cognitive dissonance

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do
by Matthew Syed
Published 3 Nov 2015

From reading exactly the same material, the two groups moved even further 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 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 in her home in Billings, Montana.

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Imagine what it must be like to be confronted with evidence that they have assisted in putting the wrong person in jail; that they have ruined the life 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 of the worst professional mistakes you 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 DNA evidence.

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In other words, the victim had had consensual sex with another man, but had subsequently been raped by the prisoner, who had used a condom.22 This is the domino effect of cognitive dissonance: the reframing process takes on a life of its own. The presence of an entirely new man, not mentioned at the initial trial, for whom there were no eyewitnesses, and whom the victim often couldn’t remember having sex with, may seem like a desperate ploy to evade the evidence. But it has been used so 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 will say “We still think your client is guilty and we are going to retry him.”

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation
by Chris Nodder
Published 4 Jun 2013

Provide reasons for people to use If you expect that users will be conflicted about the product or service you offer, provide them with many reasons they can use to resolve cognitive dissonance and keep their pride intact. Online, cognitive dissonance can be brought about by effects such as buyer’s remorse, in which the purchaser struggles to justify the high purchase price and their desire for an item in comparison to their subsequent feelings of the item’s worth. Sites help users resolve this cognitive dissonance by giving them reasons and evidence that bolster their satisfaction with the product (positive reviews; images of famous people using the product; and promises of hard-to-quantify benefits, such as social approval brought about by using the product) rather than letting them resolve the dissonance by returning the product.

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Pride Saint Augustine quote: “Humilitas homines sanctis angelis similes facit, et superbia ex angelis demones facit.” as quoted in Manipulus Florum (c. 1306), edited by Thomas Hibernicus. Cognitive dissonance Leon Festinger proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance after he studied the aftermath of Dorothy Martin’s December 21, 1954, end of the world prediction. Yes, these predictions seem to happen with alarming frequency: Leon Festinger. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Illinois: Row, Peterson, 1957. Harold Camping quote: familyradio.com. Retrieved January 2012. Ig Nobel prize winners, by year: “Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize.”

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They revolve around setting goals to reduce debt, to have “toy fund” money for frivolous expenditures, and simply being entertained: “Why not get paid for sitting at the computer, which I would be doing anyway?” Lots of these reasons appear to be justifications that attempt to remove the cognitive dissonance of doing something that isn’t actually particularly “worthwhile” in financial terms. And that fits in nicely with some findings from way back in 1959 when Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith found that in situations where there is cognitive dissonance between effort and return, people will be forced to create justifications for working so hard for a small reward, thus increasing their perceived value of the reward.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
Published 6 May 2007

Many of the group's members, who had not felt the need to proselytize before December 21, began calling the press to report the miracle, and soon they were out on the streets, buttonholing passersby, trying to convert them. Mrs. Keech's prediction had failed, but not Leon Festinger's. *** 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 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.

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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 conceal the identity of the members of her health-care task force. He wrote a column castigating her efforts at secrecy, which he said were 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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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 End Is Nearish," Harper's, February 1995, pp. 22, 24. 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.

Psychopath Free (Expanded Edition): Recovering From Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People
by Jackson MacKenzie
Published 31 Aug 2015

Only you can’t see this clearly because you’ve had lies about who you are and your part in this relationship pounded into your brain, over and over again. This creates cognitive dissonance, causing you to have doubts about ending it. Compounding this is the fact that in the initial phase of the relationship, they did an excellent job of idealizing and love-bombing you. The vicious circle then comes in to play, in that you cannot see clearly who they are and the cognitive dissonance won’t leave you until you’ve done some No Contact time. But it’s hard to feel at peace with your decision to go No Contact while the cognitive dissonance is wreaking havoc in your mind. What worked for me to end the cognitive dissonance: Well, I went through utter hell inside this mental tug-of-war for the first six weeks of No Contact.

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How could someone who thought you were perfect be the very same person who intentionally hurt you? How could they go from obsession to contempt in the blink of an eye? It isn’t possible. There’s no way you dated a psychopath. They loved you. Right? Cognitive Dissonance What I’ve just described is a psychological phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance. It’s a state of mind where your intuition is telling you two competing things. It’s totally natural after a psychopathic relationship, because you’re used to repeatedly being told things—instead of seeing them with your own two eyes, or feeling them in your heart.

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Plus, how could you forget those beautiful memories where you held hands as they said “I love you . . .” And that’s the danger of cognitive dissonance. It brings you back to the addictive love memories. It causes you to long for a broken dream, a manufactured lie. As you begin to work through these feelings, the diametrically opposed thoughts will become less and less extreme. But in the meantime, you are still very susceptible to their ongoing abuse. As long as you’re experiencing cognitive dissonance, make no mistake: they will be able to trick you again. All it takes is one sweet word to send you right back to the idealization phase.

Virus of the Mind
by Richard Brodie
Published 4 Jun 2009

They may be fooled by their own memetic programming! More on this in Chapter 9. 129 virus of the mind If you’re in a situation where you’re being rewarded for 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 world of memetics, the answer is: because the meme for it is good at spreading. Salespeople get infected with the high-pressure sales meme and go about acting on it, regardless of whether it’s the most effective means at their disposal.

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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 as The salesperson is a jerk. But some people buy, creating instead a meme like I really want to buy this. Once you create that meme, it’s yours, and a smart salesperson will reinforce it by telling you 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.

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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 who were torturing them have stopped. Prisoners of war have been programmed to submit and be loyal to their captors through this method. One interesting result of research in operant conditioning on people is that it works better—creates 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.

The Little Black Book of Decision Making
by Michael Nicholas
Published 21 Jun 2017

It wouldn't be at all unusual if you need a lot more convincing that you too are susceptible to 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 this dissonance is unpleasant, 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 exists between our own ideas.

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Clearly, this isn't good news for 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 the modern understanding that, actually, you are rather emotionally driven, whether you realise 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 to seek to confirm our existing beliefs.

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Index adaptability adaptive change aircraft recognition Alvarado, Alejandro Sánchez ambiguity amygdala Antioco, John arousal artificial intelligence (AI) assumptions attention controlling the focus of frontal lobe inattention 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 “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 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.

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit
by Aja Raden
Published 10 May 2021

You also don’t notice or don’t remember evidence contrary to your belief (no replies, no wires outside the office walls). Honesty bias with a chaser of confirmation bias creates the conditions in which we can be deceived, over and over, through our own willing participation, in large part because of our need to protect against something called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a state of untenable mental stress. It occurs when you try to hold two conflicting truths (or at least beliefs) in your mind simultaneously. You can’t do it. Really. You can’t. I mean, some people can, but they’re seriously atypical and you probably don’t want to know them. So, what happens when you have to process two conflicting beliefs?

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There’s an entire emerging field of science looking at how difficult it is to change someone’s perception and emotional opinion of fact once they’ve accepted that something is fact, even after they’re provided with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. What it mostly boils down to is more cognitive dissonance: they become incapable of processing new information, and more often than not they just can’t accept that the first fact was a lie—at least, not if they really bought it. The trajectory of confirmation bias (wherein you believe something and thus begin to see evidence for it everywhere you look) followed by cognitive dissonance (where you dig in your heels and believe something more the more it’s disproved) is a powerful emotional response and a form of recursive cognitive error that subverts objective reasoning.

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One gets dumped in the idea shredder. And it actually doesn’t make a bit of difference which one is more factually accurate: you defend and protect whichever idea you need to be true in order not to have been wrong at some point. The psychological and neurological stress experienced during moments of cognitive dissonance are so great, you’ll believe anything to protect your preexisting mental paradigm. It’s why people refuse to hear proof of things like climate change or see clips of transgressions that they insist didn’t happen—in the event that they’ve already decided they don’t believe it. What Lustig did with the Eiffel Tower, Parker did with the Brooklyn Bridge, and Smith did with his telegraph to nowhere were obviously far less harmful than enticing hundreds of people onto a boat and sending them out to die in a jungle, but they were all still the same basic con that Gregor MacGregor pulled with the nation of Poyais: it’s known among con artists as selling thin air.22 The thin-air part is integral to the Big Lie, because by definition a Big Lie is not an exaggeration, misrepresentation, or misdirection about the truth; rather, it rests entirely on the absence of any sort of tangible reality and relies on your combined theory of mind and faith in objective reality to float it enough credit to be believed.

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation
by Cathy O'Neil
Published 15 Mar 2022

For those who haven’t adapted to new norms, these changes can be jarring. A natural response to a viral wave of shaming is anger and indignation. It is here that people enter the second stage of shame, denial. One hallmark of this stage is cognitive dissonance. I’m not a bad person, Permit Karen might think. And yet people are outside my door raging at me. I’m not a racist, and yet my community insists that I am one. I must deny it. Cognitive dissonance—holding two ideas that appear to contradict each other—can cause great emotional stress and lead to tortured logic. The term was minted in the 1950s by a social psychologist at the University of Minnesota, Leon Festinger, and two colleagues.

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However, doing so usually involves an emotional journey, not unlike the passage through the stages of grief. The first stage is hurt. When shamed, whether for addiction, poverty, or illiteracy, people suffer and can feel worthless. And being denounced by millions on social media as a racist or a rapist can create cognitive dissonance, especially for people who consider themselves “good.” A natural response is to cast about for a way to turn off the pain. This leads them to hide the shame, or pretend it’s not there. Some even blame others, or seek out people nursing similar grievances. That second stage of shame, denial, leads to no end of hazards.

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It enabled me not only to address the sources of my own shame but, more important, to delve into false assumptions I used to justify my own shaming actions. In the realm of shame, most of us are both victims and perpetrators. To avoid pain, or perhaps in response to pain, we habitually and automatically deflect it toward others. Both the diagnosis and the remedy, I found, are usually rooted in phony science, cognitive dissonance, and self-preserving flattery. In short, lots of unnecessary bullshit. We should wield this weapon more carefully. My purpose in writing this book is to shine a light on both the shame we’ve been subjected to in life and the shame that we heap on others, often without meaning to or even noticing.

Power
by Shahida Arabi
Published 11 Jan 2017

This can make it difficult to pinpoint who the narcissistic abuser truly is—the sweet, charming and seemingly remorseful person that appears shortly after the abuse, or the abusive partner who ridicules, invalidates and belittles you on a daily basis? You suffer a great deal of cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile the illusion the narcissist first presented to you with the tormenting behaviors he or she subjects you to. In order to cope with this cognitive dissonance, you might blame yourself for his or her abusive behavior and attempt to “improve” yourself when you have done nothing wrong, just to uphold your belief in the narcissist’s false self during the devaluation phase.

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It’s a huge trauma made out of a million tiny shocks that shatter the memory, erode the self and break your life into fragments. It’s psychological terrorism at its worst and confusing as hell at its best. It’s an unforgettable event (or rather, series of unfortunate events) that creates some memorable cognitive dissonance because it hits the core of everything you once believed about the world. It also doesn’t make any sense—why would the same person who claimed to love and care for you hurt you—over and over without a hint of empathy or remorse? In the narcissist’s world, it’s simply because they can. To understand why narcissistic abuse is so traumatic and problematic, consider that the very nature of it distorts everything we hold true about humanity.

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Narcissistic abuse is rife with emotional neglect and unbelievable acts of murder and violence—only, most of it can never be traced back to the perpetrator because there may be no visible bloodshed. This type of abuse is brimming with psychological mind games, touched with a dash of intermittent sweetness to keep the victim constantly teetering over the edge of uncertainty and self-doubt. It is a relationship where the shadows of old scars dance with fresh wounds. When the cognitive dissonance about the abuser’s ever-shifting true identity mingles with self-doubt, a feeling of pervasive unworthiness lingers, an alienation that cannot be voiced aloud. When you’ve been psychologically and emotionally abused, there are no words that can describe the pain, no explanation that you can offer your friends and family without fearing they’ll look at you as if you’ve grown three heads.

