Pronunciations (2)
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/θɒb/
Pronunciation notes
- UK
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/θɑb/
Pronunciation notes
- Canada
- US
Verb
To engage in wishful thinking; to believe something regardless of evidence because it aligns with one's opinion; to rationalize.
Usage- Intransitive
- Rare
- Synonyms
- Examples
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More examples (4)
Oh, there's no possible way of distinguishing the ideas. Everything depends on how you regard them. If you dearly love a theory, you are thobbing. If you are curious about it, you are not thobbing.
It is by no means merely the uneducated who thob. Men of science have always thobbed, helping out fact with notions that appealed to them or were already well settled in their minds.
In the United States, and in what Kipling called the Five Free Nations, all men are granted the right to hold what opinions and beliefs they choose; and so thobbing is free, even as all emotional thinking is free—at least in some regions. And the sad thing is that thobbing is easy and required thinking is hard.
Your best protection against thobbing is to develop the habit of thinking about your thinking. (The technical name for this activity is metacognition.) More specifically, be aware of your initial feelings about problems and issues, particularly those that prompt you to take a stand immediately, without examining the evidence or weighing competing views.