What is cognitive dissonance?
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Cognitive dissonance is a scenario where you have some sort of conflict in your views and beliefs. This is usually (a) a disconnect between your supposed beliefs and your actual actions, or (b) two or more conflicting beliefs.
These days it seems to be commonly used in political type debates and arguments: e.g. you passionately support party/candidate X, but then they say or do something you strongly disagree with. You are a strong believer in some sort of policy or idea, but it will disadvantage many people or cause some negative side effect. You condemn ‘The Other Side’ for doing something but then dismiss/downplay/whitewash ‘Your Side’ for doing the same thing.
The dissonance occurs because deep down, you know all this is ‘wrong’ on some level, which may cause you great distress, confusion, disappointment or anger.
In some cases, this may cause you to temper your beliefs and ideals “OK so this isn’t as clear cut and perfect as I thought, there’s all these conflicting things in there, maybe I need to think about this more”. This is mostly a normal healthy response.
But it can sometimes lead people into denialism and extremism. “I believe passionately in something, this challenges my belief in this something, therefore it must all be a lie!”. This is often how conspiracies and similar crazy theories can develop; people don’t know or don’t want to deal with their cognitive dissonance, so dive down increasingly narrow and extreme rabbit holes to keep from having their views challenged.
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