Finance and the Good Society
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2012

If he should ever lift his nose out of the minutiae of his fascinating business and view its history whole, he would be forced to admit the sad truth that pitifully few nancial experts have ever known for two years (much less fteen) what was going to happen to any class of securities—and that the majority are usually spectacularly wrong in a much shorter time than that.4 Although Schwed’s book was anecdotal and presented no statistical evidence, it was an early and effective statement of the efficient markets theory. Cognitive Dissonance and Hypocrisy Cognitive dissonance, a term coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger, is a negative emotional response, a feeling of psychological pain, when something con icts with one’s stated beliefs—an emotional response that may lead to something other than a rational updating of the beliefs.5 In particular, when a person’s own actions are revealed to be inconsistent with certain beliefs, he or she often just conveniently changes those beliefs. Hypocrisy is one particular manifestation of cognitive dissonance, in which a person espouses opinions out of convenience and to justify certain actions, while often at some level actually believing them.

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The evidence that Festinger and his successors presented is solid: cognitive dissonance is a genuine phenomenon and leads with some regularity to human error—or at times to what we would label sleaziness. And yet there remains skepticism about cognitive dissonance in many quarters, particularly among people who feel committed to the fully rational model of human behavior. Recently a new form of evidence has appeared in support of Festinger’s theory. It has been found that brain structure is fundamentally tied to cognitive dissonance. Neuroscientist Vincent van Veen and his colleagues put human subjects in an experimental situation in which they were paid or otherwise incentivized to lie about their true beliefs as they were observed by functional magnetic resonance imaging.

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Importantly, those subjects with more activity in these regions showed a stronger tendency to change their actual beliefs to be consonant with the beliefs they were made to espouse.6 We thus have evidence of a physical structure in the brain whose actions are correlated with the outcome of cognitive dissonance, and that thus appears to be part of a brain mechanism that produces the phenomenon Festinger described based solely on his observations of human behavior. If hypocrisy is built into the brain, then there is a potential for human error that can be of great economic signi cance. A whole economic system can take as given certain assumptions, such as, for example, the belief in the years before the current nancial crisis that “home prices can never fall.” That theory was adopted by millions of people who would have experienced cognitive dissonance had they not done so, either because they were involved one way or another in a system that was overselling real estate or because they themselves had invested in real estate.

The Covert Passive-Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse
by Debbie Mirza
Published 6 Dec 2017

I also know since you have all that as your core, you are going to come out of this just fine, even better then you could imagine. Keep going. We need people like you in this world. Don’t let this take you out. You are the cream of the crop. You are the type of person that makes this planet a better place. Thank you for being brave, for being you. Cognitive Dissonance Cognitive dissonance is when you hold two conflicting beliefs in your mind. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “Psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously.” This is what makes covert narcissistic abuse so confusing and difficult. For so long you believed this person was kind and genuine.

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When I say “worst form,” I do not want to minimize anyone else’s trauma when dealing with an overt narcissist or any other type of psychologically abusive personality. Abuse is abuse—it is horrific and always undeserved. My heart goes out to anyone who has and is experiencing anything that harms and devalues them. One reason covert narcissists are so damaging is because of cognitive dissonance. This is when you have two competing thoughts in your mind. You love your mom, spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend and thought they loved you the same. Yet when you look back, their behaviors are making you question your beliefs about them. As you research you begin to wonder, “Could this person really have been controlling and manipulating me for years, and I didn’t see it… or were things really my fault and I’m just overdramatizing my experience?”

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As you research you begin to wonder, “Could this person really have been controlling and manipulating me for years, and I didn’t see it… or were things really my fault and I’m just overdramatizing my experience?” You have a solid belief that has been built up over years that this is a good person who cares about you, and at the same time, they are being incredibly cruel and controlling. The cognitive dissonance is dizzying and crazy making. The overt types of narcissists are obvious, in-your-face kind of people. They will let others know how great they are. When their mask comes off others around them roll their eyes and say, “Oh, yeah, he’s terrible.” On the other hand, covert narcissists are well liked.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

Some of those present camped out for weeks or even months, expecting something to happen imminently despite their many and repeated disappointments. It was only by the spring of 2022 that this most outlandish of Q-related subgroups finally began to dissipate, a full five months or so since the initial pronouncements. The group seemed to be displaying cognitive dissonance on a grand scale.15 ‘Cognitive dissonance’ is a psychological term for the discomfort that comes when two beliefs we strongly hold clash, or when a belief clashes with reality. If we have invested months of our lives – possibly losing jobs or relationships – in believing a conspiracy, and the moment of truth doesn’t come, we have two options.

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The study, eventually published as the book When Prophecy Fails in 1956 by Minnesota University Press, and its methodology remain deeply controversial to this day, but it was from it that the concept of cognitive dissonance is taken. It’s a core psychological tenet we’ve already applied to QAnon’s supporters, but to explain how Q survived January 2021, it merits deeper examination. Cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort we feel when our ideas or beliefs clash either with each other or with objective reality. This can be as simple as ‘I am a good person, but I have just stolen,’ or as specific as ‘I believe the world will end today, but it hasn’t.’

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At the same time, Q and its variants provided far more flexibility and alternative theories than conspiracies of old. We have seen how Q bifurcated and reformed in the years after inauguration – but let’s just look at the first few days and weeks afterwards, and see how it follows much the same cognitive dissonance process as was first observed in Dorothy Martin and her followers in 1954. Election day dissonance If we are going to consider the full-scale cognitive dissonance in QAnon, we need to look at how the movement’s US followers in particular – who were all fanatical supporters of Donald Trump – could continue to believe in at least some part of the plan after 20 January.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason
by Lee McIntyre
Published 14 Sep 2021

Their beliefs were my entrée, but my goal was to get them to talk about why they had them. Maybe I could ask them a question they’d never heard before. One that a 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, Karl Popper offers his theory of “falsification,” which says that a scientist always sets out to try to falsify their theory, not confirm it.35 In my book The Scientific Attitude, I developed a key insight from this, which is that—in order to be a scientist—you have to be willing to change your mind on the basis of new evidence.

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For an excellent psychological study of some of the motivations and causal influences in conversion to Flat Eartherism, see Alex Olshansky, Robert M. Peaslee, and Ashley Landrum, “Flat-Smacked! Converting to Flat-Eartherism,” Journal of Media and Religion, July 2, 2020, 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 the Earth was going to end on a specific date, so they waited on a mountaintop for a spaceship to pick them up. After the appointed time came and went, instead of giving up their belief they instead turned to the idea that the faith of their tiny group was so great that it had saved humanity. 35.

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Research has shown that for the most part, this is not even done at a conscious level.48 Perhaps this is why there is such a close kinship in our minds between someone who is “in denial” and someone who is a “denier.”49 We lie to ourselves as a means of more efficiently lying to others. Seventy years of social psychology has shown that satisfying the human ego is an important part 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. It also involves making sure that we present a favorable image of ourselves to those in our social circle, whose opinions we care about. Thus, our beliefs and behavior are formed in a hothouse of self-opinion, as reflected back to us in the opinion of others.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

It would be odd if this had not been a major topic of exploration, since it speaks so directly to our images of ourselves and others. While there have been many modes and idioms in which the question has been broached, for the sake of brevity we shall describe but one: the attempt to comprehend these responses as a case study in the social psychological problem of cognitive dissonance. The father of “cognitive dissonance theory” was the social psychologist Leon Festinger. In his premier work on the subject, he addressed the canonical problem situation which captures the predicament of the contemporary economics profession: Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart . . . suppose that he is then presented with unequivocal and undeniable evidence that his belief is wrong: what will happen?

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Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting people.24 This profound insight, that confrontation with contrary evidence may actually augment and sharpen the conviction and enthusiasm of a true believer, was explained as a response to the cognitive dissonance evoked by a disconfirmation of strongly held beliefs. The thesis that humans are more rationalizing than rational has spawned a huge literature, but one that gets little respect in economics.25 Cognitive dissonance and the responses it provokes venture well beyond the literature in the philosophy of science that travels under the rubric of Duhem’s Thesis, in that the former plumbs response mechanisms to emotional chagrin, whereas the latter sketches the myriad ways in which auxiliary hypotheses may be evoked in order to blunt the threat of disconfirmation.

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Predominantly, the long history of schooling, socialization, and past experience induces a stubborn inertia into cognitive processes. More commonly, people react to potential disconfirmation of strongly held views by adjusting their own understandings of the doctrine in question to accommodate the contrary evidence; this has been discussed in the social psychology literature under the rubric of “cognitive dissonance,” and in the philosophy literature as Duhem’s Thesis. Cognition sports an inescapable social dimension as well: people cannot vet and validate even a small proportion of the knowledge to which they subscribe, and so must of necessity depend heavily upon others such as teachers and experts and peers to underwrite much of their beliefs.23 And then there is a second major consideration relevant to our current conundrum, namely, the issue of whether most people who may subscribe to something like neoliberalism actually understand it to be constituted as a coherent doctrine with a spelled-out roster of propositions, or instead treat their notions as disparate implications of other beliefs.

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married
by Abby Ellin
Published 15 Jan 2019

How did I miss this? One answer is the psychological construct of cognitive dissonance, which posits discomfort when someone is faced with inconsistent evidence and driven to resolve the discrepancy. Like when my cousin told her eight-year-old son that she got pregnant with him because of sperm that swam fast to the finish line, and in the next breath told him the stork dropped him off in her lap. How could both be true? They could not. Still, somehow he managed to accept both ideas. That’s cognitive dissonance. The theory of cognitive dissonance was developed in the 1950s by Leon Festinger, a social psychologist who believed that humans needed internal consistency.20 He argued that we become psychologically uncomfortable with any kind of irregularity, and so we do everything in our power to diminish this dissonance.

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Peg Streep, “The Trouble with Trust,” Psychology Today, March 25, 2014, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/tech-support/201403/the-trouble-trust. 19. Telephone interview with author. 20. L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957). 21. Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956). 22. Ibid., 3. 23. Thea Buckley, “What Happens to the Brain During Cognitive Dissonance?,” Scientific American, n.d., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-to-the-brain-during-cognitive-dissonance1. 24.

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But Martin didn’t back down. Tomorrow, she promised. They’ll come tomorrow. Her followers stuck by her. In their 1956 book about the cult, When Prophecy Fails, Festinger and his coauthors concluded that “a man with a conviction is a hard man to change.” This applies to women, too, by the way.22 Cognitive dissonance is actually quite valuable, because it causes us to believe we have made intelligent, reasonable decisions.23 Our response is also called “motivated reasoning,” or motivated bias.24 It’s what we do when we seek out information that jibes with our previously held convictions. We discount anything that challenges our views.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal
Published 26 Dec 2013

We see others enjoying them, try a little more, and over time condition ourselves. To avoid the cognitive dissonance of not liking something that others seem to take so much pleasure in, we slowly change our perception of the thing we once did not enjoy. • • • Together, the three tendencies just described influence our future actions: The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it; we are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors; and finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance. These tendencies of ours lead to a mental process known as rationalization, in which we change our attitudes and beliefs to adapt psychologically.

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The homeowners’ greater willingness to place the large, obtrusive sign on their lawns after agreeing to the smaller one demonstrates the impact of our predilection for consistency with our past behaviors. Little investments, such as placing a tiny sign in a window, can lead to big changes in future behaviors. We Avoid Cognitive Dissonance In a classic Aesop’s fable, a hungry fox encounters grapes hanging from a vine. The fox desperately wants the grapes. Yet as hard as he tries, he cannot reach them. Frustrated, the fox decides the grapes must be sour and that therefore he would not want them anyway. The fox comforts himself by changing his perception of the grapes because it is too uncomfortable to reconcile the thought that the grapes are sweet and ready for the taking, and yet he cannot have them.

