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Rationalization (making Excuses)
Rationalization is a defense mechanism (ego defense) in which apparent logical reasons are given to justify behavior that is motivated by unconscious instinctual impulses. It is an attempt to find reasons for behaviors, especially one's own. Rationalizations are used to defend against feelings of guilt, maintain self-respect, and protect oneself from criticism. Rationalization happens in two steps: # A decision, action, judgement is made for a given reason, or no (known) reason at all. # A rationalization is performed, constructing a seemingly good or logical reason, as an attempt to justify the act after the fact (for oneself or others). Rationalization encourages irrational or unacceptable behavior, motives, or feelings and often involves ad hoc hypothesizing. This process ranges from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defense against ridicule from others) to mostly unconscious (e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt or shame). People rational ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Defense Mechanism
In psychoanalytic theory, defence mechanisms are unconscious psychological processes that protect the self from anxiety-producing thoughts and feelings related to internal conflicts and external stressors. According to this theory, healthy people use different defence mechanisms throughout life. A defence mechanism can become pathological when its persistent use leads to maladaptive behaviour such that the physical or mental health of the individual is adversely affected. Among the purposes of defence mechanisms is to protect the mind/self/ego from anxiety or to provide a refuge from a situation with which one cannot currently cope. Examples of defence mechanisms include: '' repression'', the exclusion of unacceptable desires and ideas from consciousness; '' identification'', the incorporation of some aspects of an object into oneself; '' rationalization'', the justification of one's behaviour by using apparently logical reasons that are acceptable to the ego, thereby furt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subaltern (postcolonialism)
In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, subalterns are the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term ''subaltern'' to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms ''subaltern'' and ''subaltern studies'' entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the common people who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India. As a method of investigation and analysis of the political role of subaltern populations, Karl Marx's theory of history ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Displacement (psychology)
In psychology, displacement () is an Unconscious mind, unconscious defence mechanism whereby the mind substitutes either a new aim or a new Object relations theory, object for things felt in their original form to be dangerous or unacceptable. Example: If your boss criticizes you at work, you might feel angry but can't express it directly to your boss. Instead, when you get home, you take out your frustration by yelling at a family member or slamming a door. Here, the family member or the door is a safer target for your anger than your boss. Freud The concept of displacement originated with Sigmund Freud. Initially he saw it as a means of dream-distortion, involving a shift of emphasis from important to unimportant elements, or the replacement of something by a mere illusion. Freud called this “displacement of accent.” Displacement of object: Feelings that are connected with one person are displaced onto another person. A man who has had a bad day at the office, comes home ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denialism
In the psychology of human behavior, denialism is a person's choice to denial, deny reality as a way to avoid believing in a psychologically uncomfortable truth. Denialism is an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality. In the sciences, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject, in favor of ideas that are radical, controversial, or fabricated. The terms ''Holocaust denial'' and ''AIDS denialism'' describe the denial of the facts and the reality of the subject matters, and the term ''climate change denial'' describes denial of the Scientific opinion on climate change, scientific consensus that the climate change of planet Earth is a real and occurring event primarily caused in geologically recent times by human activity. The forms of denialism present the common feat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work
Some Character-Types Met within Psycho-Analytic Work is an essay by Sigmund Freud from 1916, comprising three character studies—of what he called 'The Exceptions', 'Those Wrecked by Success' and 'Criminals from a Sense of Guilt'. Freud described as the 'Exceptions' those who because of early narcissistic injury felt that they were subsequently entitled to special privileges in life, in ongoing compensation. His description has been extended to include an early sadomasochism in the experience of being victimised. Freud explored the paradox whereby people become neurotic or punish themselves through illness, not as a result of failure but of success, illustrating his theme by way of Ibsen's '' Rosmersholm'', among other examples. He saw the cause as an intense (if unconscious) sense of guilt, which sought relief in the punishment of suffering from what is felt as an unjustified degree of success. In the shortest of his three studies, Freud highlighted the way an unconscious gui ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias, or congeniality bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or Value (ethics and social sciences), values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Biased search for information, biased interpretation of this information and biased memory recall, have been invoked to explain four specific effects: # ''attitude polarization'' (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence) # ''belief perseverance'' (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false) # the ''irrational primacy effect'' (a greater relia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Compartmentalization (psychology)
