And before you say it- concrete thinking can be useful… etc. Just depends on how and when used, and how frequently. But in my humble opinion, concrete thinking is mostly a problem and not a good habit to get into.

Oh, I get it, you’re not dense, you just choose not to believe me. Either way, quite convenient for you.

My common sense is just as valid as yours. And we all agree that something is very wrong with our country. Problem is you only blame Liberals, which I believe is irrational and illogical. I beleive it is the system, and both political parties are to blame.

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Cognative+dissonance
“Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term describing the uncomfortable tension that may result from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one’s beliefs, or from experiencing apparently conflicting phenomena.”

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Cognitive+bias
“Bias arises from various life, loyalty and local risk and attention concerns that are difficult to separate or codify. Much of the present scientific understanding of biases stems from the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman and their colleagues, whose experiments demonstrated distinct and replicable ways in which human judgment and decision-making differ from rational choice theory. This led to Tversky and Kahneman developing prospect theory as an alternative. Tversky and Kahneman claim that the biases they identified are at least partially the result of problem-solving using mental short-cuts or “heuristics”, for instance using how readily or vividly something comes to mind as an indication of how often or how recently it was encountered (the availability heuristic). Other biases have been demonstrated in separate experiments, such as the Confirmation bias demonstrated by Peter C. Wason.

Some scientists have questioned whether all of the ‘biases’ are in fact errors. David Funder and Joachim Krueger have argued that some so called ‘biases’ may in fact be ‘approximation shortcuts’, which aid humans in making predictions when information is in short supply. For example, the false consensus effect may be viewed as a reasonable estimation based on a single known data point, your own opinion, instead of a false belief that other people agree with you.”

Two different things entirely.

You are right though that I do benefit from arguing with you, and I can say the same, as you said, it has made me think about certain things more than I probably would otherwise. Which really is a good thing. So I guess it’s not been an overall negative experience.