Cognitive dissonance

or just nuanced?

This term has fascinated me for a long time, since the very first time it was slapped in my face years ago in what I now recognize as a spectacular attempt at manipulation. This lead me to want to explore the idea - whether the way it is commonly used by angry, manipulative people has any bearing on its origins, whether it’s just a tool of manipulation and coercion, or if there’s some validity to it as a concept.

In order to be fair and thorough, I’ve gone to Google Scholar for my definitions of the word and its context - Google Scholar being the biggest repository of research articles in the world. There’s a part of me that definitely hesitates to consider that psychoanalysis, being most accurately described as a pseudoscience, should be on Google Scholar at all. For those who think I’m being inflammatory, pseudoscience is not actually an insult or a pejorative term, it simply means a topic that is being approached as a science, but which fails to meet all 3 criterea of the scientific method - observable, repeatable and measurable. And oddly enough since at least 50% of questions worth answering cannot be answered using the scientific method (how would the meaning of life be observable, repeatable and testable? I should jolly well hope that it isn’t) that doesn’t make it necessarily less worthy of pursing.

So: the actual definition of this term that is frequently thrown around, is “persons are uncomfortable maintaining two seemingly contradictory ideas”. Cognitive dissonance theory was first invented by Leon Festinger in the mid 1950s, and Festinger described it thus: when an individual holds two or more elements of knowledge that are relevant to each other but inconsistent with one another, a state of discomfort is created: “dissonance”. Festinger theorized that persons are motivated by the unpleasant state of dissonance and that they may engage in “psychological work” to reduce the inconsistency, for example a change in attitudes “in the direction of the cognition that is most resistant to change”. He hypothesized that dissonance is mainly aroused when a person acts in a way that is contrary to his or her attitudes and tested his theory by means of an experiment:

Participants were asked to perform a boring task. Then, participants were paid either $1 or $20 to tell “another participant” that the task was interesting. According to dissonance theory, lying for a payment of $20 should not arouse much dissonance, because $20 provides sufficient justification for the counterattitudinal behavior (i.e., it adds 20 cognitions consonant with the behavior). However, being paid $1 for performing the same behavior should arouse much dissonance, because $1 was just enough justification for the behavior (i.e., it adds only one consonant cognition). As expected, participants in the $1 (low-justification) condition changed their attitudes to be more positive toward the task, whereas participants in the $20 (high-justification) condition did not change their attitudes.

OK, for one thing I really appreciate the experimentative approach, but I’m not quite sure how you knew for sure that a task was “boring”. I, for example, actually love copy-pasting vast tracts of information into Excel sheets, I once did it for a translation database for a code project 8000 times and apparently I don’t even hold the record for copy-pasting. I can’t be the only one who actually finds repetitive tasks where you have to stay sufficiently awake to not make a mistake but are also sufficiently hypnotic that your mind is in a delightful state of calm awareness, anything except boring. So there’s a bit of a flaw in the level of the subjectivity of the initial assumption. I’d just have been delighted to be being paid 1$ or 20$ for telling the truth.

Setting aside for a moment the potential vaguries of my insanity, I think my more alert readers will already have noticed a difference between the way cognitive dissonance was actually defined, and the way it’s generally thrown around as an insult or a manipulation tactic by people with less positive intentions. For one thing, the word dissonance here means discomfort. In other words, if I was experiencing cognitive dissonance, I (and not them) would be the first person to be aware of it, since it directly means that I personally am experiencing discomfort. That’s not implied, it is literally the definition. So, by extention, they cannot be the ones to accuse me of it, because they have no idea at all about what I am feeling or not feeling. They could try to present evidence of the fact that I was feeling discomfort, but they’d never actually know, because only I can know that. As I think we’re all aware, the people who jump out of the woodwork and accuse you of being cognitively dissonant do not generally approach the topic as “you seem very angry or uncomfortable because you told me to shove my opinion up my nether regions, to me this implies that my statement made you feel that your attitude or actions are in contrast to your opinion”. That would be an accurate use of the word, but I think we know people in the real world aren’t using it like that. Sadly enough, people in the real world don’t talk with clarity and responsibility for their own assumptions and projections at all - especially not bad actors - but that is another story. After all, taking responsibility for your own projections or version of events implies self-reflection, and if they had that they probably wouldn’t be arguing agressively with you about your right to an opinion in the first place.