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The fox comforts himself by changing his perception of the grapes because it is too uncomfortable to reconcile the thought that the grapes are sweet and ready for the taking, and yet he cannot have them. To reconcile these two conflicting ideas, the fox changes his perception of the grapes and in the process relieves the pain of what psychologists term cognitive dissonance. The irrational manipulation of the way one sees the world is not limited to fictional animals in children’s stories. We humans do this as well. Consider your reaction the first time you sipped a beer or tried spicy food. Was it tasty? Unlikely. Our bodies are designed to reject alcohol and capsaicin, the compound that creates the sensation of heat in spicy food.

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
by Michael Huemer
Published 29 Oct 2012

Thus, the widespread belief in political authority does not provide strong evidence for the reality of political authority, since that belief can be explained as the product of systematic bias. 6.3 Cognitive dissonance According to the widely accepted theory of cognitive dissonance, we experience an uncomfortable state, known as ‘cognitive dissonance’, when we have two or more cognitions that stand in conflict or tension with one another – and particularly when our behavior or other reactions appear to conflict with our self-image.15 We then tend to alter our beliefs or reactions to reduce the dissonance. For instance, a person who sees himself as compassionate yet finds himself inflicting pain on others will experience cognitive dissonance. He might reduce this dissonance by ceasing to inflict pain, changing his image of himself, or adopting auxiliary beliefs to explain why a compassionate person may inflict pain in this situation.

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Aronson, Elliot. 1999. ‘Dissonance, Hypocrisy, and the Self-Concept’. Pp. 103–26 in Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology, ed. Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Aronson, Elliot, and Judson Mills. 1959. ‘The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59: 177–81. Aronson, Joshua, Geoffrey Cohen, and Paul R. Nail. 1999. ‘Self-Affirmation Theory: An Update and Appraisal’. Pp. 127–47 in Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology, ed. Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills.

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Some believe that it is dangerous to undermine belief in authority. 6.1.2 The appeal to popular opinion Some believe that the rejection of authority is too far from common-sense political beliefs to be taken seriously. 6.2 The Milgram experiments 6.2.1 Setup Milgram devised an experiment in which subjects would be ordered to administer electric shocks to helpless others. 6.2.2 Predictions Most people expect that subjects will defy the orders of the experimenter. 6.2.3 Results Two-thirds of subjects obey fully, even to the point of administering apparently lethal shocks. 6.2.4 The dangers of obedience The experiment shows that belief in authority is very dangerous. 6.2.5 The unreliability of opinions about authority The experiment also shows that people have a strong pro-authority bias. 6.3 Cognitive dissonance People may seek to rationalize their own obedience to the state by devising theories of authority. 6.4 Social proof and status quo bias People are biased toward commonly held beliefs and the practices of their own society. 6.5 The power of political aesthetics 6.5.1 Symbols The state employs symbols to create an emotional and aesthetic sense of its own power and authority. 6.5.2 Rituals Rituals serve a similar function. 6.5.3 Authoritative language Legal language and the language of some political philosophers serve to encourage feelings of respect for authority. 6.6 Stockholm Syndrome and the charisma of power 6.6.1 The phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome Kidnapping victims sometimes emotionally bond with their captors, as in the case of the Stockholm bank robbery. 6.6.2 Why does Stockholm Syndrome occur?

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

The pernicious effects of confirmation bias and related models can be explained by cognitive dissonance, the stress felt by holding two contradictory, dissonant, beliefs at once. Scientists have actually linked cognitive dissonance to a physical area in the brain that plays a role in helping you avoid aversive outcomes. Instead of dealing with the underlying cause of this stress—the fact that we might actually be wrong—we take the easy way out and rationalize the conflicting information away. It’s a survival instinct! Once you start looking for confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, we guarantee you will spot them all over, including in your own thoughts.

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Once you start looking for confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, we guarantee you will spot them all over, including in your own thoughts. A real trick to being wrong less is to fight your instincts to dismiss new information and instead to embrace new ways of thinking and new paradigms. The meme on the next page perfectly illustrates how cognitive dissonance can make things we take for granted seem absurd. There are a couple of tactical mental models that can help you on an everyday basis to overcome your ingrained confirmation bias and tribalism. First, consider thinking gray, a concept we learned from Steven Sample’s book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership. You may think about issues in terms of black and white, but the truth is somewhere in between, a shade of gray.

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Scott Fitzgerald once described something similar to thinking gray when he observed that the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability to function. This model is powerful because it forces you to be patient. By delaying decision making, you avoid confirmation bias since you haven’t yet made a decision to confirm! It can be difficult to think gray because all the nuance and different points of view can cause cognitive dissonance. However, it is worth fighting through that dissonance to get closer to the objective truth. A second mental model that can help you with confirmation bias is the Devil’s advocate position. This was once an official position in the Catholic Church used during the process of canonizing people as saints.

Surfaces and Essences
by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander
Published 10 Sep 2012

a uniquely human capacity, and computers can only dream with impatience of that far-off day when they, too, will at last be able to perceive that two situations so different on their 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, 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 as a quintessential example.

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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 by denying that he wants to eat them. Since they are sour (so he says), they are no longer desirable, so his failure to reach them is no longer upsetting. Much as the concept once bitten, twice shy contains the essence of the modern psychological notion 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 of arbitrary and often unlikely justification.

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For this reason, his fable not 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 of the 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, sometimes rather bizarre ones, in order to reconcile themselves with disappointing outcomes.

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life
by Emily Nagoski Ph.d.
Published 3 Mar 2015

Cultural Context: A Sex-Positive Life in a Sex-Negative World Three Messages You Are Beautiful Criticizing Yourself = Stress = Reduced Sexual Pleasure Health at Every Size “Dirty” When Somebody “Yucks” Your “Yum” Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 1: Self-Compassion Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 2: Cognitive Dissonance Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 3: Media Nutrition You Do You part 3 sex in action 6. Arousal: Lubrication Is Not Causation Measuring and Defining Nonconcordance All the Same Parts, Organized in Different Ways: “This Is a Restaurant” Nonconcordance in Other Emotions Lubrication Error #1: Genital Response = “Turned On” Lubrication Error #2: Genital Response Is Enjoying Lubrication Error #3: Nonconcordance Is a Problem Medicating Away the Brakes “Honey . . .

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Or twice a week. Or more. Each time, the things you like will become a little more salient and the noise will get a little quieter. Maybe even consider telling someone else about what you see and what you like. Better still, tell someone who also did the exercise! It’s an activity that gets labeled cognitive dissonance because it forces us to be aware of good things, when mostly we tend to be aware of the “negative” things. Try it. 2. Ask your partner, if you have one, to have a close look. Turn on the light, take off your clothes, get on your back, and let them look. Ask them what they see, how they feel about it, what memories they have of your vulva.

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But there’s growing evidence that disgust is impairing our sexual wellbeing, much as body self-criticism does, and there are things you can do to weed it out, if you want to. And that’s what I’ll talk about in the last section of this chapter. I’ll describe research-based strategies for creating positive change in both self-criticism and disgust: self-compassion, cognitive dissonance, and basic media literacy. The goal is to help you recognize what you’ve been taught, deliberately or otherwise, in order to help you choose whether to continue believing those things. You may well choose to keep a lot of what you learned—what matters is that you choose it, instead of letting your beliefs about your body and sex be chosen for you by the accident of the culture and family you were born into.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett
Published 9 Apr 2018

Another track of cognition studies – dealing with contradictions – arrived at this same end. We owe this work to Leon Festinger, the psychologist who developed the modern understanding of ‘cognitive dissonance’. This term refers to a situation in which there are contradictory rules of behaviour, or rules which are confusing. How will the subject respond? Festinger was a man of the experimental laboratory, making use of animals – he preferred pigeons – but he was thinking always about the application of his findings to human beings. He recognized, though, that cognitive dissonance, a condition which he created for the pigeons, is a painful state that people create for themselves. Aesop’s fable ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ is a classic instance of this.

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One way out of this bind, Festinger writes, is for ‘the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance’. This mentality can mean that ‘when dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance’. That’s the negative side of cognitive dissonance: the subject avoids its complexities whenever possible. The fox craves grapes but in time comes to lie about his craving: ‘I really don’t like grapes.’ Any ex-smoker will recognize this line.19, 20 There is also a positive way to respond to frustrating or contradictory experience. Knowing of my interest in complex environments, Festinger led me one day through a laboratory filled with caged pigeons trying to peer around obstacles hiding their watering tubes, or to make sense of feed troughs the experimenters had angled oddly.

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Florian Znaniecki recognized that neophytes are made uncomfortable by the silence of a subject, and are tempted to jump in with statements like, ‘In other words, Mrs Schwarz, what you mean to say is…’. Znaniecki counselled, don’t put words in their mouths; to do so is the cardinal sin of sociology. Since the time of the Chicago School, techniques have evolved for spotlighting meanings which are left inarticulate or contradictory; listening for cognitive dissonances figures in the education of the modern ethnographer. The fact that a subject contradicts him- or herself cannot be taken as a sign he or she is stupid or ignorant; rather, following Bakhtin, it is the context of the speech act that is crooked and contradictory. Little would be gained by the interviewer saying, ‘Mrs Schwarz, you contradict yourself’; that makes the difficulty her problem rather than one of the situation she finds herself in.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol
by Holly Glenn Whitaker
Published 9 Jan 2020

All this came together to dismantle my confirmation bias; drinking was no longer this precious wonderful thing, but a trap, and we were all in it. It was like learning that Santa Claus wasn’t real; once we know, we can’t go back. Carr’s book also smashed my cognitive dissonance into cognitive alignment. I was no longer of two minds: I desired to not drink, I believed not drinking could be fun and effortless, and I was excited for my nondrinking life to begin. When Carr instructed me to “never question the decision,” he was giving me the golden ticket for success—a way out of cognitive dissonance and a way out of battling myself. I decided not to drink, and I wouldn’t question it or need to use my willpower. If a friend called me on my way home from work when I’d had a bad day and asked me out for a drink, I wouldn’t need to think about whether I should or shouldn’t; I’d made up my mind to not drink, and I would uphold the decision.

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If I had a dollar for every person in recovery who told me I needed to take responsibility for my actions and stop vilifying poor alcohol—or worse, ruining it for the people who “can” drink—I’d be a rich woman. We love to protect alcohol and our right to consume it, and to vilify people who can’t handle it. We venerate the substance; we demonize those who get sick from using it. BELIEVING THE LIE The engineered controversy born of Big Tobacco’s need to keep the public trapped in cognitive dissonance—first over whether the cigarette was to blame, or a few unfortunate people with bad genes, and eventually over whether the mounting scientific evidence could be believed, or if we needed more proof—is the same mechanism that’s being applied to alcohol today. Because of this co-opting of Big Tobacco’s strategy, we hold on to ideas that alcohol is bad for a fraction of the population instead of all of us, or that it’s a matter of drinking responsibly versus drinking irresponsibly.

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Let’s say I believe that quitting alcohol is all but impossible, that people die trying to do it, or that people feel deprived without alcohol, or that their lives suck forever and ever amen—and I see this confirmed in the movies, or when Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen ends up back in rehab, or when my friend’s mom is still going to meetings more than twenty years after she quit—then my belief about quitting alcohol being terrible and impossible is right, and I should probably not try to do it. We see what we want to see, or what we’ve been trained to see, and our beliefs are constantly reinforced. The second concept is cognitive dissonance, which is when we have two conflicting thoughts at the same time. It’s the devil on one shoulder, angel on the other. We may not like hangovers, or saying stupid things, or forgetting portions of our evenings, or having beer guts or purple teeth, or fucking people we don’t like. But we also love how booze helps us overcome our shyness and inhibitions, be the life of the party, connect intimately, be able to have sex, and relax.

