Civilitas
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I am trying to recall the name of a phenomenon I read about somewhere a few years ago. It's to illustrate a point in a presentation I'm making to a high school class. Nutshell: you find information you know to be wrong from a well-known source, but then you go on to trust the source on other information that you can't verify.
I have been struggling to find the name of it but keep failing. This is a pretty diverse and intelligent group and maybe someone here can ID it. Here's how it was described to me in a classic example.
Situation: You are a genuine expert in your narrow field: accounting, medicine, air traffic control, harbour pilot, etc. You are reading your morning paper (recall those days?), and you see an article about an accident or controversy in your area of expertise. You can immediately tell from the "facts" related that the reporter has made a complete hash out of it and the truth, while intimated at, is WAY more complex and hidden vs. what they are getting at, or even the opposite.
So you dismiss it as useless. But then you go on to read the paper, but still generally trusting its articles and opinions on subjects you don't know anything about in depth - when clearly your ONE moment of insight showed that to be a bad bet.
There is an actual name or specific moniker for this cognitive dissonance wrt authority. Can anyone recall it, or recognize what I'm talking about?
NOTE: this has nothing at all to do with the current media criticism, etc. I'm trying to give really concrete examples for a class on epistemology and to show how "appeal to authority" is a more widely used way of knowing than we think it is.
I have been struggling to find the name of it but keep failing. This is a pretty diverse and intelligent group and maybe someone here can ID it. Here's how it was described to me in a classic example.
Situation: You are a genuine expert in your narrow field: accounting, medicine, air traffic control, harbour pilot, etc. You are reading your morning paper (recall those days?), and you see an article about an accident or controversy in your area of expertise. You can immediately tell from the "facts" related that the reporter has made a complete hash out of it and the truth, while intimated at, is WAY more complex and hidden vs. what they are getting at, or even the opposite.
So you dismiss it as useless. But then you go on to read the paper, but still generally trusting its articles and opinions on subjects you don't know anything about in depth - when clearly your ONE moment of insight showed that to be a bad bet.
There is an actual name or specific moniker for this cognitive dissonance wrt authority. Can anyone recall it, or recognize what I'm talking about?
NOTE: this has nothing at all to do with the current media criticism, etc. I'm trying to give really concrete examples for a class on epistemology and to show how "appeal to authority" is a more widely used way of knowing than we think it is.