cognitive dissonance

We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler  · 13 Apr 2026  · 225pp  · 76,418 words

, such as language, culture, or context, frames change how we respond to a situation. Seeing a challenge as an opportunity alters the brain. Uncertainty diminishes, cognitive dissonance is reduced, and survival responses become creative and exploratory. Is AI coming for your job? Framing this as an existential threat triggers terror. Reframing it

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson  · 6 May 2007  · 420pp  · 98,309 words

me): why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts/Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Cognitive dissonance. 2. Self-deception. I. Aronson, Elliot. II. Title. BF337.C63T38 2007 153—dc22 2006026953 ISBN 978-0-15-101098-1 Text set in Adobe Garamond

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his faults as his most benevolent teachers. —Lao Tzu * * * Contents INTRODUCTION Knaves, Fools, Villains, and Hypocrites: How Do They Live with Themselves? 1 CHAPTER 1 Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine of Self-justification 11 CHAPTER 2 Pride and Prejudice ... and Other Blind Spots 40 CHAPTER 3 Memory, the Self-justifying Historian 68 CHAPTER

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admit that we made any? To do that, we have to recognize the siren song of self-justification. In the next chapter, we will discuss cognitive dissonance, the hardwired psychological mechanism that creates self-justification and protects our certainties, self-esteem, and tribal affiliations. In the chapters that follow, we will elaborate

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society. Understanding is the first step toward finding solutions that will lead to change and redemption. That is why we wrote this book. Chapter 1 Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine of Self-justification Press release date: November 1,1993 WE DIDN'T MAKE A MISTAKE when we wrote in our previous releases that

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self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones—is an unpleasant feeling that 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

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minds, consistent and meaningful. The theory inspired more than 3,000 experiments that, taken together, have transformed psychologists' understanding of how the human mind works. Cognitive dissonance has even escaped academia and entered popular culture. The term is everywhere. The two of us have heard it in TV newscasts, political columns, magazine

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coverage and high levels of public attention to the topic, this level of misinformation suggests that some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance." You bet.8 Neuroscientists have recently shown that these biases in thinking are built into the very way the brain processes information—all brains, regardless

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themselves even angrier. 16 Venting is especially likely to backfire if a person commits an aggressive act against another person directly, which is exactly what cognitive dissonance theory would predict. When you do anything that harms someone else—get them in trouble, verbally abuse them, or punch them out—a powerful new

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choices. It takes time, self-reflection, and willingness. The conservative columnist William Safire once described the "psychopolitical challenge" that voters face: "how to deal with cognitive dissonance."29 He began with a story of his own such challenge. During the Clinton administration, Safire recounted, he had criticized Hillary Clinton for trying to

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toxic to democracy. No dissonance there; those bad Democrats are always doing bad things. Six years later, however, he found that he was "afflicted" by cognitive dissonance when Vice President Dick Cheney, a fellow conservative Republican whom Safire admires, insisted on keeping the identity of his energy-policy task force a secret

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thinking is that stereotyping causes discrimination: Al Campanis, believing that blacks lack the "necessities" to be managers, refuses to hire one. But the theory of cognitive dissonance shows that the path between attitudes and action runs in both directions. Often it is discrimination that evokes the self-justifying stereotype: Al Campanis, lacking

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higher than they were. The students who stayed on the waiting list for the skills program, having expended no effort, energy, or time, felt no cognitive dissonance and had nothing to justify. Having no need to distort their memories, they remembered their abilities and recent grades accurately. 12 Conway and Ross called

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lie detection test. That your blood was found on the victim, or the victim's blood was on your clothes. These claims will create considerable cognitive dissonance: Cognition 1: I was not there. I didn't commit the crime. I have no memory of it. Cognition 2: Reliable and trustworthy people in

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are barking up the wrong one. Law professor Andrew McClurg would go further in the training of police. He has long advocated the application of cognitive-dissonance principles to keep highly motivated rookies from taking that first step down the pyramid in a dishonest direction, by calling on their own self-concept

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their honesty commitment. "The only hope of substantially reducing police lying is a preventative approach aimed at keeping good cops from turning bad," he argues. Cognitive dissonance theory offers "a potent, inexpensive, and inexhaustible tool for accomplishing this goal: the officer's own self-concept."45 Because no one, no matter how

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alternative, they said, was chaos, anarchy, and bloodshed. Far from seeing themselves as despots, they saw themselves as self-sacrificing patriots.19 "The degree of cognitive dissonance involved in being a person who oppresses people out of love for them," wrote Louis Menand, "is summed up in a poster that Baby Doc

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. New York: Harper and Brothers, p. 11 (first quote), p. 120 (second quote). 10 Edward Humes (1999), Mean Justice. New York: Pocket Books. CHAPTER 1 Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine of Self-justification 1 Press releases from Neal Chase, representing the religious group Baha'is Under the Provisions of the Covenant, in "The

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. 2 Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter (1956), When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 3 Leon Festinger (1957), A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. See also Leon Festinger and Elliot Aronson (1960), "Arousal and Reduction of Dissonance in Social Contexts," in D. Cartwright and Z

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. Zander (eds.), Group Dynamics (third ed.), New York: Harper & Row, 1960–1; and Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills (eds.) (1999), Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. 4 Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills (1959), "The Effect of Severity of

