While the average newspaper or magazine may not represent a ponderous pursuit of profound cosmic puzzles, journalism remains a brazen epistemic act for its attempt to regularly define reality, to purport to summarize a day in the world, to mark another notch on history’s timeline. And so one may be startled at journalism's confidence in certainty—its own certainty and the idea of certainty in a confusing world to begin with. "That's the way it is," Walter Cronkite curtly signed off (his successor, Dan Rather, is more ontologically deferential: "that's part of our world tonight"). Nothing perplexed me more as a journalism student and newspaper intern as my insecurity about my lack of overconfidence. I trusted my ability to observe and write, but at times I would be paralyzed by the task of telling it like it is. Is this the way it is? I would ask myself before turning in a story (even if the story was on as mundane a topic as, say, real estate—the more mundane the subject, in fact, the greater my insecurity about my mastery of it). What is this reality I'm defining? Already I had been disabused of the pompous journalistic ideal of objectivity—the silly but durable belief that the journalist could release herself from her personhood, hover above reality, and render it in a neutral way. But what, then, is left? Is the news just a record of the he-saids and she-saids of the government, financial, and social elites? ("Lady, we don't report the truth," Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee responded to a plea to print the truth. "We just report what people say.") An establishment organ that pacifies society, as neo-Marxists believe? Is not the news article merely a rhetorical style, adhering to the habits and assumptions of its institution, rather than some supreme method of conferring truth?

Even if journalism in practice reduces the writer to a propagandist for a corporation, journalism in theory remains a metaphysical experiment, and thus an exotic enterprise. "The writer," said Emerson, "believes all that can be thought can be written. ... In his eyes a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported." The reason I chose to embark on this reportorial venture as a journalist and not as a scholar (at least not yet) is that I was dissatisfied with academia's commitment to report the universe in an organic, personal, broadly curious way. The ivory tower is so specialized today that it seems one can only gain distinction if one disgorges volumes on an obscure new strand of socio-psychological relational paradigms in early seventeenth century German literature. Besides, decades after the advent of mass literacy (and the supposed liberation of knowledge from the elite), academia remains mired in its own habits of vision and snooty superiority complex. All of which raises the familiar but important question of what accumulating knowledge has to do with gaining wisdom. The writer—the thinker—cannot comfortably be a specialist at the expense of being a generalist. Novelist E.L. Doctorow, who entitles his essay collection Reporting the Universe, channels Emerson to say that the writer is "alive only to the great, if problematical, glory of your own consciousness." I am no transcendentalist; my only impulse to write is my curiosity. Since curiosity is as boundless as creation itself, it tantalizes its holder with a universe bearing "the possibility of being reported." 

That possibility, though, depends on simplificiation. To apprehend reality via the human mind and its communicative capacities requires that reality be simplified. The human mind is nothing but a hair-thin lasso with which to snare a toenail of the raging steer of reality. Truth is our traction on reality, and traction by definition is a roughness over an otherwise inaccessible surface. My journalistic insecurity described above arose from this realization; I was awed by the task of considering a complex topic and then simplifying it helpfully. Take that real estate story. What is the reality? (Or, if you prefer, the "realty.") Another way of asking it is, in journalistic terms, what's the angle? From one realtor's perspective, the market was getting better. From another's, it was getting weaker. In one analyst's view, it depended on how you saw the recent past. From another's, it depended on how you saw the near future. Whose perspective was correct? Was any? But I had to write a story. So the headline was, market stays strong, and the story stayed faithful to this angle.

Human conception of reality is necessarily an act of simplification. In journalism, the result is the writing and reading of stories that all sound alike, about the same things—politics, street crime, and earthquakes—over and over again, until a certain controlled version of reality emerges—an artificial, predictable world that exists only on the page or the television screen. This is why, though most people read the paper to "get the facts," I've taken to avoiding TV and newspapers in order to actually gain a truer sense of creation and not just a plastic picture. 

