I’ve looked it up, but still feel a little confused
In: 49
Have you ever been told something that had tension with something else you thought you knew or felt?
You might have had to consider both ideas and decide which one to trust and which one to discard, or if there was some way to make the beliefs fit together.
For the brief moment where you are holding two ideas that don’t fit, that is Cognitive Dissoannce.
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Here are a couple hyptohetical examples:
**Is it raining?**
* Alice walks into your home and says “Dang, it was raining so I’m all damp.”
* A minute later, Bob walks into your home and says “What a nice day today! You should go for a walk.”
* You might go “Huh??” You feel uncomfortable at the contradiction. and that discomfort could drive you to wonder what the truth is: Is one of them lying to you? Did the weather change in just 1 minute? Is one of them just joking? Does Bob think being rained on is nice?
**Is there such a thing as negative numbers?**
* As a small child, you were probably told that you can’t subtract a larger number from a smaller one. e.g. “3-7 is impossible”.
* As an older child, you would have learnted about negative numbers. e.g. “3-7=4”.
* You probably felt a bit annoyed at this updated information, and then had to decide whether to believe the previous teacher, or the new teacher.
* [If this is a bit too basic, consider instead “You can’t take the square root of a negative number.” Mathematicians do this routinely.]
**Can I call people gay**
* You call people ‘gay’ as an insult.
* You think that you are a reliably nice person.
* An actual gay person tells you that it isn’t nice to use ‘gay’ as an insult.
* You might start to wonder: is that gay guy just being too sensitive? Am I actually not that nice? Should I stop using ‘gay’ as an insult (because I’m trying to be nice)?
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Now, people might not act on these feelings of Cognitive Dissonance. If Alice & Bob contradict each other just once, you *might* obsess over it, but you might not bother interrogating them and just let it slide for now. A student might ignore their teacher in maths class. You might not bothing changing how you insult people after just one person calling you out on it.
But these contradictions do give some feeling that pushes people towards a change. Whether they act on that feeling, and which way they go if they change their mind, can all be different. Cognitive Dissonance is the name for that feeling you get when ideas don’t fit together well.
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