606. Discovering And Developing Preferences

606.   Discovering And Developing Preferences

I just read this, but I disagree with the interpretations. 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121003132416.htm

"You're in a store, trying to choose between similar shirts, one blue and one green. You don't feel strongly about one over the other, but eventually you decide to buy the green one. You leave the store and a market researcher asks you about your purchase and which shirt you prefer. Chances are that you'd say you prefer the green one, the shirt you actually chose. As it turns out, this choice-induced preference isn't limited to shirts. Whether we're choosing between presidential candidates or household objects, research shows that we come to place more value on the options we chose and less value on the options we rejected.

One way of explaining this effect is through the idea of cognitive dissonance. Making a selection between two options that we feel pretty much the same about creates a sense of dissonance -- after all, how can we choose if we don't really prefer one option over the other? Re-evaluating the options after we've made our choice may be a way of resolving this dissonance."

"They were then presented with pairs of similar vacation destinations and asked to choose which destination they would prefer. "

"The results suggest that the act of choosing between two similar options can lead to enduring changes in preference. Participants rated vacation destinations as more desirable both immediately after choosing them and again three years later. "

"Sharot and her colleagues argue that fact that this effect is robust and enduring has implications for a diverse array of fields, including economics, marketing, and even interpersonal relationships. As Sharot points out, for example, repeatedly endorsing a particular political party may entrench this preference for a long period of time."

The quoted article concerns preferences expressed by a decision.   The preference for one color of a shirt over another is the decision what to buy and does not automatically represent a possible preference for one of the colors by itself.  

I doubt that a more or less haphazard choice leads to changing a preference.   The choice of a green shirt does not suffice for a change towards experiencing green as the favorite color. Making a choice is a decision process leading to discover or to develop a preference.   This process includes getting aware and considering the pros and contras of all options from either the memory or by obtaining additional external information.     The result of making a rational choice by this process is then remembered.    It is not a changed preference, but one either newly acquired or a previously existing one rationally reinforced or enhanced. 

People are often not consciously aware of pros and contras concerning any issues and matters, until circumstances for the first time require a specific choice.   This then triggers some thinking and reasoning, which leads to discovering or developing the preference.  

1.  Someone may spontaneously not prefer a green over a blue shirt.   This is an example of basing a decision upon getting aware of reasons in favor of one of the colors by retrieving them from the memory.   Such reasons could be the color of the majority of the trousers to be worn in combination with the shirt, the color of other shirts in the wardrobe or the favorite color of the partner. 
 
2.  Someone may spontaneously not prefer one vacation destination over another.   This is also a case of remembering reasons like a favorite national dish or music.  But this is additionally a case for not being able to choose until obtaining sufficient information about the availability of especially interesting places for sightseeing.   

3.  The more complex and abstract a choice, the less someone can have an initial strong preference before getting informed.   This is the case with political parties.   Ignorance and manipulations by propaganda do not lead to a persistent and qualified preference.    Only if a subjectively informed decision has been reached by learning something about the parties, this can cause a preference to persist after having voted. 


In entry 590 I declared myself as opinionated.   Opinions are preferences, which can be either expressed by the behavior of making a choice or it can merely exist as a predisposition for a specific choice.

Writing over 600 blog entries about my preferences of who is compatible and suitable as a mindmate is the result of a lot of thinking, pondering, and reflecting.   While I am blogging for the purpose to be found by my mindmate, as a side effect I got more and more conscious of the reasons behind my preferences.   The awareness for my reasons enabled and enables me to evaluate them rationally.   Better understanding my reasons made me also more certain and more confident and this reinforces my preferences.   

595. Communication: The Importance Of The Correct Conveyance Of Information

595.   Communication:  The Importance Of The Correct Conveyance Of Information

Communication is a process of conveying non-obvious information from one brain into another.   Cooperation, agreement, consent require the availability of the same information to all parties involved.   

Whenever information does not reach the recipient (listener or reader) unaltered from how it was supplied by the sender (speaker or writer), the result is distorted communication and subsequent unsolved and unsolvable conflicts.  In this case, relationships are doomed by the accumulation of more and more unsolved conflicts.   

