Abstract
It is usually around this point in my lectures that one of the more practical-minded students raises a hand and expresses the unease felt by the rest of the class. He means no disrespect, but… putting it gently, he finds protracted theoretical doubts wearing.
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Here I am using an “ideal type” student, of course, so as to deliberately simplify a highly complex and intriguing psychological puzzle that I cannot presently discuss in detail. Let me stress, however, that I have the utmost respect for the realistic urgency of my practical-minded students. It should be noted however that self-deception rarely makes us indifferent to the desirability of learning per se, but rather often expresses our ambivalence toward its hardships. And it exists at all levels of learning, from the crudest to the most refined. On the one hand, even people who have been convinced that anti-aging cream is no more effective than water will often continue to deceive themselves about its effects. On the other hand, some forms of self-deception are clearly not just universal but also biologically beneficial as means of self-encouragement, of mustering our energies, etc. The slogan “fake it till you make it” has some truth to it, and people who, for whatever reason, feel younger and more beautiful, may on some levels actually become so. Thus, even the mere illusion of becoming experts may on some levels improve our performances.
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See Popper (1950a, b) for an elaborated discussion of the “Oedipus effect ”. See also Popper (1945, p. 22), and the famous introduction to Popper (1957 ) . In the same vein, Robert Merton (1968 ) famously noted and studied various cases of the self-fulfilling prophecy. A Bank, for example, will go bankrupt for the mere reason that people believe that it will. Both Popper and Merton regarded the “Oedipus effect ” as the most distinctive feature of the social sciences. The aim of every “true” prophet, they noted, is to become a “false” one.
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Popper, K. (1945). The open society and its enemies, Vol. 2. London: Routledge.
Popper, K. (1950a). Indeterminism in quantum physics and in classical physics: Part I. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1(2), 117–133.
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Popper, K. (1957). The poverty of historicism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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Bar-Am, N. (2016). Appendix from the Classroom: Toward a Useful Introduction to Communication. In: In Search of a Simple Introduction to Communication. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25625-2_3
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