In fact, all human communication is oversimplified. Rather than a mechanical recitation of inert tidbits of truth called "facts," as rational objectivity promises, communication is a way we process nature, culture, and ideas, and regurgitate them through the filters of human consciousness. The depths of reality elude us, because we're human. This is why we have something to wonder about. This is also why we generalize. Our grotesque generalizations take the form of prejudice, leaps to conclusions, gossip, hearsay, myth, memes, habits, assumptions, and conventional wisdom that is neither conventional nor wise. 

Our simplifications are simultaneously functional and dysfunctional. If you are walking down a city street at night and see a young black male coming your way, how will you react? Many people will become at least slightly uneasy, for mathematical reasons—more young black males commit crimes than young males of other races—and borderline racist ones—they have seen enough prime time dramas and television news reports in which young black males are savage attackers that they adopt the view themselves. It may well be that the black man in front of you is a Harvard student, a minister, or an undercover cop. Without knowing anything about who he is or where he has been in life, we have already put him in a box. We have simplified reality in order to tolerate it. It would be intolerable to refrain from conceiving anything about anyone until you stopped them and asked for their life story. That's the function of stereotypes. But it would be degrading to avoid speaking to a man for fear of assault were he actually a peacemaker. That's the dysfunction. 

Because of this tension between functional and dysfunctional simplification, the ceaseless process of growing up and making peace with life necessarily means learning to tolerate nuance and ambiguity. A pscyhology professor of mine said it explains a lot about people to consider the principle of variation of tolerance of ambiguity. Different people, you might say, have different ambiguity thresholds. The ambiguity threshold of radio talk show hosts and their listeners, of army commanders and their soldiers, of athletic coaches and their players, of politicians and their voters, of many ministers and their followers, of some teachers and their students, of accountants, construction workers, and emergency room surgeons, is low. The ambiguity threshold of philosophers, novelists, researchers, the doctoral student, the sensitive, compassionate and thoughtful, is higher. (Which is not to say there is no overlap—there are indeed compassionate and thoughtful emergency room surgeons.) H.L. Mencken, who had a low ambiguity threshold, nonetheless wrote that "moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. ... The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure.'" I'm not convinced; the cultural elite can be self-assured, snobbish, and condescending toward rural residents, devout Christians, Republicans, the poor, and so forth; meanwhile, having little education does not preclude you from being a patient and sensitive person. And firmness of belief can be preferable to wishy-washy nihilism. But the point is usefully provocative.

In order to make peace with people's varying ambiguity thresholds, I had to come to this realization: our systems of meaning (including religious doctrine, political rhetoric, and cultural myths about money and success) are best understood as a defiance of chaos. Without systems of meaning—explanations of human existence and purpose—human life is a disorienting void that threatens mental health. I remember reading a story about an amnesiac woman who was found wandering the streets of New York with no idea of who she was or what she was doing there; evidently she had suffered some unknown trauma that caused her to erase her memory. Such mental chaos is a form of hell. The same goes for sufferers of Alzheimer's disease; they lose their ability to defy chaos by constructing meaning. They and those who love them visit hell for the length of the illness. And so, whenever I get flummoxed by the follies of fundamentalism or the smugness of atheist scientists, I try to remember that people don't hold beliefs only to feel superior to others, but also to stave off meaninglessness. That helps.

Still, this makes the bickering between opponents on different sides of debates about politics, church doctrine, and social issues such as abortion and homosexuality look like a silly exercise. In some cases, all that is missing is a mutual confession of low ambiguity thresholds. In the absence of that, author Rodney Clapp says proponents of one cause or another seem to be waiting for their opponents to “suddenly fall down and say, 'Silly us. We had our prejudices, our pet ideas, our traditions, and our personal histories. Now we’ve decided to set those aside and be objective. We know that all along you’ve been beyond traditions and prejudices. And we congratulate you on being right.'”