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds
by Kevin Dutton
Published 3 Feb 2011

But there’s no magic at work here – rather, the hand of cognitive dissonance. Two incontrovertible and antithetical cognitions – ‘I have spent X amount on this particular purchase’ on the one hand, and ‘I don’t like it and can’t change it’ on the other – are forced to cohabit the same bit of brainspace until one of two things happens. They either get their act together and sort out their differences. Or one of them packs its bags. Nine times out of ten, they learn to get along. The Neurology Of Influence The effects of cognitive dissonance demonstrate quite clearly how the propositional aspects of belief are closely tied in with emotion. 9But a recent experiment conducted by Sam Harris and his colleagues at the University of California in Los Angeles goes one better – and shows how belief, emotion and influence are possibly tied up in the brain.

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That there never had been a custom-built flying saucer. That the master plan to spirit them all off into the cosmos had never existed in the first place. And that the jobs, spouses and houses had all been abandoned in vain. 8Festinger’s exposé of Keech’s divinations precipitated an avalanche of research into the dynamics of cognitive dissonance. The flagship study, conducted by Festinger himself in 1959, did much to get things moving. The study consisted of three key ingredients: the obligatory cohort of students, a series of meaningless and mind-numbingly tedious tasks, and a downright whopper of a lie: the students had to perform the tasks and then rope in subsequent ‘participants’ (in reality, associates of the researchers) by claiming that they were actually interesting.

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The students, in the absence of any other justification for their behaviour, were forced to internalise the attitude they were induced to express – and came, in so doing, genuinely to believe that the tasks they had performed were enjoyable. On the other hand, those in the $20 group had reason to believe there was external justification for their behaviour – they were in it for the money. No confusion there over job satisfaction. Why We Love The Things We Hate (Especially If We Can’t Get A Refund) The perils of cognitive dissonance should feature uppermost in the mind of any prospective persuader. Especially in situations where there’s a lot at stake and the person whom one is persuading has much to lose. Festinger’s study – these days considered a classic – provided, for the very first time, concrete evidence of something that we now take for granted: powerful gravitational forces deep within our brains keep the orbits of both belief and behaviour in close psychological alignment.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
by Amanda Montell
Published 14 Jun 2021

Among New Age types, I’ve also heard semantic stop signs come in the form of wily maxims like “Truth is a construct,” “None of this matters on a cosmic level,” “I hold space for multiple realities,” “Don’t let yourself be ruled by fear,” and dismissing any anxieties or doubts as “limiting beliefs.” (We’ll discuss more of this rhetoric in part 6.) These pithy mottos are effective because they alleviate cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable discord one experiences when they hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. For example, I have an acquaintance who recently got laid off from her job, and she was lamenting to me about how beside the point it felt when people responded to her bad news with “Everything happens for a reason.”

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But her roommates and old coworkers didn’t want to think about those things, because doing so would make them anxious, suddenly hyperaware of the fact that life fundamentally bends toward entropy, which would conflict with their goal of appearing sympathetic. So they fed her a line—“Everything happens for a reason”—to simplify the situation and put everyone’s cognitive dissonance to bed. “It’s work to think, especially about things you don’t want to think about,” confessed Diane Benscoter, an ex-member of the Unification Church (aka the Moonies, an infamous ’70s-era religious movement). “It’s a relief not to have to.” Thought-terminating clichés provide that temporary psychological sedative.

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One anonymous ex-Way member recalled a traumatic glossolalia experience from her childhood for the blog Yes and Yes: “When I was 12, I was . . . required to speak in tongues in front of everyone, and I was so shy I couldn’t do it,” she said. “The man hosting the class . . . put his face very close to mine and essentially bullied me into speaking in tongues.” The girl’s parents watched the interaction unfold from across the room, benumbed by cognitive dissonance. “I was crying,” she continued. “The man was inches from my face . . . using the language of love in the most terrifying, bullying way.” Say you’re a child like this Way International survivor was or one of the Jesus Camp kids, who grew up in an oppressive religious environment and only ever knew its language.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr
Published 1 Jan 2013

A dark, opposing magic happens to our view of those who are on the ‘out’. But as damaging as it can be, we need prejudice. It is the shape of our models, the starting point for our guesses about the world. When our brains are told things that contradict their models, we often enter a state known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. In their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describe this as ‘a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are inconsistent, such as “smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day”.

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For their own candidate, however, ratings averaged closer to two, indicating minimal contradiction.’ But that was just the beginning. Westen also had his scans to consult. He wanted to know exactly what happened on the neurological level when new data arrived that conflicted with internal models; when their minds were blasted into a state of cognitive dissonance. As he expected, the unpleasant emotion was soothed away quickly. ‘But the political brain also did something we didn’t predict,’ he writes. ‘Once participants had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on.

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Psychics, homeopathy, chiropractors, ghosts, God – they don’t believe a word of it and that is one of their favourite things to do. The fallibility of human belief is the base upon which the Skeptics build their activism. As bracingly incredible as it was to me, it is highly likely that the ordinary Skeptic would have discovered nothing new in the chapter that precedes this one. Confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, unconscious ego-bolstering and the many illusions of vision are their foundational texts, their Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Skeptics rely on the findings of science, rather than the dubious anecdotes of individuals, to inform them about the world. They are knights of hard intellect whose ultimate goal is a world free of superstitious thinking.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 2 Jul 2009

We fume over the mistreatment of animals by agribusiness but freak out at an uptick in food prices. We lecture our kids on social responsibility and then buy them toys assembled by destitute child workers on some far flung foreign shore. Maintaining cognitive dissonance is one way to navigate a world of contradictions, and on an individual basis there’s much to be said for this. But somehow the Age of Cheap has raised cognitive dissonance to a societal norm. On May 1, 2008, the New York Times ran a cover story in its Styles section headlined “Is This the World’s Cheapest Dress?: How Steve & Barry’s Became a $1 Billion Company Selling Celebrity Style for $8.98.”

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Since these mall fees were essential to its survival, the company was required to expand continuously. In a sense, the company relied for its existence on a fully legal variation of a Ponzi scheme. Business plans like this are not built on a foundation of frugality. They are built on a platform of cognitive dissonance. Three months after boasting of their great success to the New York Times, Steve and Barry filed for bankruptcy. THRIFT MAY BE a bedrock American virtue, but it is no more branded into our DNA than it is branded into the DNA of any other culture. Benjamin Franklin, whose most famous homily translates roughly into “A penny saved is a penny earned,” confessed that thrift would elude even him were it not for Deborah, his frugal and hardworking wife.

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The chronic disregard for workers’ rights in China’s foreign-invested private sector threatens wages and working conditions around the globe, including the hard-won gains of American workers. Labor scholar Robert Bruno, a political economist at the University of Illinois, has observed that most Americans tend not to think of themselves as “workers.” This demands some level of cognitive dissonance because most of us do work for a living. But in a society where salesclerks in discount stores are called “associates” and garbage collectors “sanitary engineers,” the term “worker” has lost meaning. Bruno is certain that this is no accident, and explained why in one of several conversations we had over many months.

How the Mind Works
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 1997

Darwin’s anti-Darwinism: Fridlund, 1992. 415 Voluntary and involuntary facial expressions, method acting, and the brain: Damasio, 1994. 415 Honest signaling in animals: Dawkins, 1976/1989; Trivers, 1981; Cronin, 1992; Hauser, 1996; Hamilton, 1996. 416 Emotions and the body: Ekman & Davidson, 1994; Lazarus, 1991; Etcoff, 1986. 417 Theory of mad love: Frank, 1988. 417 Marriage market: Buss, 1994; Fisher, 1992; Hatfield & Rapson, 1993. 419 Tactics for controlling self and others: Schelling, 1984. 420 Grief as a deterrent: Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a. 421 Self-deception: Trivers, 1985; Alexander, 1987a; Wright, 1994a; Lockard & Paulhaus, 1988. Self-deception and Freudian defense mechanisms: Nesse & Lloyd, 1992. 422 Split brains: Gazzaniga, 1992. 422 Lake Wobegon effect: Gilovich, 1991. 422 Beneffectance: Greenwald, 1988; Brown, 1985. Cognitive dissonance: Festinger, 1957. Cognitive dissonance as self-presentation: Aronson, 1980; Baumeister & Tice, 1984. Beneffectance and cognitive dissonance as self-deception: Wright, 1994a. 424 Argument between husband and wife: Trivers, 1985, p. 420. 424 Explaining Hitler: Rosenbaum, 1995. 7. Family Values 426 Greening of America controversy: Nobile, 1971. 426 Nineteenth-century Utopias: Klaw, 1993. 427 Human universals: Brown, 1991. 427 The thirty-six dramatic situations: Polti, 1921/1977. 427 Darwinian competitors: Williams, 1966; Dawkins, 1976/1989, 1995. 428 Homicide rates: Daly & Wilson, 1988.

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When they are fooled in a fake experiment into thinking they have delivered shocks to another subject, they derogate the victim, implying that he deserved the punishment. Everyone has heard of “reducing cognitive dissonance,” in which people invent a new opinion to resolve a contradiction in their minds. For example, a person will recall enjoying a boring task if he had agreed to recommend it to others for paltry pay. (If the person had been enticed to recommend the task for generous pay, he accurately recalls that the task was boring.) As originally conceived of by the psychologist Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is an unsettled feeling that arises from an inconsistency in one’s beliefs. But that’s not right: there is no contradiction between the proposition “The task is boring” and the proposition “I was pressured into lying that the task was fun.”

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But that’s not right: there is no contradiction between the proposition “The task is boring” and the proposition “I was pressured into lying that the task was fun.” Another social psychologist, Eliot Aronson, nailed it down: people doctor their beliefs only to eliminate a contradiction with the proposition “I am nice and in control.” Cognitive dissonance is always triggered by blatant evidence that you are not as beneficent and effective as you would like people to think. The urge to reduce it is the urge to get your self-serving story straight. Sometimes we have glimpses of our own self-deception. When does a negative remark sting, cut deep, hit a nerve?

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter
Published 9 Jan 2007

No matter what Bill does, you’ll see it through a prism that confirms he’s a jerk. Even the times when he’s not a jerk, you’ll interpret it as the exception to the rule that Bill’s a jerk. It may take years of saintly behavior for Bill to overcome your perception. That’s cognitive dissonance applied to others. It can be a disruptive and unfair force in the workplace. Yet cognitive dissonance actually works in favor of successful people when they apply it to themselves. The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of evidence that shows we may have chosen the wrong path.

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It means turning that muscular commitment on its head. Easy to say, hard to do. The more we believe that our behavior is a result of our own choices and commitments, the less likely we are to want to change our behavior. There’s a reason for this, and it’s one of the best-researched principles in psychology. It’s called cognitive dissonance. It refers to the disconnect between what we believe in our minds and what we experience or see in reality. The underlying theory is simple. The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong.

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In other words, now that you’ve said you’re sorry, what are you going to do about it? I tell my clients, “It’s a lot harder to change people’s perception of your behavior than it is to change your behavior. In fact, I calculate that you have to get 100% better in order to get 10% credit for it from your coworkers.” The logic behind this is, as I’ve explained in Chapter 3, cognitive dissonance: To recap, we view people in a manner that is consistent with our previous existing stereotypes, whether it is positive or negative. If I think you’re an arrogant jerk, everything you do will be filtered through that perception. If you do something wonderful and saintly, I will regard it as the exception to the rule; you’re still an arrogant jerk.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
by Kathryn Schulz
Published 7 Jun 2010

True, certainty cannot protect us from error, any more than shouting a belief can make it true. But it can and does shield us, at least temporarily, from facing our fallibility. The psychologist Leon Festinger documented this protective effect of certainty in the 1950s, in the study that gave us the now-famous term “cognitive dissonance.” Along with several colleagues and hired observers, Festinger infiltrated a group of people who believed in the doomsday prophecies of a suburban housewife named (actually, pseudonymed) Marian Keech. Keech claimed that she was in touch with a Jesuslike figure from outer space who sent her messages about alien visits, spaceship landings, and the impending destruction of the world by flood.

