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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 no

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

chmod775 5y ago
> For example, this from their questionnaire: 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.
- apocalypstyx 5y ago
  Yes, I misread. But I would still scrutinize the reasoning expressed by the sample for the same reasons.
  - chmod775 5y ago
    Actually, no you didn't misread. I did. > Participants are given two vivid examples of each distortion [...] and then report how frequently they engage in each type of thinking. > For example, emotional reasoning is illustrated with the following examples: That sure sounds like participants faced those examples somewhere.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> 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.
- apocalypstyx 5y ago
  But what gives the right to the most positive one?
  - dymk 5y ago
    A general predisposition to assuming a good nature of your fellow humans?
    - apocalypstyx 5y ago
      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.
      - dymk 5y ago
        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).
jessaustin 5y ago
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?
imgabe 5y ago
> 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.
- chmod775 5y ago
  > 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.
  - imgabe 5y ago
    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.
    - apocalypstyx 5y ago
      You've conflated several things. 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.
hogFeast 5y ago
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).
- apocalypstyx 5y ago
jcims 5y ago
>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.
- apocalypstyx 5y ago
  Perhaps this falls into the quadrant of Unknown Knowns.
  - jcims 5y ago
    Nice! You might be on to something there. 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.
theboat 5y ago
> 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.
scythe 5y ago
>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.
chrismcb 5y ago
Without more context, Kim WAS rejected. They got some tickets, just not enough. So Kim want in the "in" crowd to get the tickets they did get.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
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).
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > 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.

chmod775 5y ago

> For example, this from their questionnaire: 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.

apocalypstyx 5y ago
Yes, I misread. But I would still scrutinize the reasoning expressed by the sample for the same reasons.
- chmod775 5y ago
  Actually, no you didn't misread. I did. > Participants are given two vivid examples of each distortion [...] and then report how frequently they engage in each type of thinking. > For example, emotional reasoning is illustrated with the following examples: That sure sounds like participants faced those examples somewhere.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> 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.

apocalypstyx 5y ago
But what gives the right to the most positive one?
- dymk 5y ago
  A general predisposition to assuming a good nature of your fellow humans?
  - apocalypstyx 5y ago
    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.
    - dymk 5y ago
      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).

jessaustin 5y ago

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?

imgabe 5y ago

> 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.

chmod775 5y ago
> 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.
- imgabe 5y ago
  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.
  - apocalypstyx 5y ago
    You've conflated several things. 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.

hogFeast 5y ago

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).

apocalypstyx 5y ago

jcims 5y ago

>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.

apocalypstyx 5y ago
Perhaps this falls into the quadrant of Unknown Knowns.
- jcims 5y ago
  Nice! You might be on to something there. 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.

theboat 5y ago

> 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.

scythe 5y ago

>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.

chrismcb 5y ago

Without more context, Kim WAS rejected. They got some tickets, just not enough. So Kim want in the "in" crowd to get the tickets they did get.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

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).

tsimionescu 5y ago
> 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.