What I cannot resolve is whether it is more rewarding or punishing to raise my own ambiguity threshold. It rises automatically, I suppose, the more I read and experience in life. But as a reporter, inclined to condense reality into the artificial templates of news writing, as and a Christian, inclined to blurt "God said it; I believe it; that settles it!" (neglecting, as fundamentalists do, to reflect what it is God said, what it means, and why I accept a certain interpretation), I am continually overwhelmed by how vast and elusive reality and truth can be, and carry out the dog-chasing-tail act of trying to figure out why I believe what I believe and how I know what I think I know. The selling point for higher education and the ambiguity that comes with it (or should) is that ambiguity makes life richer, more nuanced and thus more nourishing. But exploration of epistemology can be agonizing, and even depressing. As my ambiguity threshold rises, my ability to defy chaos seems to weaken, which is a debilitating thing for the human creature. And so, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan (a low ambiguity man himself), I ask myself: as a college graduate, am I better off today than I was four years ago?

I remain, then, in search of certainty. Certainty is usually second nature to human beings. We take our certainty for granted. We live as though we are certain of things, of our existence, our basic knowledge about the world, the purpose of our actions, maybe even of God's existence. "Faith," says the NIV translation of Hebrews 11, "is being certain of what we do not see." (How can faith mean being certain; doesn't certainty make faith unnecessary?) 

My doubts about certainty—the shift in my ambiguity threshold—took root in college, most specifically in two college classes my senior year—a social psychology class that made me skeptical of how humans form misperceptions based on their social interactions, and a class on worldview that helped me identify tensions in my perception of myself and my place in the world. After the classes were finished I sat down and made a list of all these tensions, which I have posted in full below. Here are some of them for now: 

Fundamental Attribution Error: We believe our bad behavior and bad decisions are situational, but the bad behavior and decisions of others is dispositional. That is, we believe our personal traits have a lesser effect on our behavior than our external circumstances do, but assume others’ traits have a greater effect on their behavior than their external circumstances. The classic example is when someone cuts you off in traffic you conclude that they are a jerk, but when you are in a hurry and cut someone else off in traffic, you remain virtuous.

Cognitive dissonance results when our thoughts and beliefs conflict with what we see, say or do. When we make a hard decision with good reasons to act another way, when we say something we didn’t mean, when we believe something and find strong evidence that contradicts it, we have cognitive dissonance. We seek to resolve it by altering our beliefs or behavior, but we may favor resolution of dissonance (in other words, altering a belief to better suit us, with minimal concern for its veracity) over truth itself. 

Confirmation bias: People tend to neglect evidence that contradicts their existing beliefs. They will ignore or de-emphasize the good deeds of someone they believe to be bad and the bad deeds of someone they believe to be good. Supporters of a political issue will downplay, doubt or deny statistics or reasoning that undermines their cause. 

Other tensions in personal access to certainty:

The Bible is timeless transcendent truth; it has a central, universal message/The Bible is distorted by translations and historical or denominational interpretation, and means different things to different audiences.

I must defer to authority, which may know better than I and which is a God-given structure for keeping order in a chaotic, selfish world/I must reject authority, which fallen leaders use to perpetuate institutional norms and serve their own pride.
 
If good, godly people can smartly, selflessly, but firmly disagree, each believing the Holy Spirit has revealed truth to them, are both wrong, are both right, are both somewhat of each, and what does this say about truth? How can a belief be worth having if an equally (or more) faithful and intelligent person can believe the opposite? (Since I believe capitalism is more disastrous than good in a fallen world, and certain good Christians believe the opposite, and we each have good reasons, can I believe myself to be true and the other false? If I cannot, what is the worth of the belief-is it still a question of truth and falsehood or a mere variation in perception?)

Thus my malaise. Who can live with these kind of questions swirling around the cerebrum? There are more: I haven't even gotten around to the Cartesian question of consciousness: how do I know I exist, that reality isn't a dream (or that it isn't like Plato's problem of illusory cave shadows?) Frankly, this has never bothered me as much as it did Descartes; consciousness has a history and continuity to it that my dreams never do; even though I don't always discern them as dreams at the time (in other words, even though I don’t always know when I’m dreaming, I know when I’m not dreaming). But in The Matrix, Morpheus poses a vexing problem when Neo looks around his computer-generated training room and asks: 

Neo: This...this isn't real?

Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. 

Since I wrote those questions down in college, I've come upon more obstacles to certainty. One is marriage. Until you share your life with someone (and this could be true of a family member or friend), it is difficult to appreciate the slipperiness of what you see, say, and remember. A living partner calls you on things; it's harder to fool yourself. Without yourself as your ontological focal point, you realize that the way you and someone else look at things is flawed, and that the truth, which each of you claim, lies between or beyond the both of you.  

Nor can one easily appreciate what happens to certainty when you find yourself in extended isolation. The past several months I have been working at home, my friends having dispersed with no immediate replacements, surrounded by strangers, suddenly spending many isolated, silent hours alone with my thoughts. It loosened my grip on the operative assumptions I was accustomed to in society and in church. When you’re surrounded by people, you come to share their assumptions about what’s important—the way co-workers always ask about what recreation consumed your weekend, or state their approval when you report a new purchase, and so forth—you begin to assume that having an exciting weekend or buying new things is important. When you’re by yourself, you realize how shallow this is and start to think about more essential aspects of life—purpose, relationships, and so forth. Part of this is healthy. Part of it is dangerous; I fell into mild depression after a few months of being at home alone with my thoughts. I wanted to be certain about things, and instead, I had long hours alone with myself and my uncertainty. It drove me half-crazy.

This seems to bode ill for certainty itself. Ordinarily, we live with subconscious assumptions of what we believe to be certain—we don’t walk around constantly second-guessing everything we think. Yes, we overestimate our capacity for certainty. But certainty is nonetheless our default mode; the elusiveness of certainty never deters us. Nor should it, as John Locke once wrote: 

If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things; we shall do much-what as wisely as he, who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly. 

The realization that presumed certainty is our default mode is important. The fact that we operate with assumptions of certainty with little regard to the reliability of those assumptions reveals the function of those assumptions. The purpose of certainty is not actual certainty, but a perception of certainty to direct our lives. This is illustrated even by my typing of this essay—I’m experiencing confusion and ambiguity, but I keep typing. I’m typing these letters and not others. True uncertainty would mean staring at a blank screen all day. But the inertia of thought impels me forward, just as the inertia of our lives keeps us moving without the aid of rock-hard certainty about where we’re going. This pursuit is more natural to us than actually arriving at some certain determination of what truth is. 

This, in not so many words, is the conclusion of Esther Lightcap Meek of St. Louis’ Covenant Theological Seminary in an intriguing if not beautifully written book called Longing To Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People. Meek’s main goal is to expose the flaws of scientific approaches to knowledge which are so ingrained in our post-Enlightenment Western world. But unlike 99 percent of people who have done this, Meek will not conclude that absolute truth is a farce and it’s up to everyone individually to determine her own truth. That’s too easy an answer, and it doesn’t do justice to the profundity of  the act of knowing. Know, Meek says, “is a success word: when we use it we imply that we were successful at getting the truth right.” Such is the residue of the Enlightenement that we think that “for knowledge to be knowledge at all, it must be infallible or certain. Otherwise it is opinion, or belief.” This illusion of infallibility tantalizes us with what Meek calls “the dangling carrot of certainty.” The problem, she writes, is that “the old understanding of knowledge as depersonalized, disembodied pieces of information, explainable only be reference to other depersonalized pieces of information, found it difficult to explain the way we come to know the first time around.” Now postmodernism—with what the New York Times’ A.O. Scott calls its “coy suspicion of certainty” and what Richard Mouw calls the identification of “our precognitive commitments”--has, rightly, made us skeptical. After all, “human lives are a tapestry of acts of knowing,” Meek writes. “[The] features of human experience and knowing… restore to us what inside of ourselves we cannot deny: the hope, and the longing, to engage the real.”