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, May 13, 2004. 18 Edward Humes (1999), Mean Justice. New York: Pocket Books, p. 181. 19 Andrew J. McClurg (1999), "Good Cop, Bad Cop: Using Cognitive Dissonance Theory to Reduce Police Lying," U.C. Davis Law Review, 32, pp. 389–453. First quote, p. 394; second, p. 429. 20 This excuse is

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and Leo, "Strategies for Preventing False Confessions...," p. 145; note 41. 45 McClurg, "Good Cop, Bad Cop"; note 19. McClurg's own suggestions for using cognitive dissonance to reduce the risk of police lying are in this essay. 46 Saul M. Kassin and Gisli H. Gudjonsson (2004), "The Psychology of Confession Evidence

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Los Angeles Times op-ed, October 10, 2005. 7 Keith Davis and Edward E. Jones (1960), "Changes in Interpersonal Perception as a Means of Reducing Cognitive Dissonance," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 61, pp. 402–410; see also Frederick X. Gibbons and Sue B. McCoy (1991), "Self-Esteem, Similarity, and Reactions

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, Ellen, [>], [>]–[>], [>] (n.40) Bates, Edward, [>] Baumeister, Roy, [>]–[>] Baxter, Charles, [>] (n.2) Bayer Corporation, [>] Bay of Pigs fiasco, [>] Beck, Martha, [>] bedwetting, childhood sexual abuse and, [>] behaviorism, cognitive dissonance and, [>] -[>] benevolence benevolent dolphin problem, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] virtuous circle and, [>]–[>] Bennis, Warren, [>] Berent, Stanley, [>], [>] Bergman, Ingrid, in Casablanca, [>], [>] Bernstein, Elitsur, [>], [>] Berscheid, Ellen, [>] Bible, [>], [>] Biko, Stephen, [>]–[>] bin Laden

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, [>], [>] Cialdini, Robert, [>]–[>] Civil War, [>], [>], [>]–[>] Clancy, Susan, [>]–[>] Claytor, Ralph, [>]–[>] clinical psychologists, [>], [>] clinical trials, [>]–[>] Clinton, Bill, [>], [>], [>] (n.2) Clinton, Hillary, [>] cloning, [>] closed loops, of mental-health practitioners, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>]–[>] cognitive dissonance, [>], [>]–[>] admitting mistakes, [>]–[>], [>] (n.2) behaviorism and, [>]–[>] brain processing of information, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] catharsis and, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] (n.16) confirmation bias and, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] in decision making, [>]–[>], [>] (n.12) denial of problems

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, Deborah, [>] Davis, Jefferson, [>] Davis, Keith, [>]–[>] Davis, Laura, [>], [>]–[>], [>] (n.40) daycare center abuse claims, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>] (n.3), [>]–[>] (n.39) Dean, John, Watergate scandal, [>]–[>] death penalty, [>], [>] decision making cognitive dissonance in, [>]–[>], [>] (n.12) pyramid of choice and, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] Dedge, Wilton, [>]–[>] defense mechanisms, [>] de Klerk, Frederik, [>]–[>] DeLay, Tom, [>]–[>] Democrats, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] denial of guilt, confessions and, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] depression, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>] DeRenzo, Evan

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, [>] DeWitt, John, [>] Dickens, Charles, [>] Dinka (Sudan), tooth extraction by, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] discrimination, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] dissociative identity disorder, [>], [>], [>] (n.3) dissonance theory. See cognitive dissonance divorce and separation, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>] divorce mediation, [>]–[>] DNA testing, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] (n.40) Donaldson, Thomas, [>] doomsday predictions, [>]–[>], [>], [>] Dostoevsky, Fyodor, [>]–[>] Dow Chemical, [>] dreams alien abduction and, [>]–[>] analysis of, [>] in recovered

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, Jeb Stuart, [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>] Majdanek concentration camp, [>], [>] Major League Baseball, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] malpractice charges, [>], [>] (n.5) Mandela, Nelson, [>]–[>] Marino, Gordon, [>]–[>] Markovic, Mira, [>] Marquis, Joshua, [>]–[>], [>] marriage, [>]–[>] buying a house and, [>]–[>] cognitive dissonance in, [>], [>]–[>] conflict resolution in, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>] denial of problems with self and, [>]–[>] downward spiral and, [>]–[>] her version/his version accounts and, [>]–[>], [>], [>] (n.13) housework study, [>], [>] (n.4

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), [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>] McNally, Richard J., [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>] Meehl, Paul, [>], [>] (n.25) Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (McCarthy), [>]–[>] memory, [>]–[>]. See also false memories; recovered-memory therapy; repressed memories biases of, [>]–[>] cognitive dissonance and, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] imagination inflation (Loftus) and, [>]–[>] metaphors of, [>]–[>] revisionism in marriage and, [>]–[>] self-concept and, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] self-justification of, [>]–[>] self-serving distortions of, [>], [>] (n.4), [>] (n.21

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, [>] Schiavo, Michael, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] Schiavo, Terri, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] Schimmel, Solomon, [>] Schindler, Mary, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] Schindler, Robert, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] Schneider, Bill, [>] Schulz, William, [>] Seattle Police Department, [>]–[>] self-awareness, [>]–[>] self-concept blaming the victim and, [>]–[>] cognitive dissonance and, [>]–[>] legal system and, [>] in marriage, [>]–[>] memory and, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] Semmelweiss, Ignac, [>], [>] Senese, Louis, [>] separation, marital, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>] Seward, William H., [>] sexism, [>]–[>], [>] (n.31) sexual abuse. See childhood sexual

