These excerpts were taken from:
Cronick, K, in; Pandemia and coexistence in the chapter:
Farías Mata, Mariana, De Tejada Lagonell, Miren and Karen Cronick (in press). La pandemia, confinamiento por Covid-19: Práctica psicológica y ética de la convivencia, in Leonor Mora, Editor: PSICOLOGÍA Y SOCIEDAD VENEZOLANA. CONOCIMIENTOS Y PRÁCTICAS CONTEMPORÁNEAS. Central University of Venezuela.
Translation: Karen Cronick
[One’s] decision to accept beliefs is only voluntary to a certain degree. People "decide" whether to look for evidence, or to evaluate the sources of the information they receive, or to uncritically support what their favorite politicians or clergy say. Accepting a particular way of determining "reality" is a deeply ethical act, but it has many impediments; human beings do not fully enjoy the capacity for free will, because choosing our behavior does not necessarily come from a conscious decision. Multiple influences intervene: -the teachings we receive as children, -the need for the cognitive and emotional structure, which is sometimes satisfied with the creeds, -social pressures from the family and reference groups, and -the coercion that emanates of political parties.
A collective belief is not limited to a simple sum of individual intentions. The phenomenon of team action occurs. Participants value their membership in a group and accept its demands. This is partly about coercion and authority, but also to affective group affiliation that includes the obligation to adopt the collective will. Jujan Kraus (March, 2011) affirms that, through a kind of adaptation similar to empathy, people assume the group's intentions as if they were their own, without questioning them.
“Agents cooperate because they can take a higher-order perspective on what would be optimal for the group, even if the decision goes against their best individual plans. If this is true, it is plausible to consider that, in groups characterized by asymmetries and imbalances in power, individual agents can be persuaded to select a strategy that not only runs counter to their own interests, but is also not optimal. for the group itself ” (Krause, p. 5).
I think of the people who participate in demonstrations, for example, in Michigan in the United States in the last week of April in 2020. The militants were armed with automatic rifles, and demanded an end to the quarantine that local authorities had declared to protect the population from the contagion of Covid-19; they demanded their "right" to return to work. They did it in droves of people without protective masks despite the fact that this is one of the states most affected by the virus in the country. Some of the members of the state legislature protected themselves with bulletproof vests. The national president in Washington had called on them to “liberate their state” from the opposition party that currently governs there, and those who demanded “justice” obeyed this slogan, exposing themselves to contagion and sacrificing themselves for objectives unrelated to their own well-being. This attitude goes beyond the individual beliefs of the protesters.
Why did they feel the need to arrive armed? I think the most immediate response is that they wanted to show a potential power that would surpass any electoral force. There are two messages in this type of behavior. First their behavior is meant to demonstrate their omnipotence as a group, and second, beneath this alleged power there is an obvious desire to feel protected. This second message is an indication of fear, but fear of what? Against whom would it be necessary to demonstrate its capacity for lethal action? ...
On the other hand, if the weapons were intended to protect them, who threatened them? First it should be noted that the protesters were all white, and American racial bias is well documented. Social exclusion is closely related to fear of economic loss and of social prerogatives. Also in the recent programming of stations such as CNNI, the exaggerated vulnerability of people of color and Native Americans to Covid-19 has been denounced. It is probable, but I have no data, that these vulnerable groups would favor a prolongation of the current quarantine, and the protesters demanded the opening of the economy. There have been recent demonstrations in which groups that support the ideology of white supremacy have paraded armed through the cities of this country to terrorize Jews, Muslims and people of color….
The domination of some over others is a group phenomenon of long antiquity. Its relationship with the seizing of power and other resources is evident. And yet, argumentation is the main weapon of democracy: conversations replace the rattle of sabers on the battlefield. The logic of the negotiation is opposed to the immediacy of the uprisings and military occupations. The participation of the rebels is complex since it not only has to do with the desire for group obedience and conformity, but also with the self-destructive consent created for reasons of social identity. From the time of the tribes it has been necesary to identify closely with the group. Today, however, our identities are more complex, and herd obedience can cause great harm to individual members, especially when such obedience increases the possibility of contagion in times of epidemic.
The Psychology of Science and Belief
According to the Royal Spanish Academy, a belief at the individual level is: 1. A firm assent and conformity with something, 2. The full credit that is given to a fact or news as certain or certain and 3. A religion or doctrine. The Royal Academy does not clarify the bases of the assent, conformity or credit that support them.
It is necessary to go to collective phenomena to find these supports, and social psychology offers some explanations. Studies on constructionism (Gergen, 1985) examine the underlying beliefs held by every society, but this case deals with beliefs restricted to particular groups that are sometimes ephemeral. For their part, Moscovici and Hewstong (1984) speak of “social representations”, which have defined structures that characterize collective beliefs in large and small groups. Moscovici (1979) also talks about “active minorities” and shows how some individuals can break their conformity and encourage dissent to the militants’ slogans. What interests us here, however, is the dynamics of self-annulment that the group demands, and the willingness of the individual himself to collaborate in this.