…

However much we might be prompted by cues from other people or our environment, the choice to face up to error is ultimately ours alone. Why can we do this sometimes but not others? For one thing, as we saw earlier, it’s a lot harder to let go of a belief if we don’t have a new one to replace it. For another, as Leon Festinger observed in his study of cognitive dissonance, it’s a lot harder if we are heavily invested in that belief—if, to borrow a term from economics, we have accrued significant sunk costs. Traditionally, sunk costs refer to money that is already spent and can’t be recovered. Let’s say you shelled out five grand for a used car, and three weeks later it got a flat tire.

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“The flight attendant comes down the aisle.” David Sedaris, “Undecided,” the New Yorker, Oct. 27, 2008. “we must be fully committed.” Rollo May, The Courage To Create (W. W. Norton and Co., 1994), 20. The second quotation in this paragraph is from p. 21. In both cases, the italics are his. cognitive dissonance (FN). Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schacter, When Prophecy Fails (Torchbooks, 1994). CHAPTER 9 BEING WRONG The quotations from Anita Wilson and from the psychoanalyst Irna Gadd are from my interviews with each of them. Greg Markus. Marcus, G. B, “Stability and Change in Political Attitudes: Observe, Recall, and ‘Explain.’”

The World According to Physics
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 10 Mar 2020

Many who hold such views will always try to interpret and favour evidence in a way that confirms their pre-existing hypotheses. This is known as confirmation bias. Often, in the case of ideological beliefs, we also hear the term ‘cognitive dissonance’, whereby someone will feel genuine mental discomfort when confronted with evidence supporting a view contrary to their own. This potent combination of confirmation bias and the avoidance of cognitive dissonance works to reinforce pre-existing beliefs. So, trying to persuade someone in this frame of mind with scientific evidence can often prove to be a waste of time. Many people, facing an avalanche of widely different views through both the mainstream and social media, understandably find it difficult to know what to believe.

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INDEX absolute zero, 102 Adams, Douglas, 5 AdS/CFT (anti–de Sitter/conformal theory correspondence; gauge/ gravity duality), 232–33 alpha particles, 101–2 Anderson, Carl, 103–4 Anderson, Philip, 47 Andromeda galaxy, 98 antigravity, 212–13 antimatter, 7, 13, 103–5 antiquarks, 96n1, 176n2 Anu (Sumerian god), 1 Archimedes, 16, 25 Aristotle, 16, 45, 57–58, 74, 77 artificial intelligence (AI), 161, 235, 240, 250, 255, 256–57 atomic clocks, 39 atomism, 16–17, 45 atoms, 15; composition of, 224; types of, 16–17 axions, 200 Banks, Joseph, 108 Bell, John, 126–27 beta radioactivity, 94, 96 Big Bang, 7, 32, 34, 98–101, 103, 150; cosmology model of, 179; in eternal inflation theory, 216; verification of, 269–70 binary data, 251 binary pulsars, 226 biology, 21, 111, 161, 236, 242–44 biomass, 151 biophysics, 242 bits, 251 black holes, 195, 221, 223, 233; entropy of, 279; evaporation of, 215, 220; formation of, 106; gravitational pull from, 72; Hawking radiation emitted from, 24, 220 block universe model, 68–69, 70–71, 79–81 Bohm, David, 136 Bohr, Niels, 122–23, 124, 125, 132 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 46 Born’s rule, 124 Bose-Einstein condensates, 226 bosons, 6–7, 13, 25, 93, 96–97, 181 Broglie, Louis de, 136 bubble universes, 217–18 Bullet Cluster, 197 butterfly effect, 157–58, 160 carbon, 106 celestial mechanics, 55 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), 174, 228 chaos, 21, 160–61 chemistry, 21, 91, 236, 241–42, 256; quantum theory and, 9, 117, 173, 246 Classical Physics, 111–12 climate, 151, 240, 271, 272–73 cloud technology, 255 COBE satellite, 199 cognitive dissonance, 272 cold dark matter, 179, 200 colour charge, 95–96, 175–76 comets, 18 complexity, 21 complex systems, 161 computer science, 241, 246, 250–58 concordance model, 179 condensed matter, 232, 233, 236 confirmation bias, 272, 277 conformal cyclic cosmology, 215–16 conservation, laws of, 41 consistent histories interpretation, 127 conspiracy theories, 271–72 constrained minimal supersymmetry, 231 Copenhagen interpretation, xiii, 123, 125, 127, 128 Copernican (heliocentric) model, 4, 26–27, 126 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 27 Cosmic Background Explorer (Explorer 66), 199n2 cosmic inflation, 208–19, 276 cosmic microwave background (CMB), 34, 101, 197, 198–99 cosmological constant, 203 cosmology, 12 creation myths, 1 Crick, Francis, 243 CT (computed tomography), 246 curved spacetime, 64n2, 78, 82, 187, 234; dark matter and, 196; gravitational field linked to 72–73, 163, 170; inflation and, 209 dark energy, 7, 9, 193, 202–5, 210, 226, 276 dark matter, 7, 9, 42, 105–6, 179, 193–201, 231, 276 de Broglie–Bohm theory, 137 decoherence, 133, 135 Delbrück, Max, 243 Democritus, 16, 44–45 Descartes, René, 55, 57–58, 59–60, 74, 77 determinism, 155–58 diffraction, 114 Dirac, Paul, 13, 14, 103, 171–72 Dirac notation, 124 disorder, 21 DNA, 243, 249 Doppler effect, 63 double helix, 243 doubt, in scientific inquiry, 266–67, 274 dwarf galaxies, 197 dynamical collapse interpretation, 127 economics, 161 Einstein, Albert, xiv, 124, 222–23, 280; field equations of, 82, 129; light quanta hypothesized by, 112–13; Newtonian theory replaced by, 8, 36, 61; nonlocality and entanglement mistrusted by, 131–32; as philosophical realist, 130; photoelectric effect explained by, 29–30; thought experiments by, 56.

Urban Transport Without the Hot Air, Volume 1
by Steve Melia

And that’s where I’ve made another discovery. The psychologists call it ‘cognitive dissonance’, a fancy term for something most of us would recognise in people around us. Put simply, where people’s behaviour conflicts with their attitudes, one or the other is likely to change. The young radical who gets a promotion and becomes more conservative, the SUV driver who convinces himself that climate change is a conspiracy invented by governments: these are the results of cognitive dissonance – people’s attitudes changing to reflect their behaviour. Cognitive dissonance affects all of us at different times in different ways.