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

by Iain McGilchrist  · 8 Oct 2012

–55 ——, ‘Schizophrenia as a recent disease’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 1988, 153(4), pp. 521–31 Harmon-Jones, E., ‘Contributions from research on anger and cognitive dissonance to understanding the motivational functions of asymmetrical frontal brain activity’, Biological Psychology, 2004, 67(1–2), pp. 51–76 ——, ‘Trait anger predicts relative left frontal

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the Menninger Clinic, 1995, 59(4), pp. 480–86 Hoshino-Browne, E., Zanna, A. S., Spencer, S. J. et al., ‘On the cultural guises of cognitive dissonance: the case of easterners and westerners’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005, 89(3), pp. 294–310 Hoshiyama, M., Kakigi, R., Watanabe, S. et

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do

by Matthew Syed  · 3 Nov 2015  · 410pp  · 114,005 words

Dedication Part I THE LOGIC OF FAILURE Chapter 1 A Routine Operation Chapter 2 United Airlines 173 Chapter 3 The Paradox of Success Part II COGNITIVE DISSONANCE Chapter 4 Wrongful Convictions Chapter 5 Intellectual Contortions Chapter 6 Reforming Criminal Justice Part III CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY Chapter 7 The Nozzle Paradox Chapter 8 Scared

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the most inspirational individuals I have ever interviewed, added a single, italicized sentence. So that others may learn, and even more may live. Part II COGNITIVE DISSONANCE Chapter 4 Wrongful Convictions I On August 17, 1992, Holly Staker, an eleven-year-old girl living in Waukegan, a small town in Illinois, took

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who opposed the war had it seared on their memories. But more than half of Republicans? Nope, they couldn’t remember it at all. “Cognitive dissonance” is the term Festinger coined to describe the inner tension we feel when, among other things, our beliefs are challenged by evidence. Most of us

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apart in their views. They had each reframed the evidence to fit in with their preexisting beliefs. Festinger’s great achievement was to show that cognitive dissonance is a deeply ingrained human trait. The more we have riding on our judgments, the more we are likely to manipulate any new evidence that

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calls them into question. Now let us take these insights back to the subject with which we started this chapter. For it turns out that cognitive dissonance has had huge and often astonishing effects on the workings of the criminal justice system. IV On March 20, 1987, a young girl was attacked

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of an innocent person; that the wounds of the victim’s family are going to be reopened. It must be stomach churning. In terms of cognitive dissonance, it is difficult to think of anything more threatening. As Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist, has put it: “[Convicting the wrong person is] one

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can make—like a physician amputating the wrong arm.”21 Just think of how desperate they would be to reframe the fatality. The theory of cognitive dissonance is the only way to get a handle on the otherwise bewildering reaction of prosecutors and police (and, indeed, the wider system) to exonerating

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often that it has been given a name by defense lawyers: “the unindicted co-ejaculator.” It is a term that usefully captures the power of cognitive dissonance. Schulz quotes from a fascinating interview with Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project: We’ll be leaving the courtroom after an exoneration and the prosecutor

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not official opinions, meaning that they don’t analyze what went wrong. Neither does anyone else.29 Chapter 5 Intellectual Contortions I The phenomenon of cognitive dissonance is often held up as a testament to the quirkiness of human psychology. It is easy to laugh when we see just how far we

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discussion so fascinating, they wouldn’t accept it. “After each participant had finished, I explained the study in detail and went over the theory [of cognitive dissonance] carefully,” Aronson has said. Although everyone who went through the severe initiation said they found the hypothesis intriguing and that they could see how most

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of dissonance-reduction—that a failure didn’t actually occur? It is worth noting here, too, the relationship between the ambiguity of our failures and cognitive dissonance. When a plane has crashed, it’s difficult to pretend the system worked just fine. The failure is too stark, too dramatic. This is

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such suffering? How could these honorable people cover up their mistakes in such a brazen way? How could they live with themselves? Our exploration of cognitive dissonance finally provides us with the answer. It is precisely in order to live with themselves, and the fact that they have harmed patients, that doctors

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of doctors and nurses are committed and decent people. Indeed, many are heroic in their care for their patients. And therein lies the tragedy of cognitive dissonance. It allows good, motivated people to harm those they are working to protect, not just once, but again and again. To put it a

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have looked like an indictment of health care culture, but we can now see that this is a painfully accurate description of the effects of cognitive dissonance. Self-justification, the desire to protect one’s self-image, has the potential to afflict us all. The health care and criminal justice systems

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future progress. II Let us return briefly to the Iraq War, for it will allow us to drill deeper into the psychological mechanisms associated with cognitive dissonance. To avoid controversy, we will not take a stand on whether the invasion was right or wrong.* Instead, we will look at the intellectual

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enough. Note another thing, too. The absence of WMD had strengthened his conviction that they would be found. This is a classic response predicted by cognitive dissonance: we tend to become more entrenched in our beliefs (like those in the capital punishment experiment, whose views became more extreme after reading evidence that

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political party has a monopoly on making mistakes, either. But what this does show is that intelligent people are not immune to the effects of cognitive dissonance. This is important because we often suppose that bright people are the most likely to reach the soundest judgments. We associate intelligence, however defined,

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met with Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former head of communications and one of his most trusted lieutenants. We talked at length about the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. Campbell was characteristically thoughtful, talking about the buildup to war and the pressure-cooker atmosphere in Downing Street. I asked him if he still backed

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said: “I said they would win the FA Cup, but I didn’t say when.” This example is yet another illustration of the reach of cognitive dissonance. Dissonance is not just about Tony Blair, or doctors, or lawyers, or members of religious cults, it is also about world-famous business leaders,

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with ever-more-tortuous rationalizations as to why they were right all along. And this takes us back to perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of cognitive dissonance. It is precisely those thinkers who are most renowned, who are famous for their brilliant minds, who have the most to lose from mistakes.

