Book Reading #20: Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 5: Quieting the Mind

Reference:
Slater, Lauren. Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. W.W. Norton & Company: 2008.


Summary:
In this chapter, Slater discusses Leon Festiger's theory of cognitive dissonance.  This is the thought that people will change their beliefs to match certain circumstances.  Slater found a woman whose child almost drowned at the age of 3.  The mother surrounded her child with religious relics, and after a while, the relics began move of their own accord.  Also, the relics would ooze blood, or strange oils. People began to come to the child and take some of the oils for cures for many different ailments.  The mother then believed that her child was a saint, to take the pains of others to heal them.  Slater says that this is classic dissonance, by the way the mother rationalized what had happened.

Discussion:
I thought that this was an interesting chapter.  I have seen people change their beliefs when presented with new evidence.  I think that it is part of being a human with an open mind.  I would like to think that I among them.  I hope that I am not one of those people who don't concede something even though there is strong evidence to prove otherwise, but also not one of those people who change their beliefs on a whim, or just because someone says so.