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Page numbers in italic refer to figures A accessibility planning 222 air pollution 25, 30, 42, 227 airport expansion 33–4, 110 Amsterdam 62, 63, 67, 148, 158, 217 anti-collision technology 119 Ashford 81, 84, 85–6 Athens 227 autonomous vehicles 119, 214, 229–30 aviation air travel restraint policy 34 airport expansion 33–4, 111 business travel 10, 238 greenhouse gas emissions 13, 14 leisure flights 29, 33, 238 ‘tourism gap’ 29, 33–4, 34 B Baker, Norman 22 Barclays Cycle Superhighways 176 Basel 61, 62, 148 Bassam, Steve 185, 232 Bath 217 Baugruppen 157 Bayliss, David 165 Berkeley Group 56–7, 58 Big Brother Watch 27 Birmingham 99, 180 Bogotá 71 Boles, Nick 93 Bonn 63 Bordeaux 148 Bracknell 151 Bradley Stoke 94–5, 96, 96, 105, 107–8 Brighton 85, 86, 184–95, 221 bus use 186–8, 186, 189, 193, 194 car ownership 210 car-free development 189, 189 cycling 190, 191, 194 demographics 189, 192–3, 210 Green Party policies 190–2 housing development 189, 195 modal shift 192–4 park and ride 190–1 parking schemes 188 rail 194 travel patterns 185, 192–4, 193 walking 194–5 Bristol car-free development 161 cycling 63, 67, 72, 76, 78, 78 housing development 99, 99 pedestrianization 88, 208 road network 116–17, 117 trams 141 UWE transport 206–8 Bristol to Bath cycle path 72, 73, 74 British Social Attitudes Survey 59 Brown, Gordon 104, 173, 174 brownfield development 55, 98–9, 100, 101 Brundtland Commission 120–1 Buchanan report 112–16, 117–18, 150, 164, 182 bus gates 64 bus travel bus rapid transport (BRT) 40, 205, 211, 221 bus-to-bus changes, resistance to 41, 222 competitive practices 45–6 deregulation 23–4, 38, 43, 45–6, 193 diesel buses 42 European countries 43 fares 23–4, 24, 38, 44 free 41–2, 43 guided busways 90, 202, 204–5, 205 impact on car use 38, 41, 42, 106 low emission buses 42 national bus use 44 orbital bus services 41 peak-time commuting 42, 43 in permeable street networks 90 radial routes 41 real-time information 188 reregulation 223 speeds 41 ‘bus wars’ 45 business attitudes 134–5, 143–4, 147, 182, 191–2 business travel see work, travel to bypasses 113 C calculation fallacy 10–11, 37 Cambourne 105, 196 Cambridge 60, 76, 184, 192, 195–206, 219 bus use 204–5, 206 Cambridge Core Traffic Scheme 197–200, 197, 202, 204, 221, 235 car ownership 210 cycling 196, 200–4, 201, 202, 203 demographics 210 filtered permeability 202, 203 Holford report (planning strategy) 195–6 political consensus 206 public transport 204–6 rail 204 travel patterns 185, 200 Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) 17–18, 232 car clubs 52, 155, 159, 222, 224, 227 car ownership Buchanan report forecasts 112–13, 112 demographics 162, 222 income and 53, 57 ‘normality’ of 26, 28, 238 parking restraints, impact of 49, 54, 55, 57–9, 110, 218, 219 predictor of car use 49, 50–3, 50, 229 public transport, impact of 58 reasons for not owning 53–4, 57, 180 rural areas 224 car purchase tax 21 car sharing 52 car use adults without cars 52–3, 52, 229 cost trends 21, 21, 24, 24 income and 53 measuring 51 ‘peak car’ 28, 211 personal freedom issues 25 public transport improvements, impact of 38, 39, 110 social costs 25 time savings 35 see also shared space car-free choosers 27, 28, 53–4, 161–2, 237–8 car-free developments 149–62, 219–20 parking overspill 157–8, 160 social benefits 159 see also under Brighton; Cologne; Freiburg; London; Louvain-la-Neuve carbon emissions 42, 119, 229 carbon trading systems 37 Cardiff 184 cars carbon emissions 14, 16, 19, 24–5 environmental-related problems 16 see also autonomous vehicles; electric cars casualties cycling and 27–8, 67, 69, 70, 75–6, 78 legal liability for 75–6 pedestrian 79 speed and 26, 27, 36 catchment populations 96 Churchill, Winston 24 climate change 13, 14, 110, 229, 236, 237 cost–benefit analysis (CBA) and 37 Climate Change Act 2008 14 Climate Change Committee 14, 15, 226, 229 cognitive dissonance 237 Collomb, Gérard 144 Cologne 148 Stellwerk 160 (car-free development) 158–61, 158, 159, 160 combined local authorities 181 commercial development 55, 56 Commission for Integrated Transport (CfiT) 50–1 Competition Commission 45 Confederation of British Industry (CBI) 30, 215 congestion 42, 211–14, 229 economic costs 215 options for dealing with 113–22, 212–14, 229–30 rich cities 215 tolerance of 118, 214 congestion charging 77, 122, 171, 174–5, 180, 181, 213, 214 connectivity 146, 222 Connex 46 Copenhagen 61, 69, 148 cost–benefit analysis (CBA) 29, 30, 35–7, 146, 228 courtesy crossings 86 Coventry 63 Cranbrook 107, 220 Crossrail 174, 178, 225 cycle hire schemes 71, 143, 143 cycle parking 68, 69, 130, 131, 135, 139, 140, 159 cycling 23, 60–78, 224–6 cycling culture argument 61, 70 European rates of 60, 61, 61, 62, 62, 63, 68–9, 182 flat terrain and 63, 70 government spending on 73 health benefits 30 hostility to 71, 225, 226 main roads 76 male dominance (UK) 67, 73, 75, 176, 226 pedestrianization and 67, 68, 87 in permeable street networks 90 protective clothing 67 push factors 70 reasons for not cycling 65, 67, 75 red lights, jumping of 68 and road casualties 27–8, 67, 69, 70, 75–6, 78 shared-space schemes 88 time cost 75, 76 traffic conditions and 63, 75 UK rates of 61, 71–2, 76 weather conditions and 63 Cycling Embassy of Denmark 77 Cycling Embassy of Great Britain 77, 203–4 cycling networks 37, 60, 61, 64, 71, 72 ad hoc design compromises 75 cycling contraflows 67, 176, 176 cyclist-only traffic light phasing 68, 139, 140 ‘Dutch-style’ infrastructure 77–8, 225, 226 European cities 64–5 filtered permeability 64, 65, 176, 176 hierarchy of provisions 74–5, 74, 77, 225 hostility to segregation 72, 73 hybrid paths 65, 66, 75, 77, 191 priority at junctions 68 safety auditors 65 segregated routes 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 82 selective road closures 67 separation of cyclists and pedestrians 65, 78, 225, 226 substandard provision 76, 76 cycling priority roundabouts 65, 66 Cyclists Touring Club (CTC) 71–2, 77 D Darlington Transport Company (DTC) 45 Daseking, Wulf 124 Davey, Ian 190, 191, 192 De Mello, Lianne 172, 191–2 Delleske, Andreas 157 demarcations, removal of 81, 85 Denmark cycling 61, 65, 66, 69, 75, 78 see also Groningen Department for Transport (DfT) 11 cost-benefit analysis (CBA) 35–7 and eco-towns, transport in 106 Economic case for HS2 47–8 Manual for Streets 75, 89, 91 National Cycling Strategy 72 and shared space 80, 84, 89 Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions 98 deregulation 23–4, 38, 43, 45–6, 84, 168, 181, 193 Dickens Heath 105 diesel buses 42 disabled people 84, 86, 114, 139, 226 domestic tourism 34 Downs, Anthony 214 Drachten 82, 82, 83 driverless cars see autonomous vehicles Dutch Cycling Embassy 76–7 E Earl, Dave 197, 198, 200–1, 204, 206, 235 eco-towns programme 104–5, 220, 221 opposition to 106 transport facilities 106 Edinburgh 158, 161, 184 electric cars 14–15, 110, 119, 224, 226–7, 229 charging systems 15–16, 227 environmental campaigns local campaigning 231–5 personal travel behaviour 236–8 transport planners 235–6 environmental capacity 114 environmental sustainability, attitudes to 110 European best practice 120–2 see also Freiburg; Groningen; Lyon European travel patterns 120, 121 Exeter 161, 162 Exhibition Road, London 80, 80, 219 F false consensus effect 56 falsely positive responses to surveys 207 ‘family houses’ 103, 218 Ferguson, George 208 ferry services 34 filtered permeability vii, 64, 65, 90, 106, 113, 137, 175, 176, 176, 182, 197, 199, 202, 203 Filton 95–6, 96 First Group 47 flats 10, 98–9, 100, 218 proportion of housing stock 92, 100, 101, 102, 102, 103 social housing 103 ‘floating bus stops’ 190, 191 flyovers 114 footbridges 64 France local government 145 motorway networks 120 national planning policy 144–5, 227 tram systems 221 transport revenue stream 228 see also Lyon free market ideology 84 Freiburg 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 122, 123–34, 219, 221 car ownership 132, 133, 157 cycling network 129–30, 130, 131 demographic profile 148 parking 132, 155, 157 pedestrianization 124, 124, 133 public transport, extension of 125–8, 125 road network 128 stellplatzfrei residential streets 155–6, 156 traffic restraint 128–9, 147 trams 126, 126, 127–8, 127, 132, 141 transport plan 123, 124–30 travel patterns 132, 133 urban planning 130–2 Vauban (car-free development) 155–8, 156 walking, fall in 147 French, Roger 187, 188, 193 fuel tax 10, 19, 20–1, 21, 213, 214 fuel tax protests 20, 213 G garden cities 106–7, 220 funding 106–7 see also eco-towns programme Germany car ownership and use 10, 49, 51, 51, 52 cycling 61, 63, 65, 69 motorway networks 120 transport decision-making 227 see also Freiburg Glasgow 184 GNER 47 good practice British see Brighton; Cambridge; London European see Freiburg; Groningen; Lyon governance issues 227–8 GPS route finding 118 greenfield development 17, 18, 55, 97, 100, 117, 212, 216–17, 220, 221, 234 land prices 103–4 greenhouse gas emissions 13–14, 14, 42, 119, 229 grid roads 89, 89, 117, 118 Groningen 61, 67, 122, 134–41, 147, 219 car ownership 134, 136, 140 cycle network 64, 137–9, 138 demographic profile 148 parking 136 traffic restraint 134–6, 136, 147 travel patterns 139, 140 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 30 guardrails 81 guided busways 90, 202, 204–5, 205 H Hackney 175, 176, 182, 219, 225 Hammersmith Flyover 116 Hammond, Philip 22 Harlow 151 Hasselt 41–2 health and safety culture 65 heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) 121 Heffer, Simon 27 Heidelberg 63 Hendy, Peter 163, 166, 169, 171–2, 177, 182 high-speed rail (HS2) 22, 23, 37, 38, 47, 223 budgeted cost 47 customer projections 40, 40 low-carbon argument 47–8 home zones 156 Hong Kong 23 household size and composition 10, 17, 92, 101, 102, 106 housing crashes 94 housing densities 94, 96–7, 98, 99, 100, 101, 106, 151 housing development brownfield development 55, 98–9, 101 ‘car-free’ 57, 58 density guidance 98, 99 facilities, provision of 95 ‘fill in and spread out’ 117, 216 greenfield development 17, 18, 55, 97, 100, 101, 103–4, 117, 212, 216–17, 220, 221, 234 ‘knock down and spread out’ 116, 118, 164, 212, 216 localised employment opportunities 107–9 parking requirements and guidelines 55, 56, 98, 99 see also eco-towns programme; garden cities; New Towns programme; small new settlements; urban intensification housing prices 218 hybrid paths 65, 66, 75, 77, 191 hydrogen 16 I immigration 17 in-group favouritism 19, 26, 27 integrated transport networks 36–7, 71, 146, 147, 214, 216, 227 joined-up decision-making 227–9 inter-urban travel 117 International Air Transport Association (IATA) 33 Islington 57 Ivybridge 65, 105, 105, 107, 108–9, 108, 234 J jet packs 118 Johnson, Boris 77, 174, 176–7, 178 K Kent County Council 56, 177 Kent Fastlink 40, 40 kerbs 81 Kiley, Bob 173, 175 Klaauw, Cor van de 137, 139 Kleinmann, Hans-Georg 158, 159 L land prices 103–4 land use planning eco-towns programme 104–5, 220, 221 New Towns programme 94, 103, 104, 117, 150–1, 154, 221 post-Second World War 94 relationship to transport 92–109 see also housing development Lessing, Doris 231 Leuven 149 light rail networks 37, 141 Liverpool 208–9, 209, 210 Livingstone, Ken 163, 164, 165, 166–8, 169–70, 171, 173, 174–5, 176–7, 178, 181, 182, 183 Local Enterprise Partnerships 228 Local Sustainable Transport Fund 22 Local Transport Today 13, 235 localism 100 London 163–83 average traffic speeds 213 bus use 39, 42, 44, 46, 163, 168, 171–3, 181 car clubs 224 car ownership 58, 179–80, 180, 210 car use 62 car-free developments 161, 162, 179, 220 car-free households 58 commuting into 108, 194, 204 congestion charging 77, 122, 171, 174–5, 180, 181, 213 cycling 62, 62, 77, 163, 175–6, 176, 182, 224–5 demographics 178, 179, 210 Fares Fair policy 165–6, 171 GLC, abolition of 167, 168 Mayor’s Transport Strategy 170–1 Oyster card 44, 172, 173 parking policies 56–7, 58, 179 population 58, 169, 170 public transport network 62, 163–83 public transport subsidy 165, 181, 182 rail 177, 178 Roads Task Force 182, 220 shared space 80, 80 total traffic volumes 163, 180 trams 141 transport issues (1980s) 163–8 transport policy under Boris Johnson 176–7, 178 transport policy under Ken Livingstone 163–76, 178 travel patterns 164, 167, 178–9 Travelcards 165, 167, 168 underground travel 39, 62, 171, 173–4, 177 walking 163, 182 London Cycling Campaign 77, 175–6 London First 169 London Overground 177, 178 London Plan 169 London Regional Transport (LRT) 167, 168, 169 Louvain-la-Neuve 147, 148, 149–55, 150, 219 car ownership 152 car-free development 149–55 cycle network 150, 154–5 housing density 151 parking 152 rail travel 151–2, 154 shared space 150 travel patterns 152–3, 153, 154 walking 152, 153, 154 Lyon 122, 141–6, 147, 219 capital investment programme 147 car ownership 145 cycle hire 143, 143 cycle network 143, 144 demographic profile 148 parking 143–4 public transport budget 141–2, 142 traffic restraint 147 trams 141, 142, 144 transport tax 142 travel patterns 145–6, 146 trolleybuses 141, 142 walking, growth in 147 Lyons Review 107 M Maastricht 148 Major, John 72, 168 Malmö 61, 65, 148 Manchester bus travel 40, 41 Metrolink 40, 40, 41, 126–7 trams 10, 40, 126–7, 181–2 Marples, Ernest 112 Menzies, Bob 199 Merseyrail 209, 209 Milan 175 Milton Keynes 117, 118, 151, 152, 221 Mitchell, Gill 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 195 mobility scooters 139, 226 modal shares 62, 74, 95, 121, 133, 134, 140, 146, 154, 164, 184, 185 modal shift 20, 48, 83, 87, 147, 178, 180, 192–4, 205, 207, 221 mode neutrality 20 Monderman, Hans 82, 83 Monopolies and Mergers Commission 45 Moody, Simon 84 Morton, Alex 93 motorway tolls 21 multi-level roads 115–16 multi-storey parking 115, 159 multiplier effects of public spending 31 Münster 148 MVA Consultancy 83, 85 myths of urban transport 9–10, 19, 29, 38, 49, 60, 79, 110 N Nailsea 151 Napier, Christopher 233–4 National Bus Company (NBC) 186, 193 National Cycle Network 65, 72 National Cycling Strategy 72, 73–4, 74 National Express 47 national parks 189, 191, 232–3 national pattern of transport movements 39, 39 national transport budget 73 Nelson 87–8 neoliberal ideologies 84, 93, 174 Netherlands cycling 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69–70, 70, 75, 78, 82 motorway networks 120 shared-space schemes 85 transport decision-making 69, 227 see also Groningen Network Rail 47 New Towns programme 94, 103, 104, 117, 150–1, 154, 221 New Urbanist movement 75, 91 New York City 57 nimbyism 17, 97, 234 Norris, Stephen 177 North American street layouts 89, 89, 90 Northampton 63 Northstowe 220 Nottingham 193, 228 Nuremberg 156 O Odense 62, 68, 69, 148 oil crisis (1973–4) 69 out-group behaviour 27 Oxford 191 bus travel 42, 43, 193 cycling 196 Oyster card 44, 172–3 P Paris 170, 182, 183, 217, 227, 239, 239 park and ride schemes 42, 190–1, 197 parking allocated parking 56 charges 129, 143, 147, 207, 213 commercial car parks 219 cycle parking 68, 69, 130, 131, 135, 139, 140, 159 driverless 119 multi-storey 115, 159 new housing developments 55–6 Radburn layout 151 underground parking 143–4 workplace parking levy 228 parking permits 57, 152, 188 parking restraint impact on car ownership 49, 54, 55, 57–9, 110, 218, 219 local authority discretion 56 new developments 55–6 opposition to 221 without parking control 55, 56, 57, 100 Parsons, Trevor 175 peak-time travel 42, 114, 172, 223 pedestrian crossings 219 pedestrian walkways 114–15, 115, 116 pedestrianization 32, 79, 80, 81, 87–8, 161, 213 Buchanan report and 113 economic impact 87, 161 night time use 87 residential developments within 87 social value 88, 219 walking and cycling, encouragement to 87 Penn Center, Philadelphia 115, 116 permeable street networks 79, 89–91 personal freedom issues 25 personal rapid transport systems 119, 120, 230 personal travel behaviour 236–8 planning permission 100 play streets 128, 156, 157 Plowden, Ben 178, 179, 182 Plymouth 107, 108, 108, 109, 234 Policy Exchange 93, 94 policy response bias 134–5 pool cars 238 Poole 54, 54, 57 population growth 17, 220 Portsmouth 178 Prescott, John 20, 98, 173, 233 Prince’s Foundation 89, 91 productivity measurement 31 public realm improvements 143–4, 208, 225 public spending, multiplier effects 31 public transport and behaviour change 38, 40, 41–2 extra journeys, creation of 38, 42, 132, 191 impact on car ownership 58 impact on car use 38, 39, 110 journey times 222 limitations of 38–48 promotion costs 147 rural areas 224 subsidies 114, 165, 181, 182, 223 public-private partnerships (PPPs) 173, 174 Q Quality Partnerships 204 R RAC Foundation 26, 57 Radburn layout 151 rail cost trends 24, 24 eco-towns and 106 expansion 46, 47, 221, 222, 223 fares 23, 223 HS2 see high-speed rail privatisation 23, 46–7 public subsidy 23, 23, 47 renationalisation 46–7 track charges 47 ‘raised table’ junctions 137, 139 Rennes 143 ‘right to buy’ legislation 103 ring roads 116 rising bollards 197, 199 risk compensation theory 84 road building 22, 211 economic impacts 29, 30–3 funding 19, 24 and increased traffic generation 29, 33, 110 public subsidy 23, 23 road capacity increasing 33, 118, 212 reducing 67, 84, 213 road closures 32–3, 67, 197, 198, 213, 228 road pricing 114, 118, 119, 211, 213–14 revenue-neutral 213–14 see also congestion charging road tax 19, 24 see also vehicle excise duty road widths 67 Roads Task Force 182, 220 Runcorn 151, 154 rural transport 94, 104, 223–4 S Salomon, Dieter 124 Scotland bus service regulation 223 housing planning policies 99, 103 season tickets 125, 126 Seoul 32 settlement size, and traffic generation 104, 105, 218 Seville 60, 70–1 shared space 75, 79–91, 80, 212, 219 as alternative to pedestrianization 87 casualty reductions and 84, 85 concept originator 82 courtesy crossings 86 cyclists and 88 definitions of 80, 81 demarcations, removal of 81, 85 hostile environment 79, 85–6 impact on car use 84 impact on traffic speed 85 permeable street networks 79, 89–91 reasons for implementation 83 resistance to 88 risk compensation theory 84 short-termism 228 showers, workplace 67 Sinden, Neil 17–18, 232, 234 Skelmersdale 154 small new settlements and traffic generation 93, 105, 106 unsustainable development 107, 220 smartcards 44, 172–3 Smith, Jeremy 196, 204, 206 social capital 83 social housing 103, 160, 218 social value 30, 88, 159 SOLUTIONS project 94–6 South Woodham Ferrers 105, 105, 106 Southampton 129 Spain 61, 70–1 speed cameras 19, 22, 25–7, 36 revenue-raising argument 25, 26, 27 Stagecoach 45, 187 Stevenage 151 Stockholm 175 Stopps, Vincent 175 Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) 46–7 subsidies public transport 114, 165, 181, 182, 223 rail travel 23, 23, 47 suburbs and traffic generation 93 travel patterns 94–6, 95, 96, 96 sustainable development: definitions of 120–1 Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) 25 sustainable transport 121 opposition to 25 reduced government support for 22–3 see also good practice Sustrans 72, 202 Switzerland 61 T Thatcher government transport policies 43, 72, 164, 167 time savings 31, 35, 36, 37 Todd, Chris 189, 190, 191, 233 Tokyo 182 Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) 106 traffic lights 81, 84 cyclist-only phasing 68, 139, 140 switching off 212 traffic management in towns 112–22, 212 Buchanan report 112–16, 117–18, 150, 164, 182 opposition to 147 traffic restraint 16, 42, 114 see also congestion traffic speeds 20 mph zones 26, 27, 191–2 in shared-space schemes 79, 85 trams 10, 205–6, 221 Bristol 141 Freiburg 126, 126, 127–8, 132, 141 London 141 Lyon 141, 142, 144 Manchester 10, 40, 40, 126–7, 181–2 Transport for London (TfL) 62, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 181, 220, 224–5 transport planners 235–6 transport tax 142, 228 transport–economy relationship 29–37, 215 Travelcards 165, 167, 168 trip chaining 33 trolleybuses 141, 142 U UKIP 25, 71, 206 Ultra personal rapid transit system 119, 120, 230 underpasses 64, 114, 115 university cities 148, 149–50, 192, 194, 196, 206 see also individual index entries University of the West of England (UWE) 58, 88, 206–8 ‘urban extensions’ 105, 220 urban intensification 96–7, 99, 100, 217–20, 229, 234 car-free development, opportunities for 219–20 paradox of 96–7, 100, 218 supportive public transport 222 visible improvements, importance of 219 V value judgments 11, 29, 36 vehicle excise duty 19, 24–5, 214 Venice 155 Vienna 158, 159 voluntary behaviour change 114, 119, 212–13 W walking 62, 72 health benefits 30 pedestrianization and 87 in permeable street networks 90 ‘war on the motorist’ 19, 20, 22, 25, 28, 56 Ward, Steve 206–7 Welsh housing planning policies 103 Wetzel, Dave 163–6, 166, 167, 171, 172, 173, 174–5, 177 White, Bob 56 Wixams 105, 105 Woitrin, Michel 149, 150, 151, 155, 219 Wolmar, Christian 168, 182–3 work, travel to 92, 222 bus 40, 194 car 10 cycling 194 flying 10, 238 local employment opportunities, impact of 107–8 new settlements and 105–6, 105 population density, relation to 93–4, 93 rail 35, 105–6, 194, 204 tram 40 two-way commuting 108, 109 work–home transition time 109 Y York 191, 196 Also in the ‘without the hot air’ series Volume 2 of Urban Transport – without the hot air looks at urban transport in the American context.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