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of all. As Tetlock put it: “Ironically, the more famous the expert, the less accurate his or her predictions tended to be.” Why is this? Cognitive dissonance gives us the answer. It is those who are the most publicly associated with their predictions, whose livelihoods and egos are bound up with their

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evidence that says otherwise. Blinded by dissonance, they are also the least likely to learn the lessons. IV A common misperception of the theory of cognitive dissonance is that it is about external incentives. People have a lot to lose if they get their judgments wrong; doesn’t it therefore make sense

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of adapting to a mistake is outweighed by the reputational disadvantage of admitting to it. But this perspective does not encompass the full influence of cognitive dissonance. The problem is not just the external incentive structure, it is the internal one. It is the sheer difficulty that we have in admitting

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internal urge to protect self-esteem. We spin the evidence even when it costs us. Confirmation bias is another of the psychological quirks associated with cognitive dissonance. The best way to see its effects is to consider the following sequence of numbers: 2, 4, 6. Suppose that you have to discover

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be interpreted not as an opportunity to do what was right for the patient, but as a challenge to his competence and authority. In short, cognitive dissonance was now in play. Pronovost, however, didn’t drop his concern. He had a deep knowledge of allergies and tried to explain his reasoning.

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you might imagine that the surgeon would be forced to accept the logic of the situation. Surely he could not persist. But the theory of cognitive dissonance offers a different possibility. The risk-benefit ratio was not about weighing the life of a patient against the few moments it would have taken

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means that doctors make the same mistakes again and again, while growing in the mistaken conviction that they are infallible. This, in turn, increases the cognitive dissonance associated with mistakes, tightening the noose still further. Admitting to error becomes so threatening that in some cases surgeons (decent, honorable people) would rather risk

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responsibility to lead the industry forward? It will not surprise you to hear that it is the latter. Intelligence and seniority when allied to cognitive dissonance and ego is one of the most formidable barriers to progress in the world today. In one study in twenty-six acute-care hospitals in

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today. Ideas and beliefs of all kinds are protected from failure, but not by a totalitarian state. Instead they are protected from failure by us. Cognitive dissonance doesn’t leave a paper trail. There are no documents that can be pointed to when we reframe inconvenient truths. There is no violence perpetrated

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you need a mindset that enables such a system to flourish. In the previous section we concerned ourselves with the mindset aspect of this equation. Cognitive dissonance occurs when mistakes are too threatening to admit to, so they are reframed or ignored. This can be thought of as the internal fear of

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difficulty that many people face, as we have seen, is in admitting to their personal failures, and thus learning from them. We have looked at cognitive dissonance, which becomes so severe that we often reframe, spin, and sometimes even edit out our mistakes. Now think of the Unilever biologists. They didn’t

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It feeds off flaws, difficulties, and problems. Insulating ourselves from failures—whether via brainstorming guidelines, the familiar cultural taboo on criticism, or the influence of cognitive dissonance*—is to rob one of our most valuable mental faculties of fuel. “It always starts with a problem,” Dyson says. “I hated vacuum cleaners for

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learn from mistakes initially made no difference because professionals didn’t make any reports. The information was suppressed due to a fear of blame and cognitive dissonance. If the previous two sections of the book were about systems that institutionalize the evolutionary mechanism, the next two sections will look at the psychological

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in some organizational contexts must—coexist with high standards for performance.9 It is worth noting here, if only briefly, the link between blame and cognitive dissonance. In a culture where mistakes are considered blameworthy they are also likely to be dissonant. When the external culture stigmatizes mistakes, professionals are likely to

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or underhand behavior, those in Growth Mindset companies disagreed 41 percent more strongly than those in Fixed Mindset organizations. This evokes the intimate interrelationship between cognitive dissonance, blame, and openness, as mentioned in chapter 11. It is when a culture has an unhealthy attitude toward mistakes that blame is common, cover-

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to celebrate excellent scientific work that nevertheless resulted in failure. It was about destigmatizing failure and liberating staff from the twin dangers of blame and cognitive dissonance. But can these kinds of interventions have real effects? Do they really change behavior and boost performance and adaptation? Consider an experiment involving a

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was that many were among the brightest students, who had worked diligently for the preceding three years. It was only years later, when reading about cognitive dissonance and the Fixed Mindset, that the pieces fell into place: they were so terrified of underperforming, so worried that the exam might reveal that they

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and Alan Axelrod, 123 conflicts in human history can be traced directly to differences in opinion, whether religious, ideological, or doctrinal.3 Think back to cognitive dissonance. This is where dissenting evidence is reframed or ignored. Wars of ideology can be seen as an extreme form of dissonant reduction: instead of shutting