Some of this obedience has been identified in the Royal Academy's third meaning cited above, which deals with religion or doctrine, but it can come from almost any source, including neighborhood gossip networks or Twitter ads. Lacking a discipline to ensure truthfulness, "believers" do not have a firm foundation for their convictions, and they do not seek them. We ask why do people lack the will to find out about something that can mean the difference between life and death for them? ...
Freedom of worship
Since the times of the Enlightenment in Europe, especially in France, and especially with the beginning of modern democracies, we have questioned transcendental truths, especially when they influence the work of governments. Téllez (2011) talks about:
[…] The speculative path opened up by the enlightenment is flanked by a political impulse: the replacement of Regnum Dei by regnum hominis, which in terms of legal claim means denying the Christian faith the right to rule / inspire the political order and public morals. The illustration can be characterized, in this sense, as "the shift of attention to man, the critical appropriation of the representations of God and their constitutive transformation by modern reason" (p. 229).
This change gave way to the idea of tolerance and freedom of conscience and worship (Voltaire, 1763-1766). This is an important milestone with respect to groupthink, because the democracies that were born after the 18th Century established the rights of all cults to exist, and founded the norm of legal tolerance of their creeds, opinions and beliefs; it is about the birth of the right to differences. By later recognizing the legitimate right of political parties in their quest to participate in (democratic) power, the European Enlightenment denied them all the ability to proclaim themselves the only bearers of absolute truth. This is the most important foundation of democracies. Within them coexist groups that believe they are the only bearers of the truth, but in the system -as a global structure-, they remain as tolerated islands, incapable of imposing their ideas on others. What they can do is try to persuade other people to be right… ..
... At the end of the Middle Ages the struggle between "believing" in a Ptolemaic universe, and "understanding" it according to the Copernican model, cost Galileo Galilei dearly. The distinction between these two verbs, "believe" and "understand", is key in humanism, one of the main sources of democracy. The dispute between tradition and science is long. The traditionalists poisoned Socrates; In another example, a horde of Christians tore Hypatia to pieces in AD 415. in Alexandria. She was a scholar of Platonic thought and mathematics. Also the empiricist Roger Bacon was captured around 1279 and probably died in prison. Similarly, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was an astronomer and poet who was burned alive in 1600 by the Inquisition.
Today, however, our identities are more complex, and herd obedience can cause great harm to individual members, especially when such obedience increases the possibility of contagion in times of epidemic.
The new authorities are science and mathematics; they are built on the reasons for their pronouncements; science never claims to have found the ultimate truth on a subject; it limits itself to proving its reasoning, always subject to later refutation. They are disciplines that generally reject the formation of groups that develop around unfounded beliefs. We could say that scientists obey both an ethics and an epistemology: they obey, from a rather individualistic ethical position, systematic reasoning that becomes incorporated into a complex body of reflections and methods that never appeal to an authority, tradition or archaism. Science is based on logic and "evidence", and its pronouncements are always clear and transparent; they are findings susceptible to being rejected when new tests are produced. In this they contrast with tribal thinking groups: nowadays no scientist is going to defend the existence of "ether", but there are sects whose members still claim that the Earth is flat.
Science is not accessible to everyone because it requires training to understand its methods and the language of its findings. When a researcher explains that his results are reliable to a degree of p = <.01, he is referring to the precise values of the certainty that can be had in these results, and it is understood, in addition, that they depend on factors such as the size of the the sample, the use of control groups and other techniques that allow to reach this level of confidence. People excluded from understanding these methods may prefer the more egalitarian world of unsupported opinions.
REFERENCES
Gergen, K. (1985). The Social Constructionist Movement in Modern Psychology. American Psychologist, Vol. 40, No. 3, 266–275.
Krause, J. (2011, marzo). Collective intentionality and de (re)production of social norms: The scope for a critical social science. Philosophy of the social sciences. No.42, p. 323. http://pos.sagepub.com/content/42/3/323 (Gergen, 1985
Moscovici, S. (1979). Psychologie des minorités actives. Presses Universitaires de France.
Moscovici, S. y Hewstone, M. (1984). "De la science au sens comun" en Moscovici, S. (Ed.), Psychologie sociale. Presses Universitaires de France. Téllez (2011)
Téllez, J. A. (2011) La libertad de conciencia y de religión en la Ilustración francesa: El modelo de Voltaire y de la “Encyclopédie”. Revista de Estudios Histórico-Jurídicos. [Sección Historia del Pensamiento Jurídico y Político]. No. 33, 227 – 272.
Voltaire (1763-1766). Traité sur la Tolérance a l`occasion de la mort de Jean Calas, 1763, en Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, mélanges IV, Kehl. http://www.voltaire-integral.com/Html/25/01_table_tolerance.html].
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