a sheltered childhood"), vague, ambiguous ("received a lot of love"), or deceptive ("the father was strict but fair"), or that even contain obvious contradictions ("he was loved and spoiled"). This is why I do not care to rely on conceptual systems whose gaps are so large that the truth escapes through them, but rather prefer to make the attempt ... to take a different route. I am not searching for statistical objectivity but for the subjectivity of the victim in question, to the degree that my empathy permits.
Though even as someone acutely atuned to the various forms trauma can take, wouldn't you agree there's such a thing as a reasonably trauma-free population? Or at least trauma-free to a degree that it makes sense to consider the bias induced by traumatic experiences minor for that population?
I think you get the perspective you have, that there's no ovjectivity, by focusing solely on the victims.
I agree with your point on subjectivity when it comes to abuse victims. Statistics want to average out individual differences, the exactly wrong thing if you're interested in understanding the specifics of individual cases. I'm with you on that.
But I think you have to go back up at some point, if you ever want to help more people than have the privilege of seeing you at a time.
Statistics as a discipline is aware of biases. It is not always applied with the appropriate carefulness, but there is tremendous, systemic good to be had as a reward for success.
I'm not convinced your criticism of current ideas in your field is something objective science cannot learn to address.
The problem I'm faced with is that empathy wants me to care, also, for people that can't directly see or reach me. They're out of sight, but not out of mind.
Empathic emotional responses are absolutely required for society to function healthily, just look at our species' dark past! Living in a not-empathic, insensitive society would absolutely suck. But the pendulum has swung past healthy empathy to being overly sensitive - there's a happy empathy middle lost to some academic cultures. Both over and underreaction to empathic emotional responses are destructive and unhealthy. Here's a good lecture on the extremes of empathic responses: including insensitive and overly sensitive empathic responses, and what healthy empathy might look like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMw8Ua1953w
Being overstimulated by empathic responses renders one emotionally unavailable and unable to help just like the emotionally insensitive person. That's why people draw a line with some academic cultures: it resembles/promotes unhealthy relationship patterns.
Having empathy isn't a problem, it's just about getting the balance right. Too much or too little of a good thing is a bad thing
I think my point is only about whether any empathy you have should apply preferentially to people close to you, or whether you should endeavor to have it for everyone equally, all else equal.
I wouldn't agree there's anything particularly extreme about that. It's not a degree of empathy that I'm trying to make a point about, but how it's distributed.
If you're able to generalize things you learn with rigorous statistics, it starts to apply more broadly, and so you can help more people who don't necessarily have to see you personally to benefit.
The extra cost to you is small, and if providing help is your goal, making a rigorous science out of it will, in the happy case, increase efficiency tremendously.
What if Kim was a healthy adult? She would maybe not have negative experiences projected onto the scenario and perhaps could easily switch to making plans by herself without her group with healthy boundaries.
- This is bizarrely reading things into the original question. The question is, essentially, "if a group of your friends announce they're doing something fun and give a fairly thin excuse for not including you and nothing else, should perceive your relationship with these people weakened". There's "emotional reaction", it's a judgement. Kim judges where Kim's friends priorities are.
The thing about this is, the only place emotions come is that most people with social bonds see things like doing activities together as a "good in itself". Even if someone isn't concerned with whether they go to a show, the person can see this group isn't too concerned with maintaining that particular bond. How a person reacts afterward isn't part the question, isn't part of my comment and seems like throwing your particular psychological baggage at the whole question.
Eh, without any qualifying circumstances I think you have to be pretty naive to make a positive judgment in this type of circumstance. Kim got triaged out of a social gathering, other people were given tickets instead. While there could be other motivates, when this happens in general you take the friends you really like and cut people you like less. Is it the end of the world? No but it's a reliable signal about where you stand socially.
The concert example was was taken out of context. The paper used it in a section about people believing a specific, unlikely alternative explanation in the face of contradictory evidence of intent.
> People can believe something to be true because it “feels” that way. To illustrate, please read the following passages
> B.Ted’s boss told him that his performance at the company has been good. Yet, Ted wonders if he could have done better. In fact, he feels like a failure. Consequently, he starts to believe he is a failure
The point isn't about whether or not the statements are 100% factually true.