Crashes occur (the accident rate on French roads is so high that a French transport minister notoriously appealed to his compatriots to drive ‘comme les anglais’). But an element of cognitive dissonance creeps into accounts of the crash. The accident victim blames someone else for his misfortune: usually with some justification. The accidents that result from tailgating are triggered by some other immediate cause – an obstruction on the road, a mistake by another driver. The same cognitive dissonance enabled many bankers to persuade themselves – and some others – that the global financial crisis was not caused by their imprudent behaviour.

…

By 2007–8 it became apparent that even the most senior tranche of a package of mortgages sold to people who were in default and whose houses were difficult to sell was likely to be worth very little. The story of that collapse has been told in detail in many places.6 Mozilo would settle charges levelled against him by the SEC with a payment of $67.5 million. With the cognitive dissonance of the tailgater, he would explain that the considerably larger amount he had received for his services as chief executive of Countrywide was justified by the profits that his company had reported from the sale of mortgages before the borrowers failed to pay them back. I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.

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Carbolic Smoke Ball Company 61, 316n13 Carnegie, Andrew 52 Carney, Mark 288 Carroll, Lewis: Through the Looking Glass 111 ‘carry trades’ 129 Carville, James 248, 249, 252 Casablanca (film) 292 Cassano, Joe 120, 293 Cayman Islands 122 Cayne, Jimmy 90 Central Banks 43, 75, 98, 183, 184, 242–6 Chacoan civilisation 277 Challenger space shuttle 276, 327n3 Channel Tunnel 158 chartism 110 Chelsfield 158 Chequers country residence, Buckinghamshire 231 Chesterton 158 Chicago Board of Trade 17 Chicago Butter and Egg Board 17, 19 Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) 19–20, 23, 31 China, economic growth in 53, 69 Chinese Revolution (1949) 3 Citibank 51, 166, 186 Citicorp 33–4, 37, 38, 48 Citigroup 1, 34, 35, 48, 49, 51, 57, 59, 91, 124, 134–5, 138, 191, 242, 293, 300 Citizens United case (2010) 304 City of Glasgow Bank 292 City of London 1, 20, 262, 263, 266, 268, 303, 305 careers in 12, 15 a pre-eminent financial centre 13 staffing of 217 Civil Aeronautics Board 238 civilisations, collapse of 277 Cleveland, Grover 233, 237 Clinton, Bill 5, 57, 205 closet indexation 206 Coca-Cola 108 ‘code staff’ 266 cognitive dissonance 102, 152 coin-tossing game 96, 105 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 59–60, 63 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 40, 63–4, 73, 101, 131, 244, 303 Collins, Senator S.M. 114, 117 commercial banks acquisitions 24 capital strength 28 investment banks within 22 payments system 25 public companies 30 short-term lending 25 structure of 30 commercial paper 163 Commerzbank 169 Commodity Futures Modernization Act (2000) 119 Commodity Futures Trading Commission 57, 288 Communist states 3, 39 company directors 84 competition 111–14 Confucius 270 Conrad, Joseph: Typhoon 233, 235 consumer debt 175 consumer protection 259–62 contactless payment cards 181, 186 corporate treasurer 164 corporation tax 266 correlation 96, 97–8 Corrigan, E.

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion
by Dean Burnett
Published 10 Jan 2023

After all, absorbing, processing, and retaining abstract information is vitally important, but often hard work for our brains, so anything that challenges the information they’ve laboriously accumulated is technically a threat, as it could potentially undo all that hard work and throw our understanding of the world into disarray. That’s why being presented with information that 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 or cynically than we would more neutral things, allowing us to figure out reasons to reject it, and preserve our existing views and beliefs. It speaks to the powerfully fundamental nature of emotions that it’s often a lot easier to change what you think than it is to change what you feel.

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Exploring the perspectives of adolescents’, Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2018, 23(4): pp. 601–613. 42 Burnett, S., et al., ‘The social brain in adolescence: evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioural studies’, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2011, 35(8): pp. 1654–1664. 43 Kleemans, M., et al., ‘Picture perfect: the direct effect of manipulated Instagram photos on body image in adolescent girls’, Media Psychology, 2018, 21(1): pp. 93–110. 44 O’Reilly, et al., ‘Is social media bad?’. 45 Quinn, K., ‘Social media and social wellbeing in later life’, Ageing & Society, 2021, 41(6): 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 emotion via touch’, Emotion, 2009, 9(4): p. 566. 50 Radulescu, A., ‘Why do we walk around when talking on the phone?’, Medium, 13 October 2020. 51 Oppezzo, M. and D.L.

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Rangel, ‘Social and monetary reward learning engage overlapping neural substrates’, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2012, 7(3): pp. 274–281. 119 Nickerson, R.S., ‘Confirmation bias: a ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises’, Review of General Psychology, 1998, 2(2): pp. 175–220. 120 Bolsen, T., J.N. Druckman, and F.L. Cook, ‘The influence of partisan motivated reasoning on public opinion’, Political Behavior, 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): pp. 1–20. 124 Brady, W.J., et al., ‘How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks’, Science Advances, 2021, 7(33). 125 Holman, E.A., D.R.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 6 Nov 2012

Models based on past results forecast in the belief that the future will be characteristically similar to history. In each case, our minds—or the models our minds construct—anticipate without giving suitable consideration to other possibilities. When in Doubt, Rationalize Your Decision Cognitive dissonance is one facet of our next mistake, the rigidity that comes with the innate human desire to be internally and externally consistent.14 Cognitive dissonance, a theory developed in the 1950s by Leon Festinger, a social psychologist, arises when “a person holds two cognitions—ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions—that are psychologically inconsistent.”15 The dissonance causes mental discomfort that our minds seek to reduce.

