Facts Don't Care About Feelings. Science Isn't Concerned About Sensibilities. Reality Couldn't Care Less About Rage.
This course is sponsored by and heaviliy discounted thanks to
The Book, "Uncomfortable Ideas" by Bo Bennett, PhD.
Self-paced, Online, Lessons
Videos and/or Narrated Presentations
Approximate Hours of Course Media
This is a course designed to help college-age and adult students appreciate and even celebrate questioning the unquestionable, thinking the unthinkable, and facing reality head on, no matter what that reality is. It is a course about uncomfortable ideas.
This is a course about uncomfortable ideas—the reasons we avoid them, the reasons we shouldn’t, and discussion of dozens of examples that might infuriate you, offend you, or at least make you uncomfortable.
Many of our ideas about the world are based more on feelings than facts, sensibilities than science, and rage than reality. We gravitate toward ideas that make us feel comfortable in areas such as religion, politics, philosophy, social justice, love and sex, humanity, and morality. We avoid ideas that make us feel uncomfortable. This avoidance is a largely unconscious process that affects our judgment and gets in the way of our ability to reach rational and reasonable conclusions. By understanding how our mind works in this area, we can start embracing uncomfortable ideas and be better informed, be more understanding of others, and make better decisions in all areas of life.
* Thanks in part to the sponsorship of The Book, "Uncomfortable Ideas" by Bo Bennett, PhD, this course is made available to you for free. Sponsors have a subtle mention under the course title and links in the course resources - there are no intrusive image-based ads or audio ads in the course.
In this section, we will cover cognitive biases and why they are important, I will share a few words about myself, and we'll explore "political correctness."
In section two, we look at the meaning of “uncomfortable idea,” specifically what uncomfortable ideas are, what it means to avoid them, and why it’s so important to entertain them and, at times, embrace them.
Section three deals with the most common unconscious and conscious reasons why we avoid uncomfortable ideas and includes dozens of examples, most of which will fall outside your comfort zone.
Section four looks at why we refuse to accept uncomfortable ideas that we would likely accept if they weren’t uncomfortable.
In section five, you are presented with several uncomfortable ideas that should make you rethink many of your core beliefs.
Not everyone will find all of these ideas uncomfortable, but the chances are most of you will find most of these ideas uncomfortable. Don’t avoid them; entertain them and either accept them or educate yourself as to why they shouldn’t be accepted, so you will be prepared with reasons as to why the ideas are bad when someone is attempting to convince you otherwise. This is the foundation of critical thinking.
A cognitive bias is like an illusion for the mind. It is a deviation from rationality in judgment.
As a social psychologist, my goal is to see issues as objectively as possible while recognizing my own biases.
Political correctness is defined as “the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.”
In this video we cover Credibility, Expose Dangerous Thinking, Attempting to Solve the Wrong Problem, and Treating Symptoms and Not the Disease.
When we get caught up in ideology and political correctness, we overlook the downside of our actions.
Another example of the unintended consequences of avoiding uncomfortable ideas has to do with identity politics, or a political style that focuses on the issues relevant to various groups defined by a wide variety of shared personal characteristics.
Depending on how passionate one might be about certain issues, one can dislike or even hate people who hold opposite views on those issues. If we want to understand why someone holds the idea they do, we need to entertain the idea.
Very often, one who presents fringe ideas is well aware of the common objections to the idea and like a good salesperson has crafted answers that address the objections.
One unifying force of humanity is our shared reality. Similarities bring people together while differences tend to tear us apart.
Within the context of avoiding uncomfortable ideas, “avoiding” can refer to a) keeping the idea from entering one’s own thoughts or b) the conscious decision to not think about, investigate, or consider evidence for the idea.
We can sum up all the reasons why we avoid uncomfortable ideas with the phenomenon known as "motivated reasoning." This describes how emotionally-charged ideas undergo a qualitatively distinct reasoning process that favors feelings over facts, which results in inaccurate conclusions and poor decisions.
Most of the unconscious reasons fall under the general category of self-preservation and are a result of the self-serving bias, which is any cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem, or the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner.
What do you think of Adolf Hitler? If I had to guess, I would say you think he was a monster. We accept that a monster can be responsible for the murder of six million Jews, but the moment we humanize this monster, we experience strong cognitive dissonance, or two competing thoughts or beliefs that cannot be reconciled.
We overcompensate for these positive feelings by publicly refusing to entertain these ideas.
Sigmund Freud introduced the idea of defense mechanisms, which are unconscious psychological mechanisms that reduce anxiety arising from unacceptable or potentially harmful stimuli, or in our case, uncomfortable ideas.
Being comfortable with or even just tolerating nuance and ambiguity is not a common characteristic found in most people.