The point is that some people will discard the statements entirely and substitute their own worst-case alternative explanation, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
If you're focusing on the statements, you're missing the point of the paper. The point is about assuming the worst in the face of uncertainty.
What contradictory evidence is provided in the sample? It doesn't say that they drew lots. As the statement is presented it only sates that a group of people told one person they can't come. The number of tickets does not by itself justify why this particular person isn't going. With such a lack of evidence we could say the reason is unknown, intent is an unknown quantity, but that isn't the desired reasoning because the very fact of the unknowns implies ill intent as a possibility, which is not charitable, therefore the only implied correct position to hold is the actively non-negative one.
You’re missing the point of the example: The authors deliberate left the ground truth as vague but provided a not-100% but otherwise good faith explanation of one interpretation.
Then the listener discarded the explanation and inserted their own worst-case explanation instead.
Inserting the worst-case explanation as the certain explanation is the cognitive distortion the paper is talking about.
The point isn’t that ill intent is impossible.
The point is that it’s a mistake to be certain about the worst interpretation in the face of uncertainty.
You’re missing the point of the example: The authors deliberate left the ground truth as vague but provided a not-100% but otherwise good faith explanation of one interpretation.
The authors provided a world view and pathologized those who didn't follow that world view.
I don't believe there's any evidence cognitive therapy works better than other forms of therapy for depression, which suggests to me the various claims of how the human mind works ("catastrophizing" or whatever) are not true.
"However, studies that compared CBT to other active treatments, such as psychodynamic treatment, problem-solving therapy, and interpersonal psychotherapy, found mixed results. Specifically, meta-analyses found CBT to be equally effective in comparison to other psychological treatments"
You don't need anything from CBT to think that depressed people tend to reach for explanations that mean everything is as horrible as possible preferentially.
Just being with one for a while will show you that bias very quickly when you hear about how every random person they passed on the street secretly hates them or thinks they're ugly or somehow did something that relates to their biggest insecurity.
It's true that I can't prove the world doesn't secretly hate them, but my own experience of literally never thinking about the random strangers I walk past informs my belief that this likely has more to do with the person's insecurity than the reality of what's going on in those people's minds.
The thing is, in my observations, depression pushes people into endless sets of no win conditions by punishing them for not obeying ever more restrictive and absurd rules. I don't want to claim what is/isn't a disease, but it's pretty obvious that some thought patterns hurt people a lot once you understand a little about how they work and get people to contort their lives around them. Getting out of that looks more like getting rid of the insecurities more than learning to walk a narrow path through endless fields of eggshells.
The thing about this you're engaging in a clear fallacy. Depressed people tend to draw negative conclusions and reinforce their conclusions, therefore if someone draws a negative conclusion (that you consider unwarranted), they are depressed and making themselves worse.
It's kind of logical for the entire bad-faith exercise involved in this article and the comments defending it. The whole thing is putting elaborate psycho-trappings on the "boomer" complaint of "you kids just too sensitive these days" (but just said about to things you consider fine).
> The thing about this you're engaging in a clear fallacy. Depressed people tend to draw negative conclusions and reinforce their conclusions, therefore if someone draws a negative conclusion (that you consider unwarranted), they are depressed and making themselves worse.
I claimed that depression often leads to catastrophizing, not that catastrophizing is somehow exclusive to depression.
So the "clear fallacy" here is reading a comment about how A sometimes implies B, then attacking the notion that B implies A, despite there being no logical connection between the two propositions.
Isn’t the explanation incomplete? It explains why someone couldn’t come, but it doesn’t explain why Kim in particular couldn’t come. Therefore, Kim must contend both with the outcome (that she couldn’t come), and with the fact that the selection process was hidden from her. The concealment creates the bias towards negativity imo, in the absence of other information.
The is another example that is missing context. Both statements can be true. Bob might have done a good enough job for the boss, but not for Bob. Maybe Bob needs to realize he doesn't need to strive for perfection. And if the boss is happy, then great. On the other hand maybe Bob could have done better. And thus getting a larger bonus or something
I think I might fall prey to this but I'm not sure.