Communication works best, when the information sent is neither redundant nor insufficient but conveys just all, which is really needed based upon a realistic evaluation of the targeted recipient's knowledge.     
Communication is distorted, when the information contained in the sender's statements does not match the needs and expectations of the recipient.

The cause of distorted communication and incomprehension can be on both ends:

1. Information provided by the sender does not correctly reach the recipient.  

• The recipient fails to listen.
  
  • He believes to know already, what will be said, based upon his assumptions, prejudices, preconceptions and misinterpretations.   
  • He underestimates the sender and does not consider his statements as worth to listen to.
  • The topic does not interest the recipient, no matter how important it is to the sender.
• The recipient confounds, what is really said, with what he only imagines as said or has heard elsewhere.   This creates a false memory, by which the recipient believes to have heard, what in reality was never said.  
  
  
• The recipient receives only a selection of the information sent. 
  
  • He listens not for the purpose of receiving information, but for the purpose of finding something to contradict and to believe himself to be right.
  • He listens for the purpose to find a hidden agenda or hidden truth in the distrusted sender's statements.   The interpretation is believed and confounded with what is really said but lost.
  • He filters the conscious reception of information to avoid hearing, what would make him feel bad. 

2. The sender fails to communicate well.   Too much redundancy forfeits attention, in which case also important information is lost.  This has a similar effect as has insufficient information, it leads to incomprehension.  

• The sender can have a memory problem. 
  • He forgets, what he has already told and repeats it too often.
  • He confounds, what he only thought about and intended to say, with what he really had told.

• The sender overestimates his own importance and expects the recipient to have paid attention and to remember everything told just once.   

• The sender is generally unable to evaluate, what information is required to be understood.
  
  • He cannot distinguish between general information to be expected from the target recipient, and specific information only available to himself.
  • His statements are omitting some information replacing them with  implicit interpretations and conclusions, which are not comprehensible, unless the recipient shares some cognitive common ground of shared values and attitudes.   
  • He is influenced by hidden and invisible sensations and emotions and is not aware, that the recipient cannot mindread and does not share his state.  

3.  The sender conveys a specific level of informational content, which is suitable for preselected recipients only,   

• He fails to adjust the level of information correctly to the recipients.
  
  • He overestimates the recipients cognitive ability and knowledge, and this leads to incomprehension.   
  • He underestimates the recipient's comprehension and ability to remember, what was already told,  The redundancy bores the recipient.  Too banal and obvious information can appear as the assumption of lacking intelligence.   

• The recipient overestimates himself and chooses communication situations, where his incomprehension is unavoidable.   

Communication can only be constructive, when both partners are both able and motivated to make it thus.   

When the communication is distorted with dynamics like described above, then a couple can spend years together and never find out, who and how the other really is.  

Instead of getting to know each other better, they reciprocally create false alleged personalities of the other.  With every conflict and misunderstanding the false image gets more extremely distant from the misjudged person's reality.   Being treated as the alleged false personality can be very painful and the relationship is doomed.

590. There Is Nothing Wrong With Being Opinionated

590.   There Is Nothing Wrong With Being Opinionated

I have been criticized in a derogatory way as someone opinionated.    I am opinionated, because it is my choice and there is nothing wrong with it.  

Opinionated means literally to have an opinion or even more literally to have the trait of being someone with opinions.  Cognitive individuals have an identity and personality, which includes values, attitudes and opinions.  Nobody can be a thinker, mature and an intellectual without having opinions.   

Only instinct driven animals are entirely void of opinions.    To be able to have opinions is a result of the evolution of cognition.   

Becoming more and more opinionated is an automatic side effect of learning and maturing.    While pondering over a variety of topics, over a structured and logical way of putting them into blog entries, I am developing my own opinions.    Thus I am in the process of getting more and more opinionated and I consider this as beneficial.   

There is a real problem, but not at all about having opinions or not, but about how some people develop, acquire or elaborate them or fail to do so.

   

A qualified method to derive opinions includes being informed about all important facts together with the awareness for one's own real needs and inclinations.   This means using logic and reasoning and also introspection.  This includes reconsiderations, whenever new information becomes available.

