Have you ever had someone who seems to believe lies over the truth? You can tell them the truth; you can have facts and proof to back it up, but they believe another over you. Common sense could say to them that the other person is lying, but they continue to believe them.
It’s genuinely annoying. However, research shows that most of us harbor beliefs that aren’t true.
Recently, I asked my entire family a series of four true or false questions. The experiment was to see how we believe things that aren’t true. Out of the eight of us, six thought the fifty percent of the questions were false. My sister in law, and I both believed that seventy-five percent of the questions were wrong. Scientifically speaking, all were false.
The reason that people believe lies over the truth is simple. Many of us tend to use our emotions to make decisions for us. This phenomenon is called “emotional reasoning.” When we use our emotions to draw untrue conditions about ourselves and others, we are practicing emotional reasoning.
For instance, let’s say you have someone in your life who has always been honest with you. You’ve never questioned their honesty before. Then there is another person in your life, someone you love and want them to love you. This person has lied to you many times. You’ve always been suspicious of this person, but each time, they convince you that to forgive them.
Now let’s say both of those people tell you something that contradicts the other. Who do you believe?
A significant number of people will tell themselves that the person they want the love from is the one telling them the truth.
When we use our emotional reasoning, we will always pick the person we want to believe in the most.
To further understand this, let’s use our mothers. When you were little, did your mother ever tell you not to swallow your gum? Did she explain that if you did, your gum would stay in your stomach for seven years before it would digest? Did you believe her? She is your mom, so everything she says must be true. Right?
Then one day, you go to school. Your science teacher tells you it’s a proven fact that if you swallow your gum, it does not take seven years to digest.
How many of us continue to believe our mothers and even teach our children this?
The answer is most of us. Even if presented with facts, we chose to believe, based on our emotions. We cling to this belief.
To further support our belief, we will even look for things out in the world that confirm that our mothers were right, and our science teacher was wrong.
In the case of the two people who tell us different stories, we will believe the lie. Perhaps we will even look for ways to discredit the honest person that was telling us the truth. We may change their words around to our benefit and look for others who will validate our beliefs about them. Whatever means necessary to make us feel that the person we love is being honest.
The number of people that use emotional reasoning seems to grow more each day. Our society has become something that we don’t even want to know the truth anymore because opinions and falsities are much more enjoyable. Manipulators everywhere are rejoicing in the fact that people no longer use common sense or even seek the truth.
The place we should all aspire to be is using both our rational and emotional minds together. When we do this, we become wise.
In my next article: Are you Emotional, Reasonable or Wise? We will discuss what fact is, what is an opinion, and cover the three processes we use to determine our decision making.
Peace & Love, Ela
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