In this situation, if I were Kim, I'd try to objectively evaluate my relationship with the ticker holder, and adjust accordingly.
When I have an objective measure, I think it is a cognitive distortion to view it in any way other than the facts: the ticket holder decided not to include me in the group that was going.
In this case, my adjustment would be based on my expectations from my relationship: if I'm very close to the ticker holder, and they know I would have wanted to go, it informs me that the relationship isn't reciprocated, and I need to adjust my expectations.
If I don't really know the ticket holder, or I know them well and know that they don't think I'd want to go, then my expectations from the relationship are met, and no adjustment is required.
So, is this a cognitive distortion? Am I assuming the worst possible interpretation of events? I think so. I'm 46, and the reason I do this is because my life has taught me that more harm results from assuming best intent when the evidence is clearly contradictory.
But there is the possibility they don't get hit by a bullet. No harm done. Do they still have the right to become angry of a mere possibility that didn't pan out? At that point it's pure conceptualization.
2nd, this seems very much to be predicated on Cartesian dualism, that the mind is independent of the body. Would someone growing up in a society where they were subjected to daily derogatory statements in regards to some group to which they belong, would their physical wellbeing be divorced from their mental wellbeing?
If the subjective is to be discounted, then there is little in the realm of human reality that will remain. Everything that a human perceives is part of their imagination. Our consciousness does not touch the real (so far as we may know); it constructs sensory data models that are by definition subjective.
Why should the speaker be granted carte blanche any more than the listener? The language game is not merely the pitcher and the passive receiver. Even silence is an interpretable phenomena. There no way out of the dance of meaning.
> But there is the possibility they don't get hit by a bullet. No harm done. Do they still have the right to become angry of a mere possibility that didn't pan out?
Firing bullets into the air and driving drunk are both crimes and there's zero dispute about it, so does this one really need discussion?
These extreme examples aren't even relevant to what the paper is discussing. If someone goes around using well-known racial slurs but then later tries to claim good intentions, it won't pass scrutiny. Claiming good intentions isn't a free pass, but it's not what the paper is claiming anyway.
> Why should the speaker be granted carte blanche any more than the listener?
No one is saying the speaker should be granted carte blanche. I don't know where this strawman argument came from, but it's not what the paper is about.
This paper isn't about a free pass to say anything and avoid scrutiny. It's about listeners denying the speaker's intent and substituting their own worst-case interpretations and rejecting the possibility of any other explanation.
The very phrase 'denying the speaker's internet' posits and assumes such a thing which is beyond the speaker's pure self-conception.
I would say the problem here is that, in a vacuum, what establishes the speaker's intent as any more authoritative than the assumptions of the listener? The right to choose what it is you meant and to choose what it is you interpret are equally weighted here. Any additional weight that is to be applied must be applied within the context of a specific interpersonal relationship at a particular point in time.
Therefore generalized mappings of the weighting of such interactions cannot likely be established preemptively through a process of pure reason.
The divorce of intent (or lack thereof) in various scenarios exactly points out that there is not some unified notion of the necessity of intent (or lack thereof) being applied in order to come to judgement, but instead the conceptualization of when intent (or lack thereof) should matter is deployed, seemingly, on the very fundamentally subjective basis of 'I know it when I see it' or in terms of society: 'when it has been culturally deemed such'. So the friction here would not seem to be one of the misapplication of a schema, but the friction of running against a social more.
If someone gave you a perfectly reasonable and logically consistent explanation, what makes it right to automatically assume they're lying and substitute the worst possible alternate explanation?
The point isn't that you have to trust 100% of what everyone says. The point is that it's a problem if you're trusting 0% of what everyone says and using that as an artificial opening to insert your own, alternative explanation in which you are the victim.
A notion that seems very culturally hidebound, rather than something that describes a general state of human psychology that policy should dictate that humans should be brought into alignment with.
No, it seems to be a universal truth that humans _generally_ cooperate, else we'd have all killed ourselves off (or been forsaken to eternal tribal squabbling, never able to coordinate enough to build a "real" society).