No, I think we’re aware that most people use cognitive dissonance in the same sense that this delightful beaut of a person used it towards me the other day:

I think your perspective is heavily cognitively dissonant…Cognitive dissonance is not “an invention”, it is an easily provable reality, like people saying “I care about labours rights” but then going to a discount store and saying “man this Chinese crap is of such poor quality”. A lie of omission is still a lie.

Now. I think we can all understand that (besides the wonderful point of defining a subjective feeling - cognitive dissonance - as “an easily provable reality”, but we’ll set the more obvious mania aside for a moment) for one thing, a perspective cannot be cognitively dissonant (unless we accept that a perspective can feel discomfort), and that the definition does not mean “a person who expresses an opinion and contradicts it with their actions”. The real word to descrube that circumstance is hypocrisy, and that word already exists in the English language. Cognitive dissonance is not scientific language for hypocrisy. I’m completely and utterly baffled as to what “a lie of omission” is being stated in that paragraph for: (what lie? what omission?) but I suspect we’re not dealing with a master of rhetorical logic here. My point is, this is the way that cognitive dissonance has entered into the rhetoric of manipulative people. I once had an extremely manipulative atheist tell me that my conviction of God’s existence was evidence of cognitive dissonance, as if a deep spiritual experience and religious faith can be reduced to a psychological condition. Unfortunately, that’s a favourite game of atheists and manipulative people in general - to try to convince you that your deep conviction is simply your own mind playing tricks on you. Since there’s nothing you can prove there, and the argument does its work through your own lack of self-esteem and willingness to go along with another’s suggestion - often backed up with a large amount of concern-trolling - it’s a particularly nasty but fortunately fairly transparent attempt to mess with your head.

In fact, if I think about it, concern-trolling just about sums up the use of cognitive dissoance in the popular discource. If I truly was feeling discomfort, I don’t think you’re actually pointing it out from geniune care as much as cloaking spite with fake concern and worry. Besides which, most people don’t seem to realize that discomfort is the bedrock of the definition, and simply apply it - as did my wonderful example, the jokes just write themselves in the comments section - as “holding two contradictory beliefs” or “opinions contradicted by behaviour”; in other words, as a dressed-up accusation of hypocrisy.

So. Let’s go into an analysis of two contradictory beliefs. Two contradicory facts cannot be true at the same time: for example, a yellow piece of paper with no writing on it cannot be pink. However - and given how long I actually had to think to find a convincing example - very little in our lives actually bases itself on what could be defined as facts. Even less if we’re talking about comments sections, which necessarily base themselves on opinion, and as I’ve pointed out, as long as I state clearly “in my opinion”, I can follow it up inarguably with “that piece of paper is pink”. I cannot be contradicted, because I’ve been clear that I’m not talking about a fact, but an opinion. And since an opinion is subjective, it is, by definition, inarguable. I can hold whatever opinion I wish to, there is no requirement of factuality in an opinion. However, what would it mean to hold two contradictory beliefs: and are accusations of holding beliefs that are “contradictory” actually valid in any way, or are they, as I propose, simply an example of a world that is increasinly incapable of understanding nuance?

For example: people who were not raised on farms, are often appauled that farmers and smallholders can give their animals - pigs, chickens, even cows - names, treat them like members of the family, and then at the end of the season, kill and eat them. This is often thrown about has “hypocrisy” or even occasionally “cognitive dissonance” (although I think we’ve agreed why the second cannot be accurate, because in this example no discomfort is being experienced; that’s the point of the example). But are these really two contradictory opinions? The two things - that an animal is alive, sentient and very lovable, and that a farmer raises animals to eat - have no trouble being true at the same time. I think a farmer who recognises the sentience and full aliveness of their animals is simply aligned with reality, and refusing to participate in a self-imposed fiction simply to ease their conscience when it comes to killing the animal later. Animals are fully alive, wonderful and loveable creatures, and we also live in a world where certain groups of animals can be eaten. Since when did eating something mean you have to hate it or negate its aliveness? I don’t go around eating people I hate, after all; I don’t think eating something is necessarily an expression of negative emotion, and killing something doesn’t have to be either. I think it’s a childish view to assume that soldiers hate their enemies: the reality of soldiering is much more complex and I suspect the whole point of real courage is to know what you’re doing and do it anyway. There are presumably some soldiers who take taking lives lightly, but I think they’re in a vanishingly small minority.