The longing to engage the real. That’s the ball postmodernists have dropped. With their willy-nilly declarations that everyone determines an individual, imperious, insular truth (pray tell, postmodernists, are these objective or subjective declarations of yours?), they run roughshod over this essential aspect of being a human being: the longing to engage the real. 

This longing is not only carried out in philosophy departments such as Meek’s. Instead, Meek talks about “our ordinary, workaday epistemic acts [that] fill our waking hours.” As a journalist, concerned as I am with everyday epistemology, my ears perked up at that phrase. “All of life is knowing,” Meek says. Her examples: “Knowing what these words mean; knowing that your roommate is at the library … knowing that you (according to your doctor) have a herniated disk.” Take those last two—how do you know those things for sure? If someone asked you to prove them, could you? Do you need to prove them or do you just accept them? We live our lives on a daily basis standing on the foundation of these “ordinary, workaday epistemic acts”—with no constant reassurance of certainty. 

The power of this proof-less knowing is conveyed in one of Meek’s central themes: Knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic. Think about it. If you have a good auto mechanic, you don’t see or know how he does everything he does—you may not want to know as long as the car runs—and as long as you trust that he or she is not gouging you, you are mostly incapable of evaluating the price you are charged. And yet a satisfying pattern of trust develops that transcends what we can articulate. Sending the car to this person becomes second-nature, even though it is an act of trust and cannot, Meek says, “be done entirely in rational prepositions.” The point is not that we can get to know to God the exact way in which Meek has gotten to know her mechanic Jeff. The point is this: if the question at hand is how we know anything for sure, we must start by acknowledging that the proof-less way we know a mechanic (or a doctor or teacher or friend) is a much more common and fundamental method of knowing to human beings than are science experiments in laboratories. The latter seek empirical conclusions; the former is how people actually live on a daily basis. 

There is irony in how we tend to deny this and erect a wall between faith and reason, Meek says:

The ideal of certainty refuses to countenance features of knowing that we might class as faith. The misguided ideal itself prompts the wall-building. And the wall, in turn, leads to certainty’s self defeat. The wall keeps out just the elements of knowing that undergird all knowing, without which our attempts are either illicit or fruitless. 

To have knowledge, we must bring down that wall and let in “the elements of knowing that undergird all knowing”—the subjective elements, the elements modernism prohibits and postmodernism elevates but then gets carried away with. Meek puts it best. 

The personal human effort [is not] the barrier that prevents us from knowing, but [rather] the situatedness in the world that is just our strategic access to it. We don’t need a beachhead; we already are one.

Here’s the rub: Contrary to what modernists believe, without subjective ways of knowing there is no knowing. Contrary to what postmodernists believe, without an objective orient for our ways of knowing, there is no knowing.

What we need instead, Meek says, is a pattern, a coherence to what we see, do, and believe and an articulation of that coherence. That’s all anyone is really after anyway, and that’s all anyone can hope to achieve. (But that’s a lot.) Think of the recognition of this pattern, Meek says, as analogous to what someone does when they stand in front of one of those 3-D “magic eye” posters. At first, the poster appears to be just a mass of color with no coherence or meaning. But then, after a period of studying it and getting your eyes accustomed to its contours, something clicks in and you see a form leaping off the page at you (well, others do, anyway; I could never make heads or tails of those things). This compares to how we know and how we live with knowledge.

This means that knowledge is a process, Meek says. (She observes: “When it comes to knowing, there are key portions that cannot be expressed in words. If there is a “before” to knowing, then there is a kind of knowing going on that can’t be represented verbatim in the description of the thing we have yet to come to know.) And that process is a struggle, a preternaturally human “struggle to achieve coherence.” Meek proceeds to “To be human is to make sense of experience, to develop our world and … extend our conceptual grasp.” We rely not on “premises” but on “evocative clues.” Gradually we develop a “skilled, felt sense of the real that extends the frontiers of our bodily, lived awareness.”