Yes, humans cooperate. But it's not a universal truth. Indifference is the default state of man's relation to man and it is man's prerogative to decide who should receive his consideration. With this in mind, it's better to say humans are contractual. They can cooperate when the incentives (or disincentives) align towards doing so. They can also ignore or attack each other when such incentives are ineffective or insufficient.
> One could fire a gun randomly into the air with no intention of harming anyone and the bullets still come down and hit someone.
The difference is that getting hit by a bullet harms you regardless of what you believe about it. Your friends not getting a ticket to a concert for you can only harm you if you believe it harms you. If you choose to ignore their intentions and feel harmed by it, then you're harmed. If you choose to give your friends the benefit of the doubt and believe that they didn't intend to harm you, then you aren't harmed.
This is why the safetyism that equates emotional harms to physical harms is fundamentally flawed. You have a level of control over what happens in your own head that you don't have in the physical world.
> This is why the safetyism that equates emotional harms to physical harms is fundamentally flawed.
For this example it might make more sense to equate that to an allergy then: there's nothing wrong with that tree, but there's something wrong with their immune system and they should consider treatment.
However there is real emotional hurt that is 'natural' and not just an improper reaction based on a misunderstanding. Though typically that is not the kind of thing that can be avoided, safetyism or no.
Sure, there's hurt that is an appropriate reaction to a real thing that happens in the world. If your "friends" set you up to be Prom Queen then dump a bucket of pig's blood on your and get the whole school to laugh at you, then it's fair to say it's a correct assessment that they weren't really your friends and betrayed you, and feeling hurt is an appropriate reaction.
Where safetyism goes wrong is that it elevates feelings above reality. If you feel bad, then things necessarily are bad, regardless of the reality. But sometimes your feelings are wrong and should be ignored or re-examined.
If you feel bad, that's just a fact; your self-perception is the only determiner of that. That is not necessarily the same as a situation being bad. And even that is open to interpretation: food hitting the floor is going to be perceived very differently between two people if one of them believes in the 5 second rule.
And I'm not even trying to say that feelings shouldn't be re-examined --- I would say the opposite, actually. But in an inter-subjective, inter-personal relationship, (which is the definition of human relationships) who is the arbiter of reality? It's the one-sidedness that betrays something. In a relationship, if someone says something that is taken offensively, even if they didn't mean it as such, if they cared about the other person (in the most basic form) they would still apologize and seek to clarify themselves. But the person who doesn't want to do that, they either have the intent of being offensive, in which case any defense along the lines of 'you just didn't understand me' is merely a shield for their own act of purposeful offensiveness, or the speaker is refusing to engage in any flavor of basic human interaction and is either effectively talking to an empty room or trying to force (or is deluded by) the notion that all other human consciousnesses mirror their own.
The arbiter of what someone's intentions were is that person. Who else would know what they are thinking inside their own head? People do not owe you an apology because you misinterpret their intentions. In fact, if you accuse someone of bad intentions where there were none, basic decency would suggest that the accuser is the one who owes an apology.
Of course, it's possible that someone lies about what their intentions are, in which case, sure demand an apology all you want. But it's not likely to be fruitful to continue interacting with someone who's deliberately trolling you.
>What in such a scenario gives the impetus to the charitable interpretation (that they simply could not get tickets)?
Did you read it? It says: "Kim knows they probably didn't exclude her on purpose" — that is the impetus, and more importantly, it is exactly the kind of thing that should be tested for here. The wrong answer is asking Kim to mistrust her own knowledge; not trusting your own knowledge is obviously a cognitive distortion. The other advantage of expressing it this way is that you evade any situation where the reader gets distracted by overanalyzing the specifics of the justification, which are not the point.
So I find the question to be worded reasonably and to accurately check for a cognitive distortion.
>Secondly, while intentionality can be important, why is there so much weight seemingly being placed on it these days (or is that just my perception?)
There has always been a lot of emphasis placed on intentionality in morality. That's why we have Latin phrases like mens rea.
>One could drive drunk without any intention of anything bad happening and still get into an accident. One could fire a gun randomly into the air with no intention of harming anyone and the bullets still come down and hit someone.
