Penny Tompkins and James Lawley
What is Cognitive Dissonance? Many books and psychological theories have used
cognitive dissonance
to explain a common aspect of human behaviour – the need to resolve
contradictory or conflicting beliefs, values, concepts, perceptions.
This dissonance only occurs when we are ‘attached’ to our attitudes or
beliefs, i.e. they have emotional significance or consequences for our
self-concept or sense of coherence about how the world works.
In 1956 Leon Festinger coined the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ in
When Prophecy Fails.
He used the idea to explain the apparently bizarre behaviour of members
of a UFO doomsday cult when the leader’s end-of-the-world prophesy
failed to occur and it became clear that the world was not going to end.
Festinger observed cult members enter a strange state of disturbance –
not knowing what to believe or do. Eventually, rather than accept that
they were misled or wrong, most cult members preferred to believe it was
the power of their faith that saved the world. Perversely this
motivated them to recruit new members thereby
increasing the membership of the cult!
By
observing the sequence of incompatible cognitions leading to strange
states requiring resolution – the notion of cognitive dissonance was
born. In
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957) Festinger defines it as:
The
psychological opposition of irreconcilable ideas (cognitions) held
simultaneously by one individual, created a motivated force that would
lead, under proper conditions, to the adjustment of one’s belief to fit
one’s behavior – instead of changing one’s behavior to fit one’s belief
(the sequence conventionally assumed).
Since then, the definition has widened somewhat. See
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance for a useful overview:
Cognitive
dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two
contradictory ideas simultaneously. The "ideas" or "cognitions" in
question may include attitudes and beliefs, the awareness of one's
behavior, and facts. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that
people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their
attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing
their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.
While lab
experiments have verified the presence of arousal in dissonance
situations, most studies have investigated how people resolve their
cognitive conflicts. A partial list of the mechanisms include:
- Excusing own faults and failures: “I was drunk, what do you expect?”
- Selectively editing and censoring evidence; in the extreme, we can completely delete counter-evidence and create false evidence.
- Interpreting ambiguity for self-serving ends.
- Giving explanations that cast us in a good light.
- Minimising: “It was just a fling, she meant nothing to me.”
- Considering weaknesses as so common that we aren’t responsible: “Everybody does it.”
- Arrogance: “The rules don’t apply to me.”
- Blaming: “They made me do it.”
- Illusion of control – not accepting when we are at the mercy of events.
- Citing mitigating circumstances: “I was so stressed I had to have a drink.”
- Not exposing ourself to counter-evidence, e.g. only read newspapers that support our views.
- Applying our critical judgement differently depending whether we support or oppose a view.
An excellent book on the subject is
Mistakes were made (but not by me): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions and hurtful acts,
by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (2008). This book like many others
is mostly about the effects of cognitive dissonance. Only a fraction is
devoted to how to overcome, combat or handle it. More strangely, very
little is said about the subjective experience of cognitive dissonance,
or how it works within a person. Tavris and Aronson provide a few hints:
The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the
need to justify our actions and decisions – especially the wrong ones –
is an unpleasant feeling that [Leon] Festinger called “cognitive
dissonance”. Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs
whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs,
opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as “Smoking is a
dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a
day.” Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to
deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce
it. (p. 13)
Dissonance is bothersome under any circumstance, but
it is most painful to people when an important element of their
self-concept is threatened – typically when they do something that is
inconsistent with their view of themselves. If you violate your own
values, you will feel much greater dissonance because, at the end of the
day, you have to go on living with yourself. Because most people have a
reasonably positive self-concept, believing themselves to be competent,
moral, and smart, their efforts at reducing dissonance will be designed
to preserve their positive self-images. (p. 29)
Dissonance
reduction operates like a thermostat, keeping our self-esteem bubbling
along on high. That is why we are usually oblivious to the
self-justifications, the little lies to ourselves that prevent us from
even acknowledging that we made mistakes or foolish decisions. (p. 31)
But dissonance theory applies to people with low self-esteem, too.
People who have low self-esteem, or who simply believe that they are
incompetent in some domain, are not totally overjoyed when they do
something well; why, on the contrary, they often feel like frauds.
Successes [are] dismissed as accidents or anomalies. (p. 31)
Self-justification, therefore, is not only about protecting high
self-esteem; it is also about protecting low self-esteem, if that is how
a person sees himself. (p. 32)
And that’s about it. The rest of the book is about fascinating experiments that explore how people attempt to
reduce cognitive dissonance – mostly by self-justifying.
But
what is cognitive dissonance? Is it the incompatible cognitions? The
unpleasant feelings? The need to reduce the feelings? The action to
resolve the conflict? Or all of that?
To answer these questions,
Part 1 of The Developing Group day was devoted to modelling our embodied sense of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive Dissonance and Self-DeceptionWe
are interested in cognitive dissonance because it appears to be a
near-universal human faculty, and also because it plays a major role in
self-delusion, self deception and self-denial.
Our modelling of self-DDD suggests there is always a conflict between
your ‘misleading representation’ and ‘what you know to be true’. This
invariably creates cognitive dissonance. And thank goodness it does
because otherwise we would have little motivation to do anything about
it.
