Ruby said- adamah, I don't agree that dogmatism and resistance to change stem from emotional factors although I agree that they may play a small part.
No? Then what do you think plays a role?
Ruby said- Are you familiar with the fascinating term availability heuristic?
Sure. Any particular reason for asking, or is that what you're suggesting plays more of a role in dogmatism?
Are you familiar with the 'affect heuristic', which is associated with making subconscious emotional 'snap-decisions' (colloquially-referred to as "trusting one's gut")? Of course, the need to protect one's faith as a Xian means adopting an appropriate faith-based affect heuristic, such the defenses trigger at the perception of a threat in order to shut down the cognitive processes: that's hardly anything BUT an emotional reaction.
That stated, ALL such heuristic models of decision-making suffer from the same limitation of being only models of what they attempt to explain, where the actual-decision-making processes are not as cut-and-dry as falling into only one category or the other, but result from a lifetime of influences, physiologically arising primarily from the interactions of many different neurons in the brain.
Even examining the process by which certain heuristic processes are adopted often involves their fulfilling certain emotional needs (heuristics DO have an adaptive value, and hence survival benefit), but it's unreasonable to think we'll ever be able to 'tease out' which decisions are made for what reason, and how much each factor played an influence (at least, anytime in the near future). Heck, JWs intentionally inculcate the adoption of certain decision-making processes, driven by a theocratically-driven heuristic.
That stated, this IS an ex-JW board and thus is a sub-population of JWs, who are known to recruit and sell a message to those possessing certain pre-existing biases, attracted by the use of certain emotional lures, such that potential recruits are more swayed than the general population by eg emotional appeals (eg love bombing, a desire to live forever, and to see their resurrected loved ones again, etc).
The JW message is not necessarily one that would appeal to say, a trained palentologist, esp once they realized that JW's were YEC, a belief which flys in the face of the evidence which they've been exposed to in their profession.
Adam