We have specific laws for these exact situations. You might not have intended to harm anyone, but you must have intended to break the law. This has the advantage of not punishing people for unintentional actions.
Cognitive distortions are explicitly defined as a thinking pattern that occurs regardless of reality...that is why it is a distortion. Referring to a specific example makes no sense because it is a pattern of thought. Referring to reality makes no sense because the thought occurs regardless of reality.
As an example, a hypochondriac will believe they are sick when they are not. That does not mean one should not feel anxious about being sick, it means that one should not feel anxious about being sick when you have no evidence that you are sick. The reason for observing that such a person has cognitive distortions is to examine the impact of those thoughts on feelings and behaviour, not engage in a debate about the meaning of reality. Most of these distortions occur in people who are have poor mental health, it is not academic, it is a clinical treatment.
If you are curious, read more about CBT rather than jumping to conclusions wildly. You can disagree with the theory of mind used, but what you have said seems to misunderstand fundamentally what the paper is about.
Mental illness is not passion. Cognitive distortion do not mean someone is mentally ill, people can have all kinds of thoughts that are not based in reality with no impact on their life. At the same time, cognitive distortions can be ruinous for other people. Would you say someone with anorexia was just very passionate about winning their joust with Reason? No. Again, the point of "cognitive distortions" is the idea that your thoughts impact your feelings and behaviour which can lead to poor mental health if those thoughts are not accurate in some way. There are several very common cognitive distortions that occur with anxiety and depression, for example, which should indicate that they are not totally fictional.
Also, I am not really sure why this is controversial or unexpected. Some of the most common cognitive distortions are word-for-word how people explain what the OP calls "safetyism"...it shouldn't be a massive surprise. It is quite reasonable to ask whether everyone else in society needs to adjust their behaviour (to be clear, everyone can adjust their behaviour ad infinitum, it will make no difference to how these people feel...I think it is self-evident that increasing "awareness" or whatever has actually added to the anxiety because the media has taken the view that good journalism is triggering...it is unbelievably toxic, whether this stuff makes you unusually upset or not, ironically I know a psychologist who is remarkably even-handed and they stopped reading the news because they felt it made their life worse...again, is this helping anyone? It is just a race to the bottom).
I don't think my point is to argue against cognitive distortions generally or against any specific mental model (as that would likely be ridiculous). (And I'm very aware of what CBT is.) It's just ... specifically this focus on 'intention' that seems to be in a certain vogue right now (or I should say newfound focus) as counter to the notion of institutional or systemic causes.
Something can be a clinical phenomena, but that does not necessarily reflect the deployment of the generalized concept of such into the broader world. There is a gap between persons being debilitated, to one degree or another, by patterns in their cognition and 'overly-sensitive' college students rejecting 'reality'.
I am not sure what your point is about intention. Institutional and systemic causes of what? You are extremely non-specific about what your actual argument is, you just say repeatedly how in vogue it is and that people intend things different to outcomes...but I think my earlier reply would likely be repeated.
Right, you are hung up on the idea that the purpose of the OP is to prove "reality". Again, reality is nothing to do with it...it isn't relevant, it makes no sense in the context of this discussion.
And it does reflect the deployment of the concept because college students are humans who have thoughts...so you can use the same tools that are used in a clinical setting because you are also dealing with humans there. As I mentioned, cognitive distortions occur in all people to some degree, that can result in something that needs treatment, it can have no effect...it just depends. But the point of the OP is to highlight that cognitive distortions are correlated to safetyism, it is not a diagnosis of anyone, it is nothing to do with any clinical phenomena.
Again, if you just look at the Wiki on cognitive distortions, it is fairly clear how the authors get to this conclusion. I would say that safetyism is a cognitive distortion (you are weighting improbable threats highly, attempting to read the mind of people you don't know, ironically making generalizations about people...this seems, to me, like it should be obvious...as is the situation we are seeing now where anxiety about this stuff has actually increased).
Maybe it's the opposite. Maybe our anxiety is increasing because we can no longer read minds and make generalizations without the subjects of those mind readings and generalizations intruding of their own will into the realm of our conceptualization.