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see any data that might count against the earth-centric view of the universe. It is difficult to think of a more revelatory episode of cognitive dissonance. They simply shut their eyes. As Galileo said in a letter to the German mathematician Johannes Kepler: My dear Kepler, I wish that we

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markets succeed because of a vital ingredient: adaptability. Different companies trying different things, with some failing and some surviving, add to the pool of knowledge. Cognitive dissonance is thwarted, in the long run, by an irrefutable failure test: bankruptcy. A company owner who runs out of money cannot pretend that his strategy

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Medical Errors and Medical Narcissism (Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett, 2005). 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Jeff Stone and Nicholas C. Fernandez, “How Behaviour Shapes Attitudes: Cognitive Dissonance Processes,” in William D. Crano and Radmila Prislin (ed.), Attitudes and Attitude Change (New York: Psychology Press, 2013). 6. http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/news/entry

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9, 25, 26, 221 black box thinking, 31 Blackstone, William, 65 Blair, Tony, 90–93, 94 blame, 12, 217–49 aviation and, 232, 239–49 cognitive dissonance and, 231 consequences of blame culture, 226–29, 231, 237–39 in corporate and political world, 225–31 fundamental attribution error and, 232 just culture

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and, 66, 67 Iraq War decisions and, 93 justice system and, 85 randomized control trials (RCTs) and, 154–59 science and, 44 Cobley, Dan, 185 cognitive dissonance, 74–77, 86–107 ambiguity of failure and, 87 blame and, 231 confirmation bias and, 101–3 denial and, 74 disposition effect and, 101 economic

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Dattner, Ben, 233 Dawkins, Richard, 128–29 deception, 87, 88 decision making, 11 Deep Blue, 134 Dekker, Sidney, 13, 227, 239 deliberate practice, 47 denial cognitive dissonance, as response to, 74 failure and, 18, 71 in prosecutorial responses to exonerating DNA evidence, 78–83 Diehl, Alan, 27, 28, 29, 30 Disch, Joanne

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experience, 45–46 expertise, 45–46 external deception, 87, 88 eyewitnesses, 114–15 Fagan, Charles, 120 failure, 8, 11–13, 14–15 ambiguity of, and cognitive dissonance, 87 attitude and, 16, 58–59 avoidance and, 101 denial and, 18, 71, 88–89 education and, 267–69 entrepreneurship and, 269–72 fear and

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War II, 33–37 Wright brothers, 199 wrongful convictions, 63–71, 77–85, 114–17 Borchard’s compilation of, 67 Bromgard case, 77–79, 116 cognitive dissonance and, 79–83 DNA evidence and, 68–71, 77, 79–83, 84, 120 drive-bys and, 114 exonerations through DNA testing, 69–70 eyewitness identification

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy

by Irvin D. Yalom and Molyn Leszcz  · 1 Jan 1967

objectivity in the face of apparent group unanimity; and (2) members reject critical feelings toward the group at this time to avoid a state of cognitive dissonance: in other words, once an individual invests considerable emotion and time in a group and develops strong positive feelings toward other members, it becomes difficult

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason

by Lee McIntyre  · 14 Sep 2021  · 407pp  · 108,030 words

scientist wouldn’t have any trouble answering. And then—rather than trying to change their mind directly—I could just sit back and watch while cognitive dissonance overtook them, as they grew increasingly uncomfortable when they couldn’t give me an answer.34 In his 1959 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery

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, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15348423.2020.1774257?scroll=top&needAccess=true. 34. One of the best introductions to the concept of cognitive dissonance can be found in Leon Festinger’s classic When Prophecy Fails (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), which is about a 1950s UFO cult that believed

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of our behavior. And an integral part of this is maintaining a positive view of ourselves. This can account for those times when we resolve cognitive dissonance by telling ourselves a story we would prefer to believe over one that is true, as long as we can be the hero in it

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eager to find facts that supported their preexisting ideological commitments about guns and crime? The preservation of one’s identity, and the reduction of any cognitive dissonance that would threaten it, are two of the most foundational ideas in social psychology. It should come as no surprise, then, that how we feel

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.”19 The evidential basis for this in the literature is not in question, and in fact goes back to Leon Festinger’s classic finding on cognitive dissonance.20 When subjects are sufficiently motivated—and their ego or identity is threatened—they will resist all efforts to get them to concede that they

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. Although it did not explicitly address the issue of partisan identity, note the care with which the Kuklinski study dealt with the potential problem of cognitive dissonance and polarization. They took care not to tweak the ego of the subjects by shoving it in their faces that they had just changed their

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.10 Clearly, there is no necessary link between climate denial and top polluter status. So it cannot all be blamed on motivated reasoning, ideology, and cognitive dissonance. But what then?11 Still, we must look for our keys where the light is. What can we do about the Chinese government’s newfound

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little evidence there had been to support them. As he searched frantically for something to justify his earlier views—and couldn’t find it—the cognitive dissonance became unbearable. As Lynas explains: There is … zero evidence that any genetically modified foods in existence today pose a health risk to anyone … [but] we

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effect and, xii, 62–64, 67–68 belief formation and, 49, 66, 71, 120, 204n9 circle of concern and, 118, 119, 120, 180, 185–186 cognitive dissonance and, 17, 47, 61, 67, 129, 194n34, 204n4 corrective information and, 63–67 debunking and, xiii, 8–9, 36, 38, 39, 91, 207n31 evidence and

