The Blind Spot

Why we ignore unpleasant things

By khappucino

There is an interesting thing that happens when we hearideas or information that we don’t agree with or that goagainst our strongly held beliefs, our brain ignores them. Soin a way… our brain has a ‘blindspot’ to such things. Theconcept comes from the Theory of Motivated reasoning. Abreakdown of the key mechanisms can be found in(Jacobsen:

Perception, Memory, and the PartisanPolarization of Opinion on the Iraq War.)

I learned of this theory when I was in B school and found this referencerecently.

Selective Judgement – the idea that if you arepresented with data or an idea that counters yourstrongly held beliefs, you will spend more energy tryingto disprove or otherwise marginalize the argument.2.Selective Perception – people will tend to absorb themessage correctly if it is consistent with their stronglyheld beliefs.3.Selective Memory – people will tend to rememberthings that are consistent with their beliefs and have atendency to forget things that are not consistent withtheir beliefs.4.Selective Exposure – people will tend to do aninformation search for things that reinforce their beliefsand will tend to avoid situations that challenge theirbeliefs. This may seem like common sense, but it is interesting thatour brain has a tendency to ‘ignore’ facts when they paint apicture that we don’t like. If you’ve ever been in anargument with someone, and you are stating something like2+2 = 4 and you can’t get them to agree, then you’veexperienced this, or perhaps you’ve been on the lack of agreement side.Why is this an important concept? There are a lot of thingsin life that are unpleasant, but just because they areunpleasant doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take measure and

recognize them.So in order to help with this problem, here is a thought Icame up with the other day during a conversation about thissort of thing.

It’s possible I have seen this somewhere but asfar as I recall I don’t remember seeing it somewhere.

The reception of ideas can have two degrees of freedom. (Of course there are more but to make things simple let’s usetwo)Dimension 1: Things that fit our IDEALIZED worldview andREALITY.Dimension 2: Things that we would value as GOOD andthings that we would value as BAD.

That gives us 4 basic combinations:

Things that fit our idealized worldview that we think aregood. Things that fit our idealized worldview that we think are bad. Things that fit our reality as we experience it, which we alsoconsider good. Things that fit our reality as we experience it, which we alsoconsider bad. You may ask what is ideal and bad? Well one example mightbe the idea that, in an ideal world, bad things can happenbut they are just a matter of being unlucky.Now what matches reality and is also bad? One examplecould be the idea that infidelity is common because our