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Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
I thought about this for a while, my conclusion was - in the presence of incomplete information, you can choose to believe in many interpretations. But the trick is, whatever you believe will in the long run become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, if hypothetical Kim believes it was an accident, she might continue to treat her friends the same and so have a better chance of maintaining/improving the relationship. So its generally better to bias towards positive interpretations over negative. (inb4 "but not always", yes reality is nuanced).
> But the trick is, whatever you believe will in the long run become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, if hypothetical Kim believes it was an accident, she might continue to treat her friends the same and so have a better chance of maintaining/improving the relationship.
I wouldn't agree here. It's just as likely that Kim should interpret this as a signal that the relationship is colder than she may have believed, and should act appropriately. Believing you are close friends with someone who doesn't see you that way will just as often cause the relationship to deteriorate as to improve.
> And I wonder if a person free of cognitive distortions would even be referred to as human, as the quote goes:
There's a difference between emotional intuition and emotional reasoning (the cognitive distortion in OP's example).
Emotions are extremely valuable for decision-making (e.g. this house ticks all my boxes but do i love it?) and making judgements (e.g. this situation does not feel right to me).
Emotional reasoning is when people distort reality in favor of their (often self-destructive) emotional impulses, discarding physical evidence in favor of their emotions.
>What in such a scenario gives the impetus to the charitable interpretation (that they simply could not get tickets)? which they seem to indicate would be what a 'well-adjusted' person free of cognitive distortion would assume.
Because thinking anything else requires Kim to believe her friends are liars or sociopaths. They obviously could be, and if there is a pattern they probably are, but if you assume that by default what's the backstop on the way to paranoid delusion?
>Secondly, while intentionality can be important, why is there so much weight seemingly being placed on it these days (or is that just my perception?)
Intent has always been part of the conversation, the question is which intent...the one stated or the one derived. Microaggressions are a pretty good example of this, in which acts that may have not even been perceived by the actor begin to create a layered story of malicious intent by the individual that perceived them as such.
>The main intent, it seems to me, at least by some, is to obscure the notion that humans and systems may act in ways contrary to their expressed intent. Much atrocity and discrimination has been predicated on actions justified by philanthropic intent, ie 'elevating the savages'.
And this, to me, is a good example of what happens as a result. First of all, we don't even know if it's true that intentionality is now more of a focus in conversations or not. Regardless, you've now imagined a concrete intent behind the increase you perceive and now assume it to be true. Intents being unfalsifiable, it's impossible to prove otherwise. So what happens in your mind now when you see someone explain that an outcome was unintended...are they liars? Why would they lie? What is the intent? The recursive nature of this question is the path to conpsiratorial thinking and delusion.
Mining my own personal cognitive landscape i find that if i have a theory about something, i can remain somewhat uncommitted and skeptical of it as long as i don’t start layering conclusions and more theories on top. Once i start doing that, however, i find that my mind habituates the ‘given’ and the theory begins to resemble fact in its frictionless adoption into an idea. Then when i recognize that I’m doing that, it takes mental energy to undo the training.
Which is why i like the ‘unknown knowns’ idea, as one interpretation would be ‘knowns’ that aren’t really known or even knowns that are being incorporated without realizing it.
In your example, if Kim disbelieves the offered excuse and complains about this shabby treatment by her so-called friends, is she more or less likely to be invited along for the next concert?
What you quoted isn't from any questionnaire. It's an illustrative example given in the paper.
Edit: I am wrong. Those examples actually showed up in a questionnaire and participants were asked to rate how likely they are to engage in that kind of thinking.
Is this an extension of epigenics? The idea/study that stressors within the current generation can be passed down, instead of purely genetic combination causing differences in the next generation?
I'm not sure if I'm reading these results correctly but the correlations they seem to be reporting in Table 1 look both really significant and really really small.
Which is an odd combination, if there was a strong causal link you'd expect both a big effect and high significance. You'd have to be pretty confident in the specificity of your test to rule out that there's not some confounding variable that accounts for the 10~20% of explained variance between most of their metrics (assuming they're reporting Pearson's correlation coefficients).