It is not possible, that everybody can have a qualified opinion about everything.   Rational people are realistically aware, when their access to sufficient information is too limited. 

I dislike and avoid:

• People, who do not to invest time and efforts for thinking and deriving qualified opinions, no matter if they are too stupid, too superficial, too hedonistic, too intellectually lazy or not bothered for any other reason. 
• Gullible people, who are influenced to imitate other people's opinions without any own evaluation, who therefore are unable to explain, why they prefer any specific opinion.   They are also a hazard, when they force unpleasant behavior upon others as a consequence of acting upon imitated opinions.
• Opportunists, who adopt and change opinions according to the prospect of the most benefits, even when they are not aware of this.
• Frauds, who have a goal for which they pretend to have opinions in contradiction to what they genuinely think.

 
I like people, who have qualified opinions and who do not hide them.   Such people can be either easily recognized as mentally attractive by affinity or easily avoided as being aversively different.    

I have no mission to convince anybody of my opinions.  My mindmate to be found is someone, who has developed the same or similar opinions before finding this blog and being attracted by affinities.  

567. The Pulvinar And The Commodification-Objectification Disorder

567.  The Pulvinar And The Commodification-Objectification Of Women Disorder

When a man commodifies a woman, he perceives her as if she were not different from an inanimate utility, which only exists for the purpose to be used by him.  Insufficient information about her person and her needs as the basis of his decisions causes, enables and aggravates the commodification.    He acquires such information only by proactively fetching them.  He studies her like a new appliance or a lab rat by observation, probing, trial-and-error.    

His reception for verbal input from her is limited to receiving the answers to his own questions. Any initiative from her to influence and improve his treatment by proffering additional information input about herself fails, because this information is not received.    It bounces off his mind with no impact.   
He communicates with the woman as if using a walkie-talkie, where only his device has the buttons to switch between transmitting and receiving.

His being thus deprived of ever getting sufficient information precludes any improvement of his behavior and perpetuates the commodification. 


There are two possible dynamics leading to this problem.    

 
Small children are self-centered and commodify their caregivers.   At some stage of maturation they get aware of and become considerate about another person's needs, and they learn to perceive and receive the necessary information. 

 
1.   The distorted misconception of women as utilities is established first and never corrected.   A boy remaining immature and having been exposed early to strong commodifying role models is never prompted by any occasion to awaken his dormant potential to receive input from others.   

2.   The reception of information input from others does not work properly.   Maturation is delayed due to lacking and never acquiring sufficient information about other people.

The following text has made me wonder, if maybe the pulvinar could be the dysfunctional part of commodifying men:     

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120817151519.htm

"A mysterious region deep in the human brain could be where we sort through the onslaught of stimuli from the outside world and focus on the information most important to our behavior and survival,"

"The researchers report in the journal Science that an area of our brain called the pulvinar regulates communication between clusters of brain cells as our brain focuses on the people and objects that need our attention. Like a switchboard operator, the pulvinar makes sure that separate areas of the visual cortex -- which processes visual information -- are communicating about the same external information "

"The brain instead selectively focuses on, or attends to, the people and objects most relevant to our behavior at the time and filters out the rest. "

"Saalmann said these findings on how the brain transmits information could lead to new ways of understanding and treating attention-related disorders,"

The commodifying man may only be puzzled, irritated and frustrated, why the commodified woman does not function as he expects.    The woman experiences such a man's behavior nevertheless as disordered.   

I would be very curious about the results, if any scientist would ever make a brain scan of a man, while he stares with a blank face and no reaction at a woman, who explains to him, why she feels hurt by his behavior.    

Maybe some men have a Commodification-Objectification of Women Disorder (COWD)?

Unfortunately I can only suggest men's COWD as food for thought, because of the ubiquitous desensitization and bias towards acceptance of and tolerance for harm, abuse, deprivation, exploitation and domination of women, which has become part of the culture and is derived from religion (more in entries 552, 553, 554).    Men, who do this to women are generally not considered as having a disorder, but as normal men doing, what they are born to do, what they are meant and entitled to do.  