Let’s go back to my wonderful troll’s analogy. Is there anything contradicory about these two things: cheap Chinese crap is exactly what it says it is, but workers’ rights are also relevant. How in the world of mental gynmastics are those two facts contradictory? In fact, I can very well recognize that products produced in a sweatshop are inferior, and actually use that as the basis for my arguments that workers are more productive if they sleep for more than 4 hours and have basic human rights. I can also be against slave labour but in the economic position that many of us find ourselves in, where buying anything that involved workers being paid as part of the overhead is not economically viable for me. How on earth does my economic position exclude me from also having ethics? Does this person think that ethics are a luxury of the rich? We can very easily be opposed to something yet pushed very strongly by our circumstances to participate in it. That doesn’t mean that we “can’t afford” the luxury of moral standards within our own beings. This kind of argument leads very conveniently to other delightful arguments I’ve heard, based on Maslow’s hierarchy, that “people in third world countries can’t possibly care about the environment because they can’t meet their basic needs”. I can be starving and not entirely amoral at the same time, thank you very much. And just because someone who is starving will do practically anything for bread, doesn’t mean that they think the actions they are being forced to perform for survival are morally right. You’re not amoral just because you’re vulnerable enough to be in a position where you have to consider your survival, although I’d argue that the person putting them in that position is amoral for exploiting a vulnerable person. And while I do hold that in all circumstances of life we have an element of choice, I’d personally consider someone who would rather that they and their family starved to death than work in a polluting petrol refinery to be the ultimate in selfishness. There is the potential that they could put another choice on the table - find another job, for example - but depending on their circumstances that particular option might have a really high degree of unfeasiblity and to quote from Blackadder, “needs must when the devil vomits into your kettle”. At the very least, I think anyone is free to choose to perform a polluting job because feeding their family seems more important than killing whales at some undefined point in the future. It doesn’t mean they hate whales and they’re lying if they say they care about them.

Religious people in particular will not be at all unfamiliar with accusations of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. The world is full of people who seem to expect that Christians are required to behave like saints, without understanding that Christianity is not a works-based religion: no Christian is trying to buy their way into heaven with their actions, and there’s a great understanding that we all need grace. But the world will inevitably insist that Christians need to be morally flawless in order to hold any position at all, and any tiny slip should condemn them to eternal silence. The more I think about this idea of cognitive dissonance, the more I see that it is a result of individuals who are incapable of grasping nuance, and have a black-and-white simplistic thinking that would make a two-year-old blush. I also think that this idea that any choice which is not in the strictest possible alignment with your opinion is not a result of the fact that we all reserve the right to perform our own individual risk assessments and cost-benefit analyses as best suits us in our own life, but evidence of hypocrisy, is the bedrock of cancel culture. No, I do not have to perform my ideas or opinions in a way which aligns with what you think those should look like. I’m allowed to make whatever choices and hold whatever opinions I wish to in my own life. I don’t even need to justify them at all: after all, in the boring-task experiment, I could very well accept that I was both lying and greedy and be perfectly fine with my choices to be both - tell a lie and accept money for doing so - simultaneously. I for one wouldn’t have to convince myself the task was entertaining in order to be comfortable accepting the payout. If I want my money, I want my money. I’m comfortable with and take responsibility for my choices without thinking they have to be aligned with anyone else’s ideas of goodness, and if they are morally wrong and I know them to be so I’ll repent for them on my own time without a busybody either internally or externally required. No policing and no self-suggestion needed.

Cancel culture insists that any tiny flaw or seeming inconsistency ought to be punished with social ostricisation and silencing across the board. It is directly aligned with this idea of “cognitive dissonance” as popularized in the culture - a dressed-up term for hypocrisy. If you’re a Christian and have a weakness for watching p*rn, provided you’re doing something to assist with that weakness and you know that it’s wrong, that doesn’t make you less of a Christian, it just makes you human. We all, oddly enough, have weaknesses and struggles. If you’re a solider and killed someone in battle, it doesn’t mean you’re not a good person or that you can’t oppose the death penalty if that’s what your moral compass requires. If you’re a farmer, it doesn’t mean you can’t love your animals. We’re allowed to be complex, and nuanced, and still have opinions, and we’re allowed to make choices based off our own inner calculus without needing an outside authority to decide if they’re aligned with our morals or not. King Charles II, when challenged by Rochester with the following verse:

We have a pretty witty king,
Whose word no man relies on.
He never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.

responded with "That's true, for my words are my own, but my actions are those of my ministers". Our words and morals are our own, but our actions are frequently determined by our calculus of what would be more feasible for us in any situation. Both of these things can be true at the same time.

Everybody gets to make their own choices. It doesn’t mean they have to perform what you think those beliefs require, or shut up.