Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Charlie Munger and the Disliking/Hating Tendency

A short excerpt from Charlie's Munger's speech "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment" in Poor Charlie's Almanack that seems relevant given what's going on with Israel and Palestine today:
Disliking/Hating Tendency also acts as a conditioning device that makes the disliker/hater tend to: (1) ignore virtues in the object of dislike, (2) dislike people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his dislike, and (3) distort other facts to facilitate hatred. 
Distortion of that kind is often so extreme that miscognition is shockingly large. When the World Trade Center was destroyed, many Pakistanis immediately concluded that the Hindus did it, while many Muslims concluded that the Jews did it. Such factual distortions often make mediation between opponents locked in hatred either difficult or impossible. Mediations between Israelis and Palestinians are difficult because facts in one side's history overlap very little with facts from the other side's.