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–119, 123, 157 reliance on fake experts and, 91 technique rebuttal strategy, 106–115 Trump and, xv, 38, 83–84 Coal miner conversations, 106–115 Cognitive dissonance, 17, 47, 61, 67, 129, 194n34, 204n4 Confirmation bias, 13, 35, 49, 122, 204n7, 206n27 “Conservative and Liberal Views of Science” (Hamilton), 154–156, 235n15

Surfaces and Essences

by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander  · 10 Sep 2012  · 1,079pp  · 321,718 words

office” to designate the standard workplace of their host, while he himself would always call it “my study”. After he had put up with this cognitive dissonance for a couple of days, it occurred to him to ask them, “How come the two of you always go around talking about my ‘office

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surface level are nonetheless “exactly the same thing”. In the meantime, though, they all pooh-pooh the interest of such a goal… How to Reduce Cognitive Dissonance in a Fox Æsop’s fox-and-grapes fable, more than two millennia old, insightfully anticipated some rather recent ideas. From the 1950’s onwards

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, thanks to the pioneering work of social psychologist Leon Festinger, the notions of cognitive dissonance and its reduction have been part of psychology, and they are direct descendants of the fable, which, in expositions of the theory, is often given

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tension that the individual tries to reduce by modifying one or another of their conflicting internal states. Thus, the fox is in a state of cognitive dissonance, since his desire to eat the grapes conflicts with his inability to reach them. He thus modifies one of the two causes of the conflict

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that a traumatic experience leaves lasting after-effects in its wake, so the sour-grapes fable contains the essence of the notion of reduction of cognitive dissonance, and more generally, the notion of rationalization, where a painful situation is rendered less painful by the unconscious generation, after the fact, of some kind

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only has survived many centuries but it also anticipated developments in modern psychology. To see how the sour-grapes fable relates to the notion of cognitive dissonance in its full generality, one can cast the notion of disparagement of an unrealized yearning, which is the fable’s crux, as a special case

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more general notion of regaining a peaceful frame of mind by distorting one’s perception of a troubling situation, which is what the reduction of cognitive dissonance is all about. Equipped with this new category, we will far more easily and more rapidly recognize situations in which people spontaneously invent novel justifications

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(that is, situations whose protagonist lacks honesty and sincerity). In this category are found many situations that have nothing to do with the reduction of cognitive dissonance. Some simple examples would be: A person who would file false reports after having had an automobile accident; Politicians who would distort facts about the

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idea of light being both particulate and wavelike was inconceivable. Nonetheless, his experiments wound up confirming Einstein’s predictions perfectly, which plunged Millikan into deep cognitive dissonance. In a major book summarizing his work, published in 1917, Millikan admitted that his results supported Einstein’s revolutionary predictions to the hilt, but he

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shows that even for the most audacious of spirits, it sometimes takes a great deal of time and intense concentration, not to mention analogy-driven cognitive dissonance, to carry out what might seem, after the fact, to be the most elementary of conceptual reversals. From 1905 to 1907 in a Nutshell Below

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to movement). These two resemblances constitute the heart of the incipient mass–energy analogy. At the same time, a lack of symmetry gives rise to cognitive dissonance… •Energy (since it is not composed of particles) is endowed with strange mass, but it has no normal mass. Also the reverse holds: any object

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). This mass–energy mismatch is a serious blight on the incipient analogy linking the two concepts. Thanks to a hypothesis that restores “cosmic unity”, the cognitive dissonance is dissipated… •Since there is no partition separating different types of energy, and since there is a promising analogy linking energy to mass, then if

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de Bellegarde and Phædrus are relevant to our section on Æsop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes”. Festinger’s book is a classic on cognitive dissonance. The books by Carroll and by Sapir deal with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and the volume by Atran and Medin covers the way that culture

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Thom (1982). Penser les mathématiques. Séminaire de philosophie et mathématiques de l’École normale supérieure. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Festinger, Leon (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Flynn, James R. (1987). “Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure”. Psychological Bulletin, 101, pp. 171–191

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, 230; stirred with absurdly thin sticks, 317, 321–322; three stars awarded for, by Guide Michelin, 462 cognitive (anti-)economy, in memory retrieval, 341–344 cognitive dissonance: as a driving force in creativity, 483, 484, 490–491; reduction of, as a category, 115–117; situations exemplifying the drive to reduce, 116; see

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, 511; of category distinctions never taught in schools, 126, 127; of children’s semantic approximations, 39–41; of chunked items in grocery stores, 92; of cognitive-dissonance reduction situations, 116; of colorful acts of categorization, 510; of common metaphorical uses of words, 62; of compound words in French and Italian, 89; of

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, 354–357; to make equations reflect cause and effect, 407–411; pushing for creative analogies, 300–301, 355–356, 458, 477, 480–481; see also cognitive dissonance prime numbers: generalized to “prime groups”, 449; generalized to “prime knots”, 449; generalized to primes inside rings, 448 primitive needs as primeval forces, 314 “prison

The Little Black Book of Decision Making

by Michael Nicholas  · 21 Jun 2017

such enormous errors of judgment, would it? It turns out there is a name for the psychological tendency that is at work in such situations: “cognitive dissonance”. It refers to those times when there is a clash between different attitudes, beliefs or ideas which results in a state of internal tension. As

