Occlumency

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 191696


> Pippin:
> 
> > Now, those of us who decided as we opened our brand new copies of CoS that JKR would never, never ever get us  to fall for Harry's Snape crap again have a cognitive advantage -- we never believed that Snape was guilty of any of that stuff.
> >
> > Those who did believe it, OTOH, are most likely stuck with a cognitive bias which they can do nothing about: a part of their minds is always going to behave as if  Harry's beliefs about Snape were true. <snip>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Seriously Pippin? Okay since I am certainly one of those readers, now I am annoyed. Please award me the courtesy of refraining from calling my views any sort of bias.

Pippin:
Oh my. Please understand that  the term "cognitive bias" is not derogatory. It is a term from psychology that  refers to a systematic human tendency to make decisions based on cognitive factors rather than evidence. This is not my field, and I may be getting things horribly wrong, but I will try to explain. 

Since these cognitive factors often operate at the unconscious level, they cannot always be directly monitored or controlled by the conscious self. But they can be detected by statistical methods. 


Cognitive bias is not a bad thing--it would be impossible for us to make decisions swiftly or efficiently if we had to rely solely on our lumbering ability to reason. As Jamie said, you don't have to reason things out to know that hitting a kid with a two by four is a bad idea. 
And it works well as long as we are dealing with familiar situations. We all have approximately  the same picture of a kid and a two by four.

But we clearly don't all have the same picture of legilimency.

And when we start reaching for conclusions in unfamilar situations our quick and dirty decision making ability may not serve us  well. Suppose I ask, "John is intelligent and brave. Would he make a good leader?" 

You may already be thinking, "Yes!"

 But what if I add, "He is cruel and impulsive." Now you probably think that you needed more information before you decided on your answer. But that didn't stop your mind from suggesting one. 

Commonly, people who are given a list of personal characteristics and told to disregard the order will still show a tendency  to rank the first items as more important. Thus, they will draw a very different picture of the individual if negative characteristics come first. And if the qualities are divided into separate lists of negative and positive, people will insist that they could not possibly both apply to the same person!

You can see how this would apply to canon. We're told that Gryffindors are daring and chivalrous, while Slytherins are power-hungry and use any means to achieve their ends. And so we unconsciously assume  (and Harry behaves as though) these characteristics could not be found in the same character. And we still tend to argue that they are not, even when we have the examples of Dumbledore and Snape! Not to mention Harry. 

Again, I cannot tell and do not claim that you, or anyone, was being influenced by a unconscious bias to believe  things about Snape after they turned out to be erroneous. But it's a statistical probability that some people will continue to remain influenced by information they once believed to be true. 

For example, on the first day of my college course in elementary statistics, the instructor announced that there was an error in the printed course materials. The  final exam had been moved to an earlier date. As I was duly writing this down, the instructor predicted that some of us would miss the exam. 

BTW, I got an A in that course -- after I'd taken the make-up exam ::blushes::. 

It was impossible for the instructor to know that *I* would be one of the people who missed the exam, and it was impossible for me to  predict  it, or even to know *why* I specifically made the mistake.  Nonetheless it was entirely predictable that some people would make it.  

Possibly I was a victim of cognitive bias. It would be logical for the unconscious to treat worthless information the same as no information, but it doesn't. Possibly part of my mind continued to trust the course information, even though I had been told not to do so and made an effort, writing down the new date, to make myself remember.

Harry knows that other people are not going to trust his conclusions about Snape because everyone knows that Harry hates him. But Harry himself does not doubt his conclusions. He doesn't think he is biased.  He is not consciously allowing his hate to influence him. He is not saying to himself, "I hate Snape, so I am going to believe he is trying to steal the Stone even though I know I can't prove it. And I am going to feel good about it." But Harry is unaware that it's possible for a cognitive factor, his hatred, to keep him from even considering other interpretations of the evidence even though he's aware that other plausible explanations must exist (otherwise he *could* prove it.) Thus he is  very surprised when the thief turns out to be Quirrell. 


Alla:
. I hate Snape and Dumbledore because of how *I* see canon facts, thats all there is to it, really.

Pippin:
Of course. But if you are like most people, how  you see  facts may be subject to cognitive factors outside your awareness and beyond your control and these *may* lead you, or me, or any person, to unconsciously favor some conclusions despite the evidence. 

If you want to know more about this, I recommend the book "Thinking Fast And Slow" by  
Daniel Kahneman

Pippin