Moreover, this doesn’t just happen in social science departments, like the one

that once thought Freud should serve as the only choice as a psychology teacher

for Caltech. Holding to old errors even happens, although with less frequency

and severity, in hard science departments. We have no less an authority for this

than Max Planck, Nobel laureate, finder of “Planck’s constant.” Planck is famous

not only for his science but also for saying that even in physics the radically

new ideas are seldom really accepted by the old guard. Instead, said Planck, the

progress is made by a new generation that comes along, less brain-blocked by its

previous conclusions. Indeed, precisely this sort of brain-blocking happened to

a degree in Einstein. At his peak, Einstein was a great destroyer of his own

ideas, but an older Einstein never accepted the full implications of quantum

mechanics.

 

One of the most successful users of an antidote to first conclusion bias was

Charles Darwin. He trained himself, early, to intensively consider any evidence

tending to disconfirm any hypothesis of his, more so if he thought his

hypothesis was a particularly good one. The opposite of what Darwin did is now

called confirmation bias, a term of opprobrium. Darwin’s practice came from his

acute recognition of man’s natural cognitive faults arising from

Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. He provides a great example of psychological

insight correctly used to advance some of the finest mental work ever done.

 

Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency has many good effects in civilization. For

instance, rather than act inconsistently with public commitments, new or old

public identities, etc., most people are more loyal in their roles in life as