It’s great that you actually looked at the paper and you inspired me to do the same. But could you please explain why you think the correlations seem “really really small”? To me they actually seem surprisingly high. Some examples: 0.25 for safetyism, -0.47 for resilience, 0.45 for loneliness. Especially the latter two are almost shockingly high given what we see elsewhere in psychology. You can’t expect one multi-faceted construct like social cognitive distortions to fully or almost fully explain some other complex and multifaceted construct like safetyism. If the correlation was super high, that would just mean that we’re likely using two different names for the same thing. Plus it’s not just a single correlation that supports the hypothesis in this paper but the whole pattern of correlations is consistent with it as far as I can tell as a non-expert. I haven’t read the paper closely, and the conclusions may very well be entirely wrong, but I wouldn’t conclude that based on the correlations.
Asuming they're reporting the pearson's correlation coefficients and not the slope of some linear fit (which they seem to use elsewhere) then a correlation coefficient with an absolute value <0.5 only explains <25% of the variation. Now that isn't actually too bad for a psychological test, so the fact that resilience and loneliness have are related to cognitive distortions is reasonable (and not too dubious a claim).
The main problem I have with it is that their main claim "Cognitive distortions predict safetyism" is based on a correlation coefficient of 0.25, this leaves roughly 90% of the variance unexplained which really stretches the meaning of the word "predicts" in their title. Also I don't have enough trust in their questionnaires to be sure that all of the variance in their results is actually directly caused by the thing they claim to be measuring so when you find some correlations it's hard to rule out it isn't caused by some confounding variable.
All in all someone's Cognitive distortion score is a pretty bad predictor of their adherence to safetyism belief. There's a nonzero amount of correlation between the results of their questionnaires but given the small effect size I'm dubious about their claim of a causal link between them.
I should at this point note that "percentage of variance unexplained" is a bit of a simplification and only really works for linear fits, but I'm using it here as a rule of thumb to reason about the strength of the correlation.
Couldn't you just as easily say that a vulnerable population seeks extra protection?
Another question, are these authors legit? I think its difficult for a bunch of software engineers to evaluate the quality of scientific work so far outside of their field.
But what he actually means is, "Crazy people go safety-crazy".
And it's true. I know a few crazy people and they are unanimously and vehemently onboard with safetyism, as of the recent hubub. Markedly moreso than everybody else.
> Moderates are the largest group at roughly 40% of the population. People with extreme views represent approximately 10% of the population in 2018 but only about 5% in 1975.
Okay this is amazing and makes me feel so much better that everyone is only pretending to agree with whichever loud ideological extremist is most convenient for them
"the final sample consisted of 786 participants (653 female, 127 male, 6 other/unspecified) ... 39% Asian, 32%
Latino/a/x, 13% White; approximately 40% with household income $0 to $39,999, 28% with income $40,000 to $80,000, 31% with income $80,000 or higher .... an overwhelming majority of participants (94.3%, n = 739) indicated support for the use of trigger warnings in our sample."
That's one heck of an unbalanced sample. The vast majority were women, nearly 1% were "other" and nearly 90% weren't white? Yes they're aiming to study college students specifically rather than the whole US population, but, how representative can this sample really be of even the college population? It feels like anyone who thinks safetyism is bunk didn't even show up for their study at all.
Yes they go ahead and use the normal statistical techniques on the data but there are limits to how far you can fix a sample this overwhelmingly dominated by certain types of people.
Although I appreciate the results of this study, there's a big misconception in here about Cognitive Distortions:
> Cognitive distortions are errors in reasoning resulting from negative intuitive thoughts that are not evidence-based (Burns, 1980; Covin et al., 2011).
This is not true. Cognitive Distortions are (a) not errors in themselves, and (b) usually do have lots of evidence for them.
Take, for example, the Cognitive Distortion of Fortune Telling. In a CBT session, it typically applies to a thought like "I'm going to fail this test." Well, that thought might not be erroneous — you very well might fail. And there is probably plenty of evidence for it — you might have done poorly on your homework, or you might be behind on studying, or you might not know the answers to questions on a practice test.