Some ideas, especially those based strongly on reason and logic, can be seen as “cold,” “calculating,” and “lacking humanity.” When exposed to ideas like these, we become defensive and favor feeling over fact, falling victim to the appeal to emotion fallacy.
In this context, we can define sacred beliefs as beliefs that are off limits to criticism, doubt, or critical thought.
Most of the conscious reasons we avoid uncomfortable ideas fall under the general category of fear of the consequences.
Sometimes we fear that the truth will have a negative impact on society, so the "right" choice is to live the lie.
Patriotism is defined as “an emotional attachment to a nation which an individual recognizes as their homeland.” This is a highly subjective term, and patriotism can be expressed in many ways. People can also act in ways that are interpreted as unpatriotic when in fact their actions are a result of their emotional attachment to their nation. Being seen as “unpatriotic” is virtually always negative and actively avoided.
Social interaction and relationships have been shown to be one of the greatest indicators of well-being. We maintain positive relationships by being agreeable and not argumentative or contrarian. Rather than sacrifice our relationships, we choose to avoid entertaining ideas that would put us in the position of having to choose between our relationships and our beliefs and ideals. This makes dismissing uncomfortable ideas easy.
Nature has not made it a priority that we know the truth—not when the truth interferes with survival or reproduction. As mentioned, the self-serving bias is our brain’s way of interpreting information that makes us feel good about ourselves despite the fact that the reasons why we feel good about ourselves, or life in general, are grossly inaccurate.
Yes, there are still an alarming number of people who genuinely believe that entertaining certain ideas is “the work of Satan.”
We avoid entertaining ideas that just feel wrong simply because the ideas to us are automatically interpreted as evil, sick, or immoral. The ironic part is, unless we entertain these thoughts, we cannot possibly justify them being evil, sick, or immoral.
Some refuse to entertain ideas that go against an authority figure in fear that they will be punished for questioning authority, displaying a lack of loyalty, showing a lack of faith in the authority, or simply having doubts.
Those thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that are not consistent with the kind of person we think we should be are our metaphorical demons. We don’t like ideas that remind us of how we fail to live up to our own standards, so we avoid entertaining them.
When a person refuses to entertain an uncomfortable idea, they shield themselves from evidence and facts that could cause them to accept the idea.
It should go without saying that one cannot evaluate evidence without being aware of the evidence.
Believability in this context refers to knowing what level of trust one should have in the source as well as knowing what constitutes evidence and how to tell the difference between strong and weak evidence.
Thanks to belief-related cognitive biases and effects, sometimes facts, evidence, and reason don’t stand a chance.
We need to remember that there are often two sides to the equation when it comes to accepting an uncomfortable idea: there is the acceptance of the uncomfortable idea and the rejection of the comfortable idea that it will replace.
In this section, we cover
One often hears the expression “I will do anything for...” in combination with a declaration of love. This is a wonderful thing... if you are the object the love, otherwise, you might be screwed.
Our behavior is controlled by our brains and most of what we believe to be selfless acts are far from selfless.
Ideas that challenge these sacred beliefs are the most uncomfortable; therefore, they are the most avoided, ignored, and dismissed.
Works of fiction often have several “plot holes” that make the story more appealing, but only if you don’t think about the plot holes.
Given everything we know about the human brain, it is clear that the mind is a function of the brain.
Lacking education in world religions, many people are not even aware of these other texts and are convinced that the holy book of their particular religion, from their particular culture, is the one “true” holy book.
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” – Richard Dawkins
There are literally dozens of studies and scientific polls that look at intelligence and religious belief. When evaluating all the available research, we find that there is no compelling evidence that atheists are more intelligent than theists.
No one can offend you without your consent.
We need to accept the uncomfortable idea that we are not right all the time, and that admitting we were wrong brings us one step closer to actually being right.
You have been exposed to hundreds of uncomfortable ideas in this book, and hopefully, you have entertained rather than dismissed them.
Bo Bennett, PhD. Bo Bennett's personal motto is "Expose an irrational belief, keep a person rational for a day. Expose irrational thinking, keep a person rational for a lifetime." Much of his work is in the area of education—not teaching people what to think, but how to think. His projects include his books, The Concept: A Critical and Honest Look at God and Religion, Logically Fallacious, the most comprehensive collection of logical fallacies, and Year To Success, a full year course in success. Bo has a podcast/blog called "The Dr. Bo Show" at http://www.TheDrBoShow.com where he takes a critical thinking-, reason-, and science-based approach to issues that matter with the goal of educating and entertaining.
Bo holds a PhD in social psychology, with a master's degree in general psychology and bachelor's degree in marketing. His complete bio along with current projects can be found at BoBennett.com.
