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Showing posts from March, 2006

Sincerity and openness

I admire sincerity. I am drawn to people who are earnest. My wife has told me that one of my traits that attracted her to me was my sincerity. I am not exactly sure why I find honesty and openness so engaging, and really...intriguing. I could speculate on why I have a preference for this, but I know enough about psychology to know that I can't really know why I like what I like. I don't have access to the part of my brain that determines things like that. The best we can do is create a model as to why we and others might have the preferences we do. Our common error is to think we actually discovered why when we have only come up with a reasonable speculation. An excellent article on how we don't have access to what motivates most of our behaviors is "Telling more than we know: Verbal reports on mental processes" by Nisbett, R. E. & Wilson, T. D. (1977) in the Psychological Review, Vol 84-3, pages 231-244. Back to the topic of sincerity. I have found many peopl