The issue with a Cognitive Distortion is not that it is erroneous, nor that it lacks evidence. The issue is that it makes you depressed, anxious, scared, and unable to function. In CBT, if you think that you will fail a test, you naturally start to feel anxious, frightened, and lose morale, and get really sad — after all, you think you are about to fail! It's pretty scary to fail. You start thinking about what's going to happen when you fail. All these actions actually prevent you from studying dutifully for the test and doing better on it.
We need to stop thinking of people using Cognitive Distortions as being irrational. In actual practice, we all have Cognitive Distortions (like Fortune Telling) in most of our thoughts. They are little shortcuts that we use all the time to get by, because we can't think infinitely about everything, so we use shortcuts that explain the evidence as best we can. The problem is that we can sometimes get stuck in depressive loops on deeply distorted thoughts.
In other words: a distortion by itself is not bad; but if you are doing bad, you are probably in a distortion.
So it's no surprise that people who are fragile, who feel any thought or statement could trigger them into a dangerous panic attack, tend to have distortions in their thinking.
Another way to put this is that people who are depressed and anxious are likely to be emotionally fragile and need restricted safe-spaces of speech in order to avoid being triggered into an anxious loop.
The problem is that we're letting college students, and the public at large, become depressed, anxious, and lonely. Our mental health is suffering a psychic epidemic, as Carl Jung put it. Getting mad at overly restrictive safe-spaces doesn't help. We need to cure the depression, and heal each other's psyches. Calling people irrational isn't going to help. We need to listen to each other, love one another, and heal and grow our way out of this, by caring for each other as individuals and mending each other's minds. We have to do this in love.
They cite Burns (1980). Burns is still going. His recent work is on why CBT practitioners often fail and how they go wrong. One aspect of his approach is that distortions aren’t all bad. There a good things about them, and are in a way a powerful source of strength. A well-meaning practioner can paradoxically trigger resistance and cause a patient to dig in deeper. (Reactionaries with an agenda like Haidt etc is another story).
So a bunch of professors get together and decide that if students have issues with their (extremely expensive) education it’s the result of pathological cognitive distortions. They’re weaponizing CBT against people below them in the status hierarchy. Employers do this stuff too. If you’re not a good enough cog for the machine it’s a flaw in your psyche.
This take floats on the assumption that the writers want those that aren't a "good enough cog" replaced. Perhaps the writers want those that react inappropriately negatively to situations get help in order to both improve the efficiency of the system and for the individual's healing? This and other similar takes in the comments section seem to just be anxious projections. Do we really think the authors want to watch the world to burn, or is it more likely they want to help everyone in reality?
Looks like the degree of engagement in cognitive distortions such as ‘emotional reasoning’, though, were measured based on self-reports. Seems likely to me that someone with an empathy deficit would be both less likely to agree that words can harm and less capable of realistically reporting how much emotional reasoning they engage in.
Also the study that correlates the cognitive distortion of catastrophizing with "safetyism" states that "greater empirical scrutiny of safetyism-inspired beliefs and practices is warranted before such customs become more widely adopted."
It'd be such a catastrophe if those "customs" were adopted, wouldn't it?
For example, this from their questionnaire:
>Kim’s friends told her that she could not come to the concert with them because they were unable to get enough tickets for everyone. Kim knows they probably didn’t exclude her on purpose, but she feels rejected. Therefore, part of her believes she was rejected
What in such a scenario gives the impetus to the charitable interpretation (that they simply could not get tickets)? which they seem to indicate would be what a 'well-adjusted' person free of cognitive distortion would assume.
Secondly, while intentionality can be important, why is there so much weight seemingly being placed on it these days (or is that just my perception?) People can intend one thing and harmful outcomes still result. One could drive drunk without any intention of anything bad happening and still get into an accident. One could fire a gun randomly into the air with no intention of harming anyone and the bullets still come down and hit someone.
The main intent, it seems to me, at least by some, is to obscure the notion that humans and systems may act in ways contrary to their expressed intent. Much atrocity and discrimination has been predicated on actions justified by philanthropic intent, ie 'elevating the savages'.
And I wonder if a person free of cognitive distortions would even be referred to as human, as the quote goes:
"Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions." --David Hume