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, the mind seeks to reduce the conflict between the two opposing thoughts, which is most easily achieved by altering one or the other of them. Cognitive dissonance has two dimensions: When there is a clash between an external idea or event and our internal model of the world. When an inner conflict

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is where the expression “sour grapes”, which is used to describe the envious disparagement of others, originated from. Clearly, people were having useful insights into cognitive dissonance over 3,000 years ago! One of the first modern researchers of dissonance was Jack Brehm.5 He used three groups of participants who were

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deeper level of truth at work here as well, because people who are not fools readily fall into this mental trap as well. By understanding cognitive dissonance it becomes evident why people so frequently choose to criticise something that, in their heart, they might desperately want to possess, such as good looks

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time and still retain the ability to function.” F. Scott Fitzgerald Brain research is beginning to provide further insights that help explain what lies behind cognitive dissonance. For example, a study led by Drew Westen,6 Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, used functional magnetic resonance imaging

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anyone who likes the idea that we are essentially rational creatures. Indeed, if this applies you, you might well be experiencing some of your own cognitive dissonance right now, created by the conflict between two ideas: your comfortable misconception that your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis and

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it or not! I'm Right Because I Believe I Am When faced with contradictory evidence, the desire to side with what is most comfortable – cognitive dissonance – and to avoid ideas that are contrary to what we believe – motivated reasoning – produces a very strong tendency for us to do little more than

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has shown that this one would have to be a prime candidate. The name given to it is “confirmation bias”, and it is inseparable from cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning. Confirmation bias refers to the tendency of decision makers to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms some

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get beyond the sense that our first impression is the “right” one? If someone's intention in asking a question did not match our interpretation, cognitive dissonance would tend to lead us to dismiss further explanations that they might be able to add. So, how can we minimise the impact of our

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with her own “no”, which would have been a bit of a shock since it conflicted with her earlier answers and would therefore have created cognitive dissonance, she probably realised that she wasn't delegating authority to the degree that she had thought. She then perhaps inferred that I had known this

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be incredibly creative in finding ways to attribute them to its own ability at problem solving – as you've seen from when we looked at cognitive dissonance, and how easily we can create explanations for even huge contradictions. To illustrate this, I'd like to take a slightly deeper look at Dick

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it conflicted with the conventional wisdom about the “correct” way to jump, which would have stimulated a negative feeling in the emotional brain, caused by cognitive dissonance. The intellectual brain, despite the ample evidence that he could do well going over backwards, reached the conclusion that the new approach couldn't work

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that creates major limitations of awareness is when we are motivated in favour of a particular outcome. The associated emotions then affect our objectivity through cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning and confirmation bias (see Chapter 4), making it very difficult for us to become aware of any information that is inconsistent with our

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blindness meditation mindfulness neuroplasticity see also intentional attention attentional blink awareness bounded fear intentional attention levels of mindfulness prefrontal cortex see also self-awareness beliefs cognitive dissonance confirmation bias doomsday see also assumptions best practice Beyth, Ruth biases awareness of hindsight triggered by emotions see also confirmation bias big data blindsided, being

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“blink” versus “think” model Blockbuster Bohm, David Boston Consulting Group (BCG) bounded awareness brain attention balance brainwaves cognitive dissonance confirmation bias fear frontal lobe meditation mind and motivated reasoning neural seesaw neuroplasticity startle reflex stress threat response Triune Brain see also unconscious mind breathing

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Brehm, Jack cause and effect Challenger space shuttle disaster change adaptive complex systems increase in the pace of chaos chess cognitive dissonance communication complexity complex systems stress complicated systems conditioning confirmation bias conflicts of interest conventional wisdom Cook, David Covey, Stephen R. creativity brainwaves conditions for creative

Virus of the Mind

by Richard Brodie  · 4 Jun 2009  · 289pp  · 22,394 words

seven times. It takes that many repetitions to implant the Buy me meme in the customer. — The second way is through a mechanism known as cognitive dissonance. When things don’t make sense, our minds struggles to make them make sense. Imagine, for example, that a friend is upset with you, but

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Bill and lunch that will influence your future behavior. I’ve heard it said that geniuses develop their most brilliant original thoughts through self-imposed cognitive dissonance. As 126 How We Get Programmed you might guess, then, as a programming method it is particularly effective with intelligent people, because you actually believe

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some behavior, think about what memes that operant conditioning is programming you with. Do they serve your purpose in life? Cognitive Dissonance Another programming technique is creating mental pressure and resolving it—cognitive dissonance. Why do high-pressure sales tactics exist even though people universally despise them? As with any “why” question in the

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no question, however, that it does work on some people some of the time. High-pressure sales work by making you mentally uncomfortable—by creating cognitive dissonance. You enter the situation with some strategy-memes that make you resist buying: perhaps they are something like Look before you leap or Shop around

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. Your mind wants to resolve the conflict. It does so by creating a new meme. There are two ways to release the pressure caused by cognitive dissonance: buy in or bail out. If you bail out, it’s likely to be because you’ve resolved the dissonance by creating a meme such

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what 130 How We Get Programmed a smart decision you’ve made and even calling a few days later and congratulating you on your purchase. Cognitive dissonance can be used to create a meme of submission and loyalty to whatever authority is causing the dissonance. Fraternity hazings, boot camp, and some religious

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before releasing the pressure. That creates an association-meme between the demonstration of loyalty and the good feeling caused by the release of pressure. With cognitive dissonance, people end up believing they have received something valuable, something deserving of their loyalty, when in reality all that has happened is that the people

