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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Thanks to Merrimac for bringing this to my attention. It seems some people have misheard ‘cognitive dissonance’ as ‘cognitive diffidence’ and proceeded to use it in its new guise. ‘Diffidence’ sounds a lot more impressive when accompanied by a ‘cognitive’, but it’s difficult to imagine a non-cognitive form of diffidence. Only 15 googlehits and here are a few of them…
Ever hear of cognitive diffidence? People have to justify bad decisions with delusion, otherwise we’d go mad trying to deal with regret. Do or die? ...
www.frostcloud.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4808&page=2 – 88k – Supplemental Result – Cached
Also, keep cognitive diffidence in mind. Few people admit their mistake and say, “my, I made a poor decision! I sure wasted a lot of the firm’s money. ...
www.law-soft.com/ – 111k – Cached
it is a total cognitive diffidence, it is a total lack of rational thought, to see who said what, to know that it can easily be proved that something was …
www.discussanything.com/forums/showthre … 645&page=3 – 250k – Supplemental Result – Cached
... curious how people “digest” information, how they reconcile cognitive diffidence, how they filter their thoughts and experiences to arrive at “meaning”. ...
www.iidb.org/vbb/archive/index.php/t-152627.html – 35k – Supplemental Result – Cached
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Curiouser and curiouser. I’m too pressed for time to go look at their contexts, but the last two do sound to me like they’re stand-ins for “cognitive dissonance.” But the first two are, well, weird. The most common meanings for “diffidence” are “timidity, shyness, lack of confidence.” None of those seem to work well in the case of the first two examples, though you can kind of shoehorn them in there. For the second person, the intended meaning seems to be something like “a lack of moral courage.” For the first person, I guess “self-delusion”—which they come close to using—is more or less the idea. Odd and interesting.
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This one made me smile!
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