Our research into how people migrate from self-deceiving to
acting from what they know to be true
shows that a desire to change is an essential element. This raises an
interesting conundrum. A desired outcome is by definition at variance
with “current reality” – we want something other than what we have.
Robert Fritz in
The Path of Least Resistance has described how the effect of maintaining a want before it is satisfied produces a “creative tension”:
In
the beginning of the creative process there will be a discrepancy
between what you want and what you have. This discrepancy forms a
tension. Tension seeks resolution. The tension is a wonderful force
because, as it moves toward resolution, it generates energy that is
useful in creating.
You can probably see the parallel between the processes of:
Cognitive Dissonance
– Experiencing incompatible cognitions, the dissonance which is
produced and the need to reduce the unpleasant feelings. Then acting to
resolve the conflict.
and
Creative Tension
– Experiencing the gap between a desired outcome and the current
situation, the resulting creative tension and the desire to reduce that
tension. Then acting to bring the creation into being.
In Part 2 of The Developing Group day explored the questions:
Are cognitive dissonance and creative tension the same or different?
Is one a sub-set of the other?
If they are different, how are they different?
Do they work in conjunction or against one another?
And what effect does that have?
To do this we self-modelled how we experienced three phenomena:
The incompatible/incongruent/conflicting cognitions.
The unpleasant/uncomfortable dissonance/tension.
The need/desire/motivation to do something to change the experience.
During the day we excluded
the subsequent action, be that a minor self-justification, a major
self-deception, acting from what you know to be true, or bringing a
creation into the world. We regards these as the effects
of cognitive dissonance and creative tension. The key question here is:
By what criteria do you evaluate the action taken to reduce the
dissonance/tension? Another
effect we put outside the frame was whether the drive to reduce
dissonance produces a change in attitude rather than a change in
behaviour, or both.Living with Cognitive DissonanceIn
Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (2005), Lauren Slater notes that:
Throughout
all of history there have been examples of people who, instead of
clapping their hands over their ears, pushed into dissonance, [were]
willing to hear what might emerge. Festiner, actually, is one of those
people. His ideas and experiments were highly dissonant with the
Skinnerian wisdom of his day. And he pursued it. (p. 123)
Slater goes on to ask Elliot Aranson:
Why
[do you] think some people rationalize, while others more deeply
revise? And more importantly, how do those people in the midst of a
major paradigm shift deal with the long days, weeks, months of grating,
and what can their ability to tolerate such sounds and sensations teach
us about how we might do the same, in search of a wider life? Has anyone
studied these types of people? “We don’t have any data,” Aranson says,
“because we don’t have people. People like you’re talking about are few
and far between.” (p.124)
We don’t accept Aranson’s belief. We believe most of us have the capacity and most of us have experiences of having taken
The Road Less Travelled
when it seemed easier to do otherwise. These times in our lives might
be few and far between, but, that they happen at all gives hope that
they can become the rule, rather than the exception.
V.S.
Ramachandran, one of the most well-known neurologists, is investigating
the neural substrates responsible for denial and revision. Matthew
Lieberman, assistant professor of psychology and social psychology at
the University of California, Los Angeles, comments on Ramachandran's
research:
Not all brains engage
in rationalizations, in such intense single-themed storytelling. East
Asians engage in far fewer rationalizations than Americans do. ... It’s
not that East Asian people don’t experience dissonance, but they have
less of a need to reduce it, probably because the structures that seek
linear thought patterns have been rewired through spiritual exercise.
(Quoted in Opening Skinner’s Box, p. 129.)
While
there may be something to Lieberman’s speculations we also suspect that
East Asians may use different ways to reduce cognitive dissonance.
The Recursive and Self-Amplifying Nature of Cognitive DissonanceThere follows a series of loosely connected thoughts on the systemics of cognitive dissonance and creative tension.
Preserving the status quoAnother
way to consider cognitive dissonance is to presume its function is to
preserve the status quo of the system within an acceptable level of
discomfort. Changing appears to require more risk or resources (time,
effort, emotional investment) in the short term at least. This is a more
systemic view since it is not reliant on ‘self image’. Rather it
involves the ‘economy’ of the whole system. In this view the effects of
cognitive dissonance are an emergent property of the response of the
whole system to two apparently incompatible cognitions.
Also
reducing discomfort in one part of the system can result in storing it
up for a worse discomfort later, or the discomfort will appear in some
other part of the system (like a balloon that’s squeezed in one place
that moves the excess pressure to another place). Eventually after many
attempts at reducing the discomfort the system recognises that staying
the same is not going to work long term and hence the desire to change
in a different way is born.
Milgram ‘authority’ experimentsOne
of the best known pieces of research that provoked cognitive dissonance
is the Milgram ‘authority’ experiments. It is commonly known that
two-thirds of participants continued giving the stooge learner ‘electric
shocks’ up to the maximum of 450 volts, and “almost 90% administered at
least one more shock after hearing the learner pound on the wall”
(Cordelia Fine,
A Mind of its Own: How your brain distorts and deceives, 2007, pp. 67-68).
