It could, but I bet for all historically significant flinching away examples you could find someone who thought they could benefit from the flinching.
Also the purpose is basically "if we pretend it can't happen it's less likely to happen." But surely this is the motivation behind most flinching examples.
Also the purpose is basically "if we pretend it can't happen it's less likely to happen." But surely this is the motivation behind most flinching examples.
I disagree. The unusual nature of banking and finance is explicitly recognized and dealt with: you can't throw a rock in the fractional-reserve banking literature without hitting someone talking about self-fulfilling prophecies and the usefulness of central banks having printing presses enabling them to make credible commitments and so on and so forth. This is not the case in most fields and...
I'm looking for historical examples of "flinching away," so I can illustrate the concept to others and talk about motivated cognition and leaving a line of retreat and so on.
The ideal example would be one of motivated skepticism with grave consequences. Like, a military commander who shied away from believing certain reports because they implied something huge and scary was about to happen, and then the huge and scary thing happened and caused great damage. Something like that.
What examples can you think of?