Meek proceeds to describe the formation of this pattern—how it is subjective in scope but objective in focus, how it is a natural process, and how we come to know God—as she fleshes out this thesis:  

Knowing is the responsible struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality.

Our relationship with truth, Meek adds, is one of “contact, not correspondence; confidence, not certainty.”

I’m going to need a few years to digest that and ponder all its implications. While I do, let me submit one last thought, and that is what I call the diner method of knowing. This is named in honor of the movie When Harry Met Sally—in particular, its memorable diner scene. In that scene, Meg Ryan’s character, in the process of arguing to Billy Crystal’s character that he is unable to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic female orgasms, spontaneously and loudly fakes an orgasm in the middle of the diner, drawing everyone’s attention and humiliating Crystal. The funny story behind this scene is that the woman who delivers the closing line after flagging down a waitress—“I’ll have what she’s having”—was the mother of director Rob Reiner, appearing in a cameo. Reiner, excruciatingly, had to coach Ryan in the scene, instructing her on points of emphasis and modulation, with his mother sitting at the adjacent table all the while. 

But that line is the one to which I keep returning. I’ll have what she’s having. Reiner’s mother says it without any idea of what Ryan had actually ordered or whether she herself would enjoy its taste. She was sold. And why wouldn’t she be, after such a display? 

As I read through Philip Yancey’s Soul Survivor, an essay collection on contemporary heroes of faith, I wondered if there was an analogy here between Reiner’s mother’s line and an integral statement of faith. I’ll have what she’s having. It was the very line that kept occurring to me as I read Yancey’s essays on Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Buechner, Annie Dillard, Dr. Paul Brand, and other saints. With the exception of King, these are not fire-and-brimstone, Bible-thumping Christians. They are, by and large, struggling, stumbling pilgrims, longing for truth but plagued by the sense that they’ve only dented its car door. Still, the richness of their thought serves as loud witness to the source of truth, whom they identify as God. Yancey writes of Brand, who worked as surgeon in India and advanced the study of leprosy, and with whom he co-authored three books: "It is indeed possible to live in modern society, achieve success without forfeiting humility, serve others sacrificially, and yet emerge with joy and contentment. To this day, whenever I doubt that, I look back on my time with Paul Brand.” What more convincing case for truth could Brand have come up with than such a life? It is subtle and indirect, but it speaks ten times louder than the blather of a televangelist. Similarly, my faith was shaped and cultivated by my relationship with my grandfather—not by what he said but by who he was. He lived out the old axiom: Preach the gospel. If necessary, use words.

If there is one thing I could suddenly implant in Western society, it would be this appreciation for subtle saints. Instead, society tends to have two reactions to people of faith—a superficial sentimentality that made Touched By An Angel a hit show; or a smug Enlightenment condescension that says, “That’s nice that you have your Santa Claus there, but leave the intellectual heavy lifting to us serious thinkers who are unspoiled by such irrational fantasies.” It’s that wall Meek talked about between faith and reason. Whenever I encounter someone with this attitude, I want to say, Don’t consider the Christianity as the platitude-spouting Bible belt dwellers you see on the news. Contend with the Christianity of C.S. Lewis, St. Augustine, Sir Isaac Newton, and yes, Dr. Paul Brand. In fact, if you give up on Christianity, Lewis, who had been hostile to the faith but says he was more or less dragged kicking and screaming to God by logic, has set the bar high; your doubt has to be more impressive, better articulated, and harder to escape than his was if you hope to avoid conversion where he did not. That’s a tall order. I’m not saying I’ve had no personal spiritual experiences of my own, but at the core of my faith is the fact that I’ve read Lewis and said, I’ll have what he’s having.

Yancey puts it this way in the introduction to his collection:

“If I were invited to a convention full of skeptics, or representatives of another religion, and asked to explain my faith, these are the companions I would want along. I could simply point to these strong witnesses and say, ‘Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive. This is what they look like.’ 

