Just
a reminder that the purpose of this discussion aims at stimulating
thought and self awareness as tools
to help those in recovery
from trauma learn how to make safer
choices. To make the discussion more jocular, we've defined
Cognitive Biases as “CranioRectal
Inversions” (CRI).
I've
spent years reading, thinking, and writing about objectification
– to treat someone as if they are a mere object instead of the
unique, complex, and valuable person that they are. The cognitive
bias of salience describes general aspects of this attribution
error which overlaps with some others – that of objectifying
people as primarily good or evil by splitting
them and their worth entirely into only
one one or the other.
[Please take note of the many links embedded in this particular post for background on some of the concepts and history referred to in the post. This one seems rather dense with them.]
The
black and white thinking that high demand groups and relationships
use to advance authoritarianism force simplistic assessments by
making leaders and model citizens who follow their program as divine
and intrinsically good, so the related CranioRectal Inversion has
been termed the halo effect. This contrasts a
whole range of possibilities when people are viewed in the opposite
light – diminishing or minimizing others and their influence.
Spiritual abusers love to cast those who fail to follow the informal
rules of conduct or the affection of leadership as ranging from
problematic to malicious if not demonic. I've dubbed it the
horn effect for this discussion.
This
blog often explores both concepts as essential components of
spiritual abuse but uses the term objectification
to describe horns far more frequently than it does halos.
Why might that be so?
Halos
Required?
When
considering CRIs as destructive because they cast reality as
something unreasonably or irrationally different, halos themselves
seem to escape scrutiny. For the Christian, there are aspects of the
halo effect that quite easily overlap with grace, so it is quite easy
for the concept to become muddled. How far does grace extend?
I
remember talking with a mature Christian who used to help others to
develop better Bible study habits to help them enrich their spiritual
lives. I mentioned a New Testament passage that actually said to “be
angry,” but in so doing, “don't sin” in the process. Because
of the pressure of the stereotypes of “how Christians should”
behave, she realized that she'd failed to even recognize that simple,
very
direct statement before. It wasn't obscure, either, and it
happened to fall in the same section of the Bible that the Christian
Patriarchy movement used to dehumanize women and tolerate abuse from
their husbands.
A
discussion ensued about examples where Christians are actually taught
to be tolerant and not to be easily angered by others without due
cause. Upon closer inspection of other evidence in the Bible about
how to cope with injustice and maltreatment, she began to see the
truth emerge from the way some skewed the subject. Together, we
found more principles that balance kindness and patience with justice
and self-advocacy as well as respect for others.
The
High Demand Duality Dance
My
friend's stupefied response as she realized that she'd fallen into
this common trap of the halo and how its antithesis comes into play.
By the (unhealthy) encouragement to deny and her natural and just
anger along with the degradation of women, she learned to place a
halo on everyone else's head. A skewed sense of grace as well as her
own diminished worth required that she tolerate anger from all
others, but her family and her church which followed “Biblical
Patriarchy” defined anger (particularly in women) as a sin.
I once
wrote a post
that explored “what goes on in the mind of the spiritual abuser”
which talks about the process of living in the duality that one must
find to exist within a high demand group. In effect, the cognitive
biases of halos and horns touch on aspects of the same process,
noting how the two can serve balance one another as a means of
coping. Lifton called this process the healing-killing
paradox. (He coined the term while exploring how physicians
in Nazi Germany could perpetrate such atrocities. I think that it
also describes how spiritual caregivers who help others with
emotional and spiritual healing can likewise justify immoral behavior
within high demand religions.)
Otherwise
virtuous people whose life work involves healing resort to their own
healing-killing paradox to survive times of war and keep them
functioning when called upon to do things that are considered immoral
during peace time. (One not need be a Nazi doctor to experience it,
either.) Moral
disengagement kicks in under the guise of the virtue of following
the greater good and the orders of one's superiors. That
disengagement offers the illusion that someone else is morally
responsible for the required immoral act. It also provides a little
bubble of some sense of meaning and existence – a type of sanity –
amidst impossible circumstances when trapped and helpless to exit.
It becomes a means of survival, all thanks to our ability to use
cognitive bias. It's one of the gifts/curses of our humanity.
In the
patriarchy movement which inspired the establishment of this blog,
this process actually has a name. The cruel
logic of the “hyper-Calvinists”
becomes “Rahab's
Lie,” a justified and blessed rite to sin during times of war
if seeking to be “Christlike.” Conveniently, this same band of
ersatz Christians follows their own special
brand of Replacement Theology, so they see themselves as the True
Jew© in a world
full of would be Nazis who seek their destruction. They are always
at war (the
culture war and the gender
war), so moral standards become quite negotiable. I think that
my same friend who marveled that anger was not intrinsically sinful
once referred to their Rahab's Lie Doctrine so prevalent in
their hidden
curriculum as something of a moral and logical loophole through
which they drove freight trains.
The next
post continues to explore the nature of the duality and interplay of
attribution errors
and how some people learn to cope with them to survive.
For
Further Reading:
- One of the $3 Kindle books about Cognitive Bias at Amazon.com
- Gilovich, Griffin & Kahneman's Heuristics and Biases
- Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
- Judith Herman's Trauma
and Recovery
