What is cognitive dissonance?
In: 37
abstract:
Finding it difficult to reconcile a fact contrary to long held beliefs.
Cognition:
Cognition is your way of processing and thinking about information. The way you think comes with inherent biases they have been trained into you through various socio-politico-cultural media.
A simple example is your culture training you into believing Santa Claus.
Bias:
Over time, with enough information training, peer-review and reaffirmation, your biases get entrenched into you. Understand that the word bias here is being used technically, not negatively. It’s a bias, for example, to want to know more about a story you read somewhere because you’ve trained yourself to not accept a story for it’s headline. Or it’s a bias for you to start indicating a turn when driving way earlier than most people because you once witnessed an accident that *you thought* could’ve been avoided with a timely turn signal.
Mental model:
The important point here is that the mental map of the world you’re forming is not based on what you see but how you’ve come to interpret it. The same news story can be interpreted differently across the political spectrum, despite all having lived the same experience. This mental model is fairly robust and can interpret or rationalize most information thrown at it.
Dissonance:
Just because you have a mental model of how *you think* the world works doesn’t mean the world works that way. Every once in a while, an event, a discovery or a new learning is irreconcilable with your long held beliefs. This is extremely inconvenient for you because this new information is not resonant with your mental model; it is dissonant.
“Santa isn’t real. Dad takes the gifts out at night from the car trunk and puts it under the tree”
A fact is irrefutable. Therefore your entire mental model must be retrained to now fit this new data.
This is called cognitive dissonance.
Long held beliefs in religion, politics, personal romance and alliances, society, and causality in general all popularly get challenged. A cheap shot is providi g irrefutable evidence to a flatearther that the planet is an oblong spheroid.
Side story:
In statistics, when designing stochastic or bayesian models that are sensitive to disruptive data, we often try to filter “noise” away. But if the signal is prominent a d recurrent enough, you’re going to have to recalibrate your model to incorporate this new signal/observation as well.
Latest Answers