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stronger memes—to give the reward only occasionally than it does to give it all the time. That could be because withholding the reward adds cognitive dissonance to the operant conditioning. So a truly manipulative meme programmer will withhold the reward most of the time even if the subject performs flawlessly, knowing

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who withheld the A’s much of the time. The occasional A reinforces the Work hard meme more than the constant A because it adds cognitive dissonance. Talk shows are filled with people who stay involved in relationships they say are awful most of the time—perhaps the conditioning and dissonance of

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the infection. Here’s what it looks like when you’re infected by a mind virus: Penetration We looked at three methods of penetration: repetition, cognitive dissonance, and the Trojan horse. When a virus of the mind infects you, it may resemble one of these scenarios: 142 How We Get Programmed — Repetition

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control or abortion (if you are not among the first to be infected, you could hear it from a wide variety of different infected people) — Cognitive dissonance. Being placed in a paradoxical or mentally uncomfortable situation can lead to being reprogrammed with new memes that relieve the mental stress: • Going through an

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than the more practical ones involving danger, food, and sex, but not so hard that our Stone Age friends couldn’t venture a guess. The cognitive dissonance set up by having these questions in mind caused the creation of some memes that made sense as answers. And from these guesses evolved mythology

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seders, and the times you get to eat during the fast of Ramadan all add attractive memes to a religion. Fasts, in fact, set up cognitive dissonance to reinforce the memes you were fasting for. *You have to believe before you can eat: feasts are for Baha’is only. 188 The Memetics

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consequences of leaving meme, the same one used by cults to keep people in line. Another method of bonding people to an organization is the cognitive-dissonance effect of the initiation ordeal. By putting people through a trial by ordeal such as a fraternity hazing, one of two things occur: either the

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you would otherwise think. Youth gangs typically have initiations involving committing a serious crime. These serve a dual purpose: the programming or brainwashing effect of cognitive dissonance, and the assurance that the initiate has bought into the lawlessness of the gang culture. I used to watch a lot of television. I don

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seminar series. Participants attend a severalday, intensive seminar that leaves them feeling very good. Mixed in with the course content is the use of conditioning, cognitive-dissonance, and Trojan-horse techniques that program people to do two things: recruit new participants for the next 206 Designer Viruses (How to Start a Cult

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Level 3, you pick a purpose for your life and hold it as your highest priority. If you commit strongly enough to this purpose, the cognitive dissonance created with old memes that don’t support this purpose will result in some reprogramming. After time, you’ll find yourself becoming more and more

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, 46, 145 operant conditioning and, 129 238 Index religion and, 128 See also under button-pushing memes Cleary, Thomas, 217 Coca-Cola, 21, 129, 153 cognitive dissonance, 126–27, 130–31, 143, 203 cognitive therapy, 8 communication, evolution of, 71–72 confidence games, 140–42 Congreve, William, 81 consciousness, 76–77, 228

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, 200–201 memes, 71–72 biological definition of, 5–6 bundling of, 132–33 classes of, 19–25, 70–71 cognitive definition of, 8–11 cognitive dissonance and, 126–27, 130–31 concept of, xvi conditioning and, 126, 127–30 danger and, 111–12, 117 embedding of, 133–35 evangelism and, 80

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quality of life and, xix–xxi Truth and, 16 243 virus of the mind Mensa, 67 Microsoft, 1, 28, 205–6 mind viruses, 15–16 cognitive dissonance and, 143 concept of, xvi cultural institutions and, 34 cultural viruses and, 45–46 definition of, 16 designer viruses and, 45–46, 195–96 evangelism

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion

by Dean Burnett  · 10 Jan 2023  · 536pp  · 126,051 words

contradicts what we already think and believe often leads to a rapid negative emotional reaction, involving the experience of stress and psychological discomfort, known as cognitive dissonance.122 To stop this dissonance, we can either alter our emotional response to it and accept we’re wrong, or think about it more critically

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): pp. 1349–1370. 46 Gentner, D. and A.L. Stevens, Mental Models (Psychology Press, 2014). 47 Brehm, J.W. and A.R. Cohen, Explorations in Cognitive Dissonance (John Wiley & Sons, 1962). 48 Marris, P., Loss and Change (Psychology Revivals): Revised Edition (Routledge, 2014). 49 Hertenstein, M.J., et al., ‘The communication of

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, 2014, 36(2): pp. 235–262. 121 Nestler, S., ‘Belief perseverance’, Social Psychology, 2010, 41(1): pp. 35–41. 122 Brehm and Cohen, Explorations in Cognitive Dissonance. 123 Martel, C., G. Pennycook, and D.G. Rand, ‘Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news’, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 2020, 5(1

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, 3; ‘flow’ state 1; and intrusive thoughts 1; and motivation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and social relationships 1, 2 see also learning (of information) cognitive dissonance 1 colours: cultural associations 1; in DB’s friend’s home 1, 2; emotional response to 1; and visual processing 1, 2, 3 communicating and

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also negative emotions emojis and emoticons 1 emotion-cognition relationship: appraisal theory 1, 2; in attention and focus 1, 2, 3, 4; belief perseverance 1; cognitive dissonance 1; competition for brain’s resources 1, 2; confirmation bias 1, 2, 3; distinction recognised by Stoics 1; in effect of emotions experienced 1; in

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