It
is less commonly known that the participants had great difficulty in
‘following orders’. Many showed signs of extreme stress at choosing
between two cognitions: wanting to stop and being told to continue. They
experienced huge amounts of cognitive dissonance as they tried to
reconcile their conflicting values. Afterwards most participants
required lengthy debriefing to reduce their levels of discomfort. It is
also not well known that the few participants who refused to continue
with the experiment were the ones who resisted early in the study,
questioning the very validity of the procedure. In most cases, once
participants had given an electric shock after they thought it was
hurting the learner, they went all the way.
We think the
recursive nature of cognitive dissonance is at the root of both the
participants difficulty deciding and their decisions to continue long
beyond anything they would have predicted of themselves. (People asked
to forecast their response to the experiment almost never think they
would continue.) Our guess is it works like this:
I am now feeling uncomfortable having to choose between walking out on a
scientific experiment which I volunteered for, or violating my value of
not hurting another human being. I don’t know what to do but I have to
decide. At this moment, the most convenient straw to clutch at is the
consistent and insistent instruction of the man in the white lab coat.
So I will continue.
But, having increased the electric shock I’m
now in a worse position. I have the same decision to make, plus I have
to reconcile what I have just done with the kind of person I thought I
was. If I cannot rely on my own values who else can I turn to? ... The
man in the white lab coat.
Feedback loopsOur
new behaviour creates a feedback loop which influences us to change our
values, beliefs or self-concept. In this way cognitive dissonance
creates a viscous — or potentially, a virtuous — spiral. Eventually our
behaviour escalates to something we never thought we would be capable
of. And then we have to live with what we did; which in the case of a
vicious spiral creates more cognitive dissonance, and so on (see diagram
below). No wonder self-deception is so popular.
Short vs. Long termWe
reckon that the mother of all cognitive conflicts happens when we have
to choose between feeling good in the moment and feeling good in the
longer term. Cordelia Fine reveals what usually determines the outcome:
it is “more important to us to feel good than to be good” (p. 157). Pass
me that second piece of apple pie while I try to figure out how to
resolve my cognitive dissonance.
This suggests that we need to learn how to both:
Live with dissonance and tension so we can take a more considered, bigger picture, longer term perspectives.
and
Reduce
dissonance in a way that is not necessarily favorable to us, at least
not in the short term, e.g. to openly admit we made a mistake, or to
“delay gratification” (M. Scott Peck). In so doing, we can feel good
about our honesty and integrity in the longer term.
Either
way, we will need to create a meta-state (Michael Hall) e.g. – being
comfortable with being uncomfortable; or being trustworthy of our own
trust. And that changes our relationship with ourself.
Using Symbolic ModellingUsing
Symbolic Modelling we have seen value in encouraging the conditions for
people to experience their personal brand of cognitive dissonance — and
holding them there. This has a number of effects: it gets them used to
staying with the dissonance; it lets them find out what happens when
they do; and it reveals their natural methods for reducing or avoiding
dissonance.
We also realise that asking the question ‘
And what would you like to have happen?’ puts some people into a bind.
Having
an answer to this question (i.e. stating a desired outcome) will
produce a creative tension which many people are not adept at handling.
But also note,
not having an answer to this question will create cognitive dissonance if the client has a problem with not-knowing (especially
if their self-concept is tied up with knowing). No wonder these people can find the question a challenge.
BindsBy our definition,
a binding pattern is a special type of cognitive-dissonance generator. A bind is composed of at least two incompatible
intentions.
That incompatibility invariably produces cognitive dissonance. From
within the person’s current logic there is no solution. When they
realise this, their cognitive dissonance gets multiplied. Eventually
they realise they will need to change
their way of thinking.
But how do you do this when thinking the way you currently do is so
natural and compelling? Pump up the dissonnance. Not only do they have
conflicting intentions, there is the extra dissonance between their
desire to solve their problem and their inability to do so. Stir in the
ingredient that many people are uncomfortable with the thought of an
unresolvable problem and you have the recipe for an existential crisis.
Another
version of how attempting to reduce cognitive dissonance can produce an
escalating pattern of self-deception goes like this:
You start by doing something to reduce dissonance that is not aligned with your espoused values, beliefs or self-concept.
This requires you to self-justify your actions by creating a
‘misleading representation’ of your actions or yourself. You have
started to self-deceive.
This creates dissonance between the misleading representation and what you know to be true.
The natural option is to reduce this dissonance by further self-justification which reinforces the self-deception.
This spiral continues until eventually your self-deception becomes untenable.
But, by the time you want to come clean, not only do you have to face
the consequences of having deceived yourself and others for so long, you
also have to handle the dissonance created by the incompatibility
between the person you would like to have been and the person you have
become.
And let’s not forget that other form of dissonance, creative tension is inherently involved in the process of changing.
We can conclude that even
considering
jumping on a train going towards acting from what you know to be true
creates dissonance at the beginning, in the middle and throughout the
journey.
ALL ABOARD!
Penny and James have both been UKCP registered neurolinguistic
psychotherapists since 1993, supervisors, coaches in business, and
certified NLP trainers. They co-authored 
