hey wow my ear isnt swollen and screaming red anymore and i can touch my piercing without wanting to rip my whole ear off!!!
Have you ever gotten talked out of liking something? Maybe you saw The Dark Knight Rises in the theater and had a great time, but the next day you started talking to your movie connoisseur friends and they pointed out all of the plot holes (“When did Batman have time to paint his logo on the bridge?!”). Over time, it gets to where you can’t even admit to yourself that you enjoyed it. Even when you think back to your experience in the theater, all you’re thinking about is the plot holes.
You might convince yourself that thinking about the subject led you to the “right” opinion, but studies show that you can just as easily be steered from a correct opinion to a wrong one. Researchers tested this with a couple of experiments where subjects were asked to offer an opinion on things like which college course they preferred or which brand of jam tasted better. The catch was that some of the participants were asked to simply taste or sample the thing and move on, while others were asked to really think about their decision before making it official. The subjects who mulled over their opinions were way less in line with the opinions of experts than the others. The more they thought about it, the more wrong they became. How is this possible?
Well, when you’re forced to think through or express why you like something, you’re immediately biased toward opinions that you can actually explain or verbalize. In other words, you may taste five jams and decide that No. 4 just tasted better, because in that moment your senses were taking in a thousand different factors you weren’t consciously thinking about. But when pressured to actually explain in detail which one you liked best, you’re looking for easily quantifiable things — suddenly you’re talking about how No. 2 had more berries, or how No. 1 had better color. In reality, neither of those things actually affected your enjoyment. You’re just trying to make it sound like you made your decision based on an easily explainable chain of logic when in reality your tongue had it right all along.
It’s kind of like the example with the movie (if you hated The Dark Knight Rises, feel free to substitute any movie you changed your opinion on months later). While you were watching it, the sum of all of its parts may have swept you away, but if somebody made you create a list of pros and cons, you’d realize that you can’t logically defend your choice. Or maybe you had a relationship with someone who you thought you were madly in love with, but a hundred conversations with friends changed your mind (“Yeah, I guess he did wear a lot of holiday-themed sweaters …”).
When forced to stick with qualities that are simpler and easier to discuss, suddenly the spell is broken. Congratulations, you have successfully used logic to kill your own enjoyment of something. Thanks a lot, brain.
[x]
Man, is it just me, or does that explain so much about Tumblr and the negative attitude in fandoms on here?