He might have added: I’m having what they’re having, and the burden of proof is high for anyone else not to do the same. 

- Why Atheism is a Faith

- S.F. Chronicle: Study finds 'intolerance of ambiguity' in conservatism

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Social psychology, the individual, truth, and perception

The young discipline of social psychology illumines the contours of human interaction in its joys and its brokenness. In a fallen world, patterns of ordinary human interaction exhibit the stain of the fall. We need communities and social identity, for we are social creatures. But we must also be aware of how societies and subcultures can distort reality. My own estimate is that we tend to assume that 70% of what we believe to be truth is non-negotiable, transcendent, capital-T “Truth,” and 30% has been colored in by our particular cultural contexts. After taking a social psychology course, and reflecting on how the community of my upbringing shaped and distorted what I perceive to be true about the world, my hunch is it may be the other way around. The following principles, which have been studied extensively and creatively in laboratory settings, have a profound influence not only my post-childhood revision of my identity, but also on how I will -work setting, evaluate information about people and social trends, and seek social reform. 

Fundamental Attribution Error
We believe our bad behavior and bad decisions are situational, but the bad behavior and decisions of others is dispositional. That is, we believe our personal traits have a lesser effect on our behavior than our external circumstances do, but assume others’ traits have a greater effect on their behavor than their external circumstances.

Cognitive dissonance results when our thoughts and beliefs conflict with what we see, say or do. When we make a hard decision with good reasons to act another way, when we say something we didn’t mean, when we believe something and find strong evidence or people that conflict with it, we have cognitive dissonance. We seek to resolve it by altering our beliefs or behavior. 

Confirmation bias
People tend to neglect evidence that contradicts their existing beliefs. They will ignore or de-emphasize the good deeds of someone they believe to be bad and the bad deeds of someone they believe to be good. Supporters of a political issue will downplay, doubt or deny statistics or reasoning that undermines their cause. 

Learned Helplessness
Repetition of bad events or the experience of bad external forces, involuntarily experienced, produces the belief that power to change or avoid the situation is impossible, even when the events or forces change. Someone who grew up in poverty, for example, may doubt that social mobility is possible even when new opportunities arise. A rickety bridge may incite the same uneasiness among people after it is repaired. 

The Great Man myth
People tend to assume that a great leader is a certain breed of Great Person with certain traits, but effective and beneficial leadership is usually a certain match of a person’s style to a certain situation. 

Change in behavior can lead to change in belief, although we usually assume only the reverse is true. For example, civil rights legislation helped reduce racism. Then-candidate George W. Bush may have underestimated this when said he would not support any extreme measures against abortion given current public opinion, and that taking action on the issue would have to be preceded by “changing hearts.”

Just world theory:
People make moral judgments about themselves and others based on whether they think it is a just world, where merit determines results, or an unjust world, where corruption determines results. Relatedly, if people are powerless to end someone’s suffering, they are more likely to rationalize it and even justify it; for example, if people feel powerless to end poverty, they will be more inclined to blame its victims for their plight.

Functional prejudice: Prejudice may originate as malice less than it is a consequence of people processing certain information in a certain social context. For example, in the Deep South 50 to 100 years ago, people may not have hated black Americans as much as they were seeking to uphold social beliefs and norms about "order" and "honor." 

Obedience and evil:
The now-famous study of whether subjects would administer what they believed to be electric shocks to a fellow experimenter at the command of a laboratory scientist proved that people’s inclination to obey authority will lead them to perpetuate evil they would not on their own. Cornelius Plantinga’s response to this study was that in a fallen world, evil is not the trademark of scheming, psychotic “mad scientists” as much as it is ordinary and “remarkably dull;" It is not abnormal or unusual, it is normal and ordinary. "Hannah Arendt called this the banality of evil." This violates our moral intuition as well as the Hollywood Catechism, which says evil is the result of a few evil people. 