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So the exhausted members, led by Mrs. Keech, started calling newspapers, radio stations, and wire services. From then on, the cult opened up. “The house was crowded with the nowwelcome horde of newspaper, radio, and television representatives,” the scientists wrote, “and visitors streamed in and out the door.”18 While cognitive dissonance is about internal consistency, the confirmation bias is about external consistency. The confirmation bias occurs when an individual seeks information that confirms a prior belief or view and disregards, or disconfirms, evidence that counters it.19 Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, notes that consistency offers two benefits.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
by Stuart Ritchie
Published 20 Jul 2020

The number 3.08 in my example was a deliberate choice, because it’s a notable one from the history of the GRIM test – and psychology research in general. In 2016, the psychologist Matti Heino applied the GRIM test to one of the most famous psychology papers of all time: Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith’s 1959 paper on ‘cognitive dissonance’13. This is the now widely known idea that forcing someone to say or do something inconsistent with their true beliefs will make them psychologically uncomfortable and they’ll do their best to alter those beliefs to make them fit with what they’ve been made to say or do. In the 1959 study, participants were made to complete some tedious, pointless tasks, such as endlessly twisting pegs around on a pegboard.

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They’d reduced their dissonance, in other words, by making themselves believe they’d had fun.14 Alas, Heino’s use of the GRIM test showed that it wasn’t just the participants’ beliefs that were inconsistent – it was Festinger and Carlsmith’s numbers.15 They reported an average score of 3.08 for a sample of twenty people filling in a scale of 0-to-10, which as we just saw isn’t possible, alongside several other averages that failed the GRIM test. Cognitive dissonance is a remarkably useful concept that makes intuitive sense, and the experiment was clever and memorable. But would the thousands of researchers who’ve cited Festinger and Carlsmith’s study over the years have done so if they’d known it was riddled with impossible numbers?16 The story reminds us once more that even ‘classic’ findings from the scientific literature – the ones that you would hope had been examined most rigorously – can be wholly unreliable, with what should be the most important part, the numbers and the data, acting as mere window-dressing in service of an attention-grabbing story.

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Carlsmith, ‘Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 58, no. 2 (1959): pp. 203–10; https://doi.org/10.1037/h0041593 14.  There was actually a third group, who were paid $20. They reported finding the task as tedious as did those who weren’t paid anything – supposedly because they had reduced their cognitive dissonance by thinking of all that nice money, rather than by altering their beliefs. 15.  Matti Heino, ‘The Legacy of Social Psychology’, Data Punk, 13 Nov. 2016; https://mattiheino.com/2016/11/13/legacy-of-psychology/ 16.  As of January 2020, the paper has over 4,200 citations, according to Google Scholar. 17.  

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

In general, according to Smith, the desired identity is of someone who is ‘lovely… or the natural and proper object of love’, and the judgement by the impartial spectator of what is lovely will always be as in the eyes of others. But what happens when such a person does something at odds with their identity—something that they know is not lovely in the eyes of others? The result, according to the great American social psychologist Leon Festinger, is cognitive dissonance: that is, a feeling of discomfort which encourages the individual to rationalize their action as having somehow been right all along. For Smith, this is seen in the excuses offered for infanticide in ancient Greece, that it ‘is commonly done, and they seem to think this a sufficient apology for what, in itself, is the most unjust and unreasonable conduct’.

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To take a recent example, when it was shown that weapons of mass destruction did not exist in Iraq in 2003, and therefore that the stated rationale for the US-led invasion of Iraq had been groundless, supporters of the invasion generally did not accept this; instead they insisted that the war had been a success anyway, was justified for other reasons, had brought peace, had increased international security and the like. Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance, and his earlier work on social comparison, sit at the heart of much modern social psychology; and they revisit ideas to be found in Adam Smith. But Smith’s work also hints at a deeper explanation for these phenomena. Recall that for Smith someone’s reputation or public character is part of their personal property, under what he calls the jus sincerae aestimationis, or right to an unspoiled reputation.

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This private internal reputation can be a hugely useful asset in supporting someone’s belief in their value in the world, their will to make things happen and their resilience in the face of adversity. But it also leads directly to the patterns of defensive self-justification described by Festinger. Treating people’s core beliefs and moral identity as property assets, perhaps hard-won, in Smithian fashion makes it easier to understand their reluctance to give them up in the face of cognitively dissonant behaviour. But this approach can also help to explain many other kinds of behaviour as well. People who see themselves as rich in the assets of moral identity tend to behave in a more entitled way. They are more likely to ‘coast’, that is, to give themselves licence to misbehave in later situations, while those who see themselves as depleted may take up worthy causes: privately in an effort to renew their identity capital, or publicly to renew their reputation with others.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
by Jamie K. McCallum
Published 15 Nov 2022

Over time, this shared experience led essential workers to see themselves as a group, and they developed what social scientists often call “class consciousness”: an awareness of one’s class position relative to others in the social hierarchy, and a set of beliefs that help shape class-based organization. Class consciousness is not a simple recognition of fact but the outcome of a process, usually set in motion by a political struggle. During the pandemic, the cognitive dissonance between essential workers’ popular designation as heroes and their actual treatment as sacrificial servants inspired collective action and a distinct awareness of their class interests. At the same time, differences among essential workers strained unity on the front lines. The classic sociological dividing lines of race, gender, and immigration status were in some sense less significant barriers than were other pandemic-specific obstacles: mass unemployment, the ability to telecommute, occupation, political differences and voting behavior, and popular recognition of one’s essential status.

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Why is it essential that someone says “Welcome to Walmart” every time a patron enters the store during a global health crisis? The answer is because Walmart, and in this case the government of Massachusetts, prioritized the business culture of the world’s largest boss over the health of workers and citizens. It was exactly this cognitive dissonance—of being both essential and sacrificial, simultaneously heroic and disposable—that was at the heart of the problem of defining what an essential worker really is. Scholar Benedict Anderson argued that nations form as “imagined communities.” The members of a particular region might not know each other or ever meet, yet “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”24 Imagined communities don’t simply form automatically but emerge through shared norms, language, values, cultural codes, and common enemies.

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Rather than resenting a system that denied paid leave to workers, her coworkers directed their frustration toward her. “In a way, I get it—I was avoiding some risks during my time off,” she said. “That’s what mattered most to all of us.” The pandemic ignited a frontline class consciousness, motivated in large part by the cognitive dissonance of being simultaneously celebrated as heroes and exposed to so much workplace risk. The language of being “essential” was almost always part of the rhetoric of protest. As I’ll explore in later chapters, these newly class-conscious workers mobilized and launched organized movements in diverse ways, profoundly reshaping labor politics and the fight for worker justice in America.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

“Tell him you disagree and he turns away,” Festinger continues. “Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” It’s easy to scoff at the story of Mrs. Martin and her believers, but the phenomenon Festinger describes is one that none of us are immune to. “Cognitive dissonance,” he coined it. When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview. Not only that, we become even more rigid in our beliefs than before.1 Mind you, we tend to be quite flexible when it comes to practical matters. Most of us are even willing to accept advice on how to remove a grease stain or chop a cucumber.

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When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come. Long Was the Night In 2008, it seemed as if that time had finally come when we were confronted with the biggest case of cognitive dissonance since the 1930s. On September 15, the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Suddenly, the whole global banking sector seemed poised to tumble like a row of dominoes. In the months that followed, one free market dogma after another crashed and burned. Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, once dubbed the “Oracle” and the “Maestro,” was gobsmacked.

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Joris Luyendijk, a journalist at The Guardian who spent two years looking under the hood of London’s financial sector, summed up the experience in 2013 as follows: “It’s like standing at Chernobyl and seeing they’ve restarted the reactor but still have the same old management.”13 You have to wonder: Was the cognitive dissonance from 2008 even big enough? Or was it too big? Had we invested too much in our old convictions? Or were there simply no alternatives? This last possibility is the most worrying of all. The word “crisis” comes from ancient Greek and literally means to “separate” or “sieve.” A crisis, then, should be a moment of truth, the juncture at which a fundamental choice is made.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
by James E. Lovelock
Published 1 Jan 2009

I am not a contrarian; instead I greatly respect the climate scientists of the IPCC and would prefer to accept as true their conclusions about future climates. I do not enjoy argument for its own sake but I cannot ignore the large differences that exist between their predictions and what is observed. In human affairs we know that ‘he who hesitates is lost’; social scientists talk of ‘cognitive dissonance’, which the composer of the phrase, Leon Festinger, defined as the feeling of discomfort we feel when trying to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously and the urge to reduce the dissonance by modifying or rejecting one of the ideas. It operates when we choose between two almost equal objects and, having chosen, invest our choice with superlative advantage over the alternative so that we can happily reject it.

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We have to choose and then have faith in our choice; this applies to the jobs we take, how we vote, the purchases we make, and the marriages to which we commit ourselves. It applies also to a judge or jury, but it is worse than useless in science. However, scientists are human and we never entirely escape the pull of cognitive dissonance. The range of forecasts by the different models of the IPCC is so large that it is difficult to believe that they are reliable enough to be used by governments to plan policy for ameliorating climate change. It is a brave try at an exceedingly difficult scientific task and probably we are expecting too much from them: it would be wrong to expect the view of the panel to be truly authoritative.

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This third component of my knowledge base has taught me that above all humans hate any conspicuous change in their daily way of life and view of the future. As Bertrand Russell put it, ‘The average man would rather face death or torture than think.’ The overwhelming wish to continue with business as usual applies far beyond the marketplace and may be a consequence of the cognitive dissonance I wrote about earlier. Business as usual is unfortunately how most of science is done even though we know that it has no place in science’s probabilistic world. For practical and administrative reasons we cannot suddenly change the direction of research of a large and expensive laboratory built around a costly assembly of instruments, computers and specialized staff; this may be part of the reason why our forecasts do not agree well with expectations drawn from the history of the Earth.

The Four Horsemen
by Christopher Hitchens , Richard Dawkins , Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett
Published 19 Mar 2019

And then they would think, ‘Oh, this is one of those cosmic shifts that Dennett and Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens are talking about. Oh, right! And they think this is somehow illicit.’ Just to create a little more awareness in them of what a strange thing it is that they’re doing. HITCHENS: I’m afraid to say that I think that cognitive dissonance is probably necessary for everyday survival. Everyone does it a bit. DENNETT: You mean tolerating cognitive dissonance? HITCHENS: No, practising it. Take the case of someone who’s a member of MoveOn.org.*4 They think the United States government is a brutal, militaristic, imperial regime. It crushes the poor and invades other people’s countries.

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web
by Paul Adams
Published 1 Nov 2011

The larger number of choices were good for getting people’s attention, but were ultimately far worse for sales.2 In a study on how people select pension funds, when 95 funds were offered, about 60 percent of people participated, but when only 2 funds were offered, the rate of participation jumped to 75 percent.3 When Procter & Gamble reduced the number of Head & Shoulders products from 26 to 15, they saw a 10 percent increase in sales.4 Often it is better to offer fewer choices. Although we want more information, when we have two or more conflicting ideas in our head, we become overwhelmed. This is known as cognitive dissonance and we often experience it when shopping. When this happens, we often pick the option that matches our current beliefs, and disregard all other options without evaluating them properly. When we buy things, in particular expensive things, we often feel discomfort after the purchase because we’re not sure if the purchase was a good decision.

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Yet, presenting them with evidence that what they currently do is a bad choice is one of the worst ways to change people’s behavior or attitude. At best, this has little influence, as we automatically ignore information counter to our beliefs. At worst, the conflicting evidence brings about cognitive dissonance, and because we don’t like to hold opposing views in our head, we become more ingrained in what we believed before. It’s incredibly hard to change people’s attitudes. It’s much easier to invoke behavioral change first, and then attitudinal change later. Changