Procrustean Thinking
In Greek mythology Procrustes (Προκρούστης) or "the stretcher [who hammers out the metal]", was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica. Procrustes was a son of Poseidon with a stronghold on Mount Korydallos, on the sacred way between Athens and Eleusis.
There, he had an iron bed in which he invited every passer-by to spend the night, and where he set to work on them with his smith's hammer,
to stretch them to fit.
In later tellings, if the guest proved too tall, Procrustes would amputate the excess length;
nobody ever fit the bed exactly because secretly Procrustes had two beds.[1]
Procrustes continued his reign of terror until he was captured by Theseus, travelling to Athens along the sacred way, who "fitted" Procrustes to his own bed:
A "Procrustean solution" is the undesirable practice of tailoring data to fit its container or some other preconceived stricture. A common example from the business world is embodied in the notion that no résumé should exceed one page in length.
Procrustean rhyme is a form of enjambment wherein words are split to create rhymes for ordinarily unrhymable words, as in "The four eng- / ineers / wore orange / brassieres.
In the 1959 science fiction novel Eden by Stanisław Lem, Procrustics is the name of a fictitious information-theory based social engineering discipline of molding groups within a society and ultimately a society as a whole to behave as designed by secretive hidden rulers, to create a hideous form of social control in which the very existence of the governing powers is denied and individuals appear to themselves to be free yet are being manipulated and controlled. One example described in the novel is "concentration camps" without any guards that are designed so that the prisoners stay inside apparently of their "free" will.
In the novel "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy, a ferry across the Colorado River where the fares were adjusted according to the passengers' ability to pay is referred to as a procrustean ferry.A Procrustean bed is an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced. Sometimes the term is applied to the pan and scan process of cropping motion pictures for television and home video.
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Procrustaen Thinking is a form of Cognitive Dissonance: a mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information.
He and later researchers showed that, when confronted with challenging new information,
most people seek to preserve their current understanding of the world by rejecting,
explaining away, or avoiding the new information or by convincing themselves that no conflict really exists.
Cognitive dissonance is nonetheless considered an explanation for attitude change.