I’ve looked it up, but still feel a little confused
In: 49
Irreconcilable conflict between two mutually-exclusive, opposing ideas. Dave Chapple’s [“the world’s only black white supremacist, Clayton Bigsby”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLNDqxrUUwQ) represents this quite comically.
The anxiety related to harboring beliefs incompatible with experience leads to thoughts like, “this isn’t me- i’m not like this,” but forces you to consider, “maybe I am this way.”
Ex: having ‘all the friends in the world’ but having no body come to your party.
Gender dysphoria is the term given to people born into a body they do not identify with. Being a man in a woman’s body, or vice-versa, means society continually reinforces concepts personal identity can not accept. This is why Trans-rights are Human rights.
The difference between what you think and what you do.
For example, You think/know smoking is bad for you, yet you still do it. Whys that? What needs to change ti get your thoughts and actions in line?
The most basic definition, used a lot with people new to addicition treatment and similar talking therapies.
It’s the feeling you encounter when you have a strong passionate set of beliefs, and then something happens to directly challenge them.
You’re a progressive feminist who adores this left-wing ‘male feminist’ politician….and then said politician is accused of raping women.
You’re a devout Christian…..and the most ‘holy’ devout man in your parish is proven to be a pedophile.
You strongly believe in some scientific theory….and research later proves it’s completely wrong.
You desperately want Country X to be a free and prosperous democracy…..and it turns into a despotic dictatorship.
All of these represent a ‘betrayal’ in some sense of your strongly-held views and opinions. It can be very hard for many people to truly accept that their beliefs were wrong and that their faith in a particular person or thing was unjustified.
Some people just cannot bring themselves do this, and may choose to double-down and start ignoring or dismissing any evidence to the contrary. This is a key factor in what leads people down the road of extremism and conspiracy-mongering.
This might be a good example. A vegan orders a sandwich at Subways, making the worker change gloves, loudly and proudly declaring that she is a vegan and that he must take extra care with her sandwich. She asks for mayo on her sandwich, to which the worker tells her mayo is made with eggs. The vegan is horrified. Worker asks vegan if she would still like the mayo. Vegan accepts the mayo.
Cognitive dissonance is the moment that the vegan is horrified, and the insists she can still take the mayo even though she is a vegan. Cognitive dissonance is the refusal to accept new facts.
https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/subway-reveals-mayo-not-vegan
“Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort a person feels when their behavior does not align with their values or beliefs.”
It’s that uncomfortable feeling you get when that comedian you hate makes a funny joke. You don’t want to find it funny because you hate them (and they’re just “not funny”), but you still laugh. when experiencing cognitive dissonance, some people have a tendency to try and rationalise the feeling to themself by saying “well, I bet he didn’t write that joke himself”
It’s a feeling you experience – not something you do. For some reason people often confuse it with “being a hypocrite” or a “refusal to accept”. But it’s more around the the “uncomfortable feeling”. Two people could do the exact same thing and one may experience cognitive dissonance and another may not.
Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling an individual experiences when something they believe to be true, is challenged and shown to be false.
A good example of how cognitive dissonance is experienced is the the old philosophy argument “the logic of evil” the argument works as below to prove that god being all knowing, all powerful, and all good, is not possible because evil still exists in the world.
If god is all good, and all powerful, and all knowing, and tragedies still occur which result in the death of children; then god can’t be all 3 of those things at once.
If he’s all knowing and all powerful, and allows the tragedy to occur, then he’s not all good.
If he’s all good and all knowing, but unable to prevent the tragedy, then he’s not all powerful.
If he’s all powerful and all good, and the tragedy still occurs, then he’s not all knowing. Because he would’ve prevented it.
When a deeply religious person is challenged with this thought experiment, some tend to experience cognitive dissonance as they can’t logically argue that their god is all knowing and all powerful and all good (even though their bible claims so) because evil exists all around us and tragedies occur everyday.
Now, will every monotheistic religious person whose presented with this argument abandon their deeply held religious beliefs and convert to atheism, or some different spirituality/religion? No, probably not. What happens is they usually ignore the information when they can’t refute it, because so much of their identity is tethered with the concept and belief of a perfectly good god.
Another less philosophical example of cognitive dissonance is how everyone wants to be healthy and look good, but nobody wants to go to the gym and eat healthy, or stop smoking/drinking.
people experiencing cognitive dissonance tend to rationalize away their beliefs/behaviors so that they don’t have to actually change anything. Common phrases are “that’s not what that means”, or “I don’t really believe that”, or “that’s not important”.
Generally speaking, the best case scenario for someone experiencing cognitive dissonance is to change their underlying belief/opinion to accurately reflect the new information. The issue with that, tends to be that it’s painful and embarrassing to have lived X years on earth only to realize that you’ve been probably wrong the entire time.
It’s embarrassing, anxiety inducing, and uncomfortable. Evolving/growing requires intentional effort, but remaining the same costs nothing, and all you have to do to defend your own ignorance is proclaim to yourself “that’s not right”, then continue on about your life.
In simple terms, the inability to accept the facts as they may disrupt some of your core conscious and unconscious beliefs. As a result, physically you feel anxious, confused, angry etc
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.
Using cognitive dissonance:
Voting for someone you believe is a winner.
That person loses the election. (He’s a loser)
The feeling of discomfort in your belief. (How can my winner actually be a loser?)
Solution: Destroy the system that proves he’s a loser.
I want to mention that having cognitive dissonance isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it can be a good thing! Dogmatic people, ones who never change their minds about ideas they strongly believe in, either don’t experience cognitive dissonance, or do everything within their power to quell it, like by confirming their biases or finding minor exploits without addressing the main points. Cognitive dissonance can be a helpful tool. For example, if scientists believe homeopathy is a bunch of nonsense, only for a study to show up saying it cures thyroid cancer, cognitive dissonance comes into play. Some scientists may question how all those earlier studies were wrong, and if homeopathy is true, then something is _really_ wrong in our understanding of biochemistry and physics. If a person is in good faith, they can use cognitive dissonance as a tool to reach better conclusions about the world around us as well as avoid believing in weakly sourced arguments.
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