534. The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

534.   The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

Whenever someone bases the decision, how to treat another person, on a belief, which is so strong, that it impedes and overrides the rational perception and comprehension of evidence and reality, there are more or less fatal consequences for at least the misjudged person, often for both. 

Examples:

1. A very drastic example was the alleged proof of who is a witch by throwing the unfortunate victim into the water to see if she floated or drowned.    Men believed in this cruel irrationality, even though their brain had nevertheless enabled them to become fluent in Latin.   
2. In some cultures, parents not only decide, whom to marry their children to, but they choose an alleged match following an astrologer's advice.   This has certainly caused millions of people to suffer from being tied for a lifetime to a mismatch, the worst fate being that of women being abused by a man, whom they would not have chosen.  
3. Today people are less prone to fall for very blatant irrationality.  But the more the irrational claims and beliefs mimic science, the more people are gullible to mistake pseudo-science for science.   
   NLP is a good example.   In entry 177 (The Jerks' Fascination with NLP) I already elaborated, why NLP is a belief system, and why this blend of some elements from scientific psychology with irrational and unscientific claims make this so attractive to people with a distorted self-concept as if being rational.  

In these as also in many more examples, there is a pattern of a specific fallacy:  

The person

• bases a rational decision process upon incorrect or insufficient information acquired by absurd, weird, preposterous or insane methods.   
• is unperceptive, mindblind, immune to or otherwise not impacted by any information coming directly from the target of the behavior.   The target has no influence upon what information is used to determine, how s/he is treated.
• imposes the decision upon the target or attempts to, feeling entitled and justified to do so. 

This fallacy impedes trust and as a consequence it impedes a relationship from becoming a safe haven, which is impossible without trust justified by trustworthiness.   
Trustworthiness can only be assessed by the rational method of evaluating evidence.  This method compares all of someone's verbal and non-verbal expressions and behaviors at any moment with all of this at any another time, and also with external independent sources.   
The more often this comparison is consistent, congruent and without contradictions, the more the person's overall trustworthiness can be estimated as probable.   Never discovering a lie is a part of this.

Any other method, which relies on unverified and unverifiable clues, is a hazard and misleading.   Earning trust depends not only on the own trustworthy behavior, it also depends upon the partner's ability to recognize trustworthy behavior as such by the correct perception of evidence.    Trust cannot be earned from a person using unsuitable methods.  

An honest person never lying is nevertheless not trusted by a partner using flawed methods to evaluate honesty.   The delusion of being able to rely upon firmly believed pseudo-clues makes him oblivious of reality.      
Fools believing in NLP derive the pseudo-evaluation of alleged honesty or lack thereof from the target's eye movements.   This is a hazardous fallacy, as the study quoted below clearly shows.    Eye movements can be caused, influenced and diverted by many triggers.  During any conversation, people's attention can be easily caught momentarily by events at the periphery of their vision.   
The haphazard location of such events suffices to determine the erroneous attribution of an alleged trait towards one of two errors:      
Accidental eye movements of a honest person can forfeit the chance to be trusted.  
The blind believer in NLP can also easily be mislead to trust by a liar's accidental eye movements.  

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120711205943.htm

"For decades many NLP practitioners have claimed that when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be lying, whilst a glance up to their left is indicative of telling the truth."

"Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Dr Caroline Watt (University of Edinburgh, UK) tested this idea by filming volunteers as they either lied or told the truth, and then carefully coded their eye movements.  In a second study another group of participants was asked to watch the films and attempt to detect the lies on the basis of the volunteers' eye movements.

"The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills,” noted Wiseman. "

The pseudo-evidence fallacy and commodification share the common defective acquisition of information.    In both situations, the target is excluded from being considered as a possible source when choosing, which information is used for the decision how to behave.  Both situations indicate depreciation and disrespect of the target, but it works differently.

In the case of commodification, the target is mistaken for a passive utility in a onesided relationship and therefore not considered as able to be a proactive source supplying any information.  
The pseudo evidence fallacy disregards, devalues and rejects the information input coming directly from the target.   The real information is noticed but replaced by the false beliefs.   The target is considered as a proactive source of irrelevant or worthless information.