Is it possible that rather than your mind is actually taking both as true but struggling with how to actually compare the two? Without that internal scale on which you can put to the two alternatives and see which has more weight you are stuck jumping back and forth between the two looking for something that allows that comparison.
I wonder if, in the specific case of the job, the test would not be: were the two part of your decision to apply and then think you would accept if offered the position. If not, then are these more like second order aspects for the decisions you made (apply, will accept). Once you know you didn’t get the job you’re looking for things the resolve how you should feel about it—be happy, be sad; anything other than ambiguous.
In other words, why weren’t these two relatively significant attributes of a job you were interested in not part of your initial decision. Were they resolved/reconciled with one another before and then when not getting the job something changed?
Perhaps the another test would be to look at other situations where clearly good and bad coexist: driving you car, breathing, pretty much anything else we might do on a daily basis. Is it the case that for the situations we don’t find ourselves in some internal conflict that we really have assuming one side just doesn’t exist/is not true or have we accepts that both good and bad are coexisting?
If most of the time we are accepting the good and the bad together, why is it that in some cases we cannot?
Is it possible that rather than your mind is actually taking both as true but struggling with how to actually compare the two? Without that internal scale on which you can put to the two alternatives and see which has more weight you are stuck jumping back and forth between the two looking for something that allows that comparison.
That would make sense as an alternative hypothesis, but I’m not sure how I’d test it.
I wonder if, in the specific case of the job, the test would not be: were the two part of your decision to apply and then think you would accept if offered the position. If not, then are these more like second order aspects for the decisions you made (apply, will accept). Once you know you didn’t get the job you’re looking for things the resolve how you should feel about it—be happy, be sad; anything other than ambiguous.
In other words, why weren’t these two relatively significant attributes of a job you were interested in not part of your initial decision. Were they resolved/reconciled with one another before and then when not getting the job something changed?
Perhaps the another test would be to look at other situations where clearly good and bad coexist: driving you car, breathing, pretty much anything else we might do on a daily basis. Is it the case that for the situations we don’t find ourselves in some internal conflict that we really have assuming one side just doesn’t exist/is not true or have we accepts that both good and bad are coexisting?
If most of the time we are accepting the good and the bad together, why is it that in some cases we cannot?