Normative influence
People are naturally inclined to conform to their social context and adhere to others’ expectations. People need approval; there are few hermits and true “rugged individualists” in the world. Those who think they are should try violating a trivial social norm: standing in an auditorium of seated people, wearing Sunday clothes to the golf course or golf clothes to church on Sunday, or facing the wrong way in an elevator. Such relatively trivial violations can be discomforting and even disorienting for people. 

Groupthink
Two heads may not be better than one. In group decisions, people are likely to value consensus over exploration of the problem, even to the point of withholding their individual opinions. Social psychologists say this is what happened with President John F. Kennedy’s ill-fated decision to invade Cuba; there was strong momentum for it in the decision-making room, though participants who were later interviewed individually admitted their skepticism for success (but was this hindsight bias?). 

Bystander effect 
The larger a crowd that witnesses a crime or power outage, the less likely anyone is to intervene; everyone operates with the assumption that someone else will do something or call authorities. Thus it is necessary for the victim of a crime in progress to isolate a member of a crowd by name or clothing with specific instructions (not “Someone help!” but “You in the red shirt, call 911”).

Tragedy of the Commons
“Rational pursuit of self-interest leads to collective doom.” In this famous example, a psychologist posed the problem of a commons lawn that can sustain 100 grazing cows in a town of 100 farmers. One farmer may reason that the lawn can support 101 and seeks to double the milk he can collect from his cows. But everyone else will reason in the exact same way and overwhelm the lawn, leaving it barren and leaving all the cows to starve. This same principle affects every other natural resource in society-people pursue their own self-interest as though only they were doing so, when in fact everyone is rationally pursuing their self-interest to the peril of the whole. In an individualistic society, we must seek to curb our own selfishness for the good of the community or society. 

Related tensions in personal access to certainty:

The social consensus may be wrong /I may be wrong

There is value in adhering to tradition, the living faith of the dead/There is value in rejecting the normative influence of traditionalism, the dead faith of the living 

We need to accept the ambiguities of a complicated world/Simplification is a survival function

I must fight for a cause; if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything/
Fighting for a cause tends to involve demonizing the enemy and becoming self-righteous

I must help redeem the fallen creation/Sinful in nature, I will multiply brokenness as well as rebind creation

I must believe in my own capacity to know truth and fight for it/I am fallen, arrogant, and often wrong and misled (Why are fundamentalists wrong, who am I to say?/I must say; Lies almost always contain a strand of truth. Which is the truthful strand and which are the false ones, and how do I know?)

The Bible is timeless transcendent truth; it has a central, universal message/The Bible is distorted by translations and historical or denominational interpretation, and means different things to different audiences

I must defer to authority, which may know better than I and which is a God-given structure for keeping order in a chaotic, selfish world/I must reject authority, which fallen leaders use to perpetuate institutional norms and serve their own pride
 
If good, godly people can smartly, selflessly, but firmly disagree, each believing the Holy Spirit has revealed truth to them, are both wrong, are both right, are both somewhat of each, and what does this say about truth? How can a belief be worth having if an equally (or more) faithful and intelligent person can believe the opposite? (Since I believe capitalism is more disastrous than good in a fallen world, and certain good Christians believe the opposite, and we each have good reasons, can I believe myself to be true and the other false? If I cannot, what is the worth of the belief-is it still a question of truth and falsehood or a mere variation in perception?)

Everything is a question of degree-few are purely Republican or purely Democrat, purely individualistic or purely collectivist. Why the variance, what explains to what extent someone believes something, and if everything is a continuum, does truth reside in one location, one end or the other, or at several points? What does this say about truth?

I must expand my intellectual mind, ask deep questions, analyze to keep from becoming complacent, recognize why my level of education leads me to think it different ways from others, and reject mediocrity and folly and instead pursue excellence and wisdom/I must be like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven, rejecting the snobbery of the intellectual elite, thinking myself no better than anyone, enjoying simple pleasures, acknowledging the wisdom of uneducated others, and not over-analyze.