Compartmentalization is a psychological defense mechanism in which thoughts and feelings that seem to conflict are kept separated or isolated from each other in the mind. Those with post-traumatic stress disorder may use compartmentalization to separate positive and negative self aspects. It may be a form of mild dissociation; example scenarios that suggest compartmentalization include acting in an isolated moment in a way that logically defies one's own moral code, or dividing one's unpleasant work duties from one's desires to relax. Its purpose is to avoid cognitive dissonance, or the mental discomfort and anxiety caused by a person having conflicting values, cognitions, emotions, beliefs, etc. within themselves. Compartmentalization allows these conflicting ideas to co-exist by inhibiting direct or explicit acknowledgement and interaction between separate compartmentalized self-states. Psychoanalytic views Psychoanalysis considers that whereas isolation separates thoughts f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Inertia
Cognitive inertia is the tendency – for a particular orientation in an individual's thinking about a matter, belief, or strategy – to resist change. Clinical and neuroscientific literature often describes it as a lack of motivation to generate cognitive processes needed to attend to a matter or problem. The physics term "inertia" emphasizes resistance to change in a mode of cognitive processing that has been used for a substantial time. Commonly confused with belief perseverance, cognitive inertia is perseverance in an interpretation of information, not perseverance in the belief itself. Cognitive inertia has been causally implicated in disregard of impending threats to one's health or environment, in enduring political values, and in deficits in task switching. Interest in the phenomenon was taken up by economic and industrial psychologists primarily to explain resistance to change in brand loyalty, in group brainstorming, and in business strategizing. In a clinica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Circumstantial Evidence
Circumstantial evidence is evidence that relies on an inference to connect it to a conclusion of fact, such as a fingerprint at the scene of a crime. By contrast, direct evidence supports the truth of an assertion directly, i.e., without need for any additional evidence or inference. Overview On its own, circumstantial evidence allows for more than one explanation. Different pieces of circumstantial evidence may be required, so that each corroborates the conclusions drawn from the others. Together, they may more strongly support one particular inference over another. An explanation involving circumstantial evidence becomes more likely once alternative explanations have been ruled out. Circumstantial evidence allows a trier of fact to infer that a fact exists. In criminal law, the inference is made by the trier of fact to support the truth of an assertion (of guilt or absence of guilt). Reasonable doubt is tied into circumstantial evidence as that evidence relies on inference ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Affirming The Consequent
In propositional logic, affirming the consequent (also known as converse error, fallacy of the converse, or confusion of necessity and sufficiency) is a formal fallacy (or an invalid form of argument) that is committed when, in the context of an indicative conditional statement, it is stated that because the consequent is true, therefore the antecedent is true. It takes on the following form: :: If ''P'', then ''Q''. :: ''Q''. :: Therefore, ''P''. which may also be phrased as : P \rightarrow Q (P implies Q) : \therefore Q \rightarrow P (therefore, Q implies P) For example, it may be true that a broken lamp would cause a room to become dark. It is not true, however, that a dark room implies the presence of a broken lamp. There may be no lamp (or any light source). The lamp may also be off. In other words, the consequent (a dark room) can have other antecedents (no lamp, off-lamp), and so can still be true even if the stated antecedent is not. Converse errors are comm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anangeon
Anangeon (, "necessary"), also known as dicaeologia (, "a plea in defense"), is a specious method of argument, in which the basis lies in inevitability or necessity. For example, "Yes, I missed school today, but I was sick and wouldn't have learned anything anyway," is an argument that ignores the need to go to school, mitigating the controversy of not going. It is used to limit or contradict fault in a matter. Anangeon can be seen as a part of and is a type of non sequitur. See also * * |
Leon Festinger
Leon Festinger (8 May 1919 – 11 February 1989) was an American social psychologist who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. The rejection of the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior is largely attributed to his theories and research. Festinger is also credited with advancing the use of laboratory experimentation in social psychology, although he simultaneously stressed the importance of studying real-life situations, a principle he practiced when personally infiltrating a doomsday cult. He is also known in social network theory for the proximity effect (or propinquity). Festinger studied psychology under Kurt Lewin, an important figure in modern social psychology, at the University of Iowa, graduating in 1941; however, he did not develop an interest in social psychology until after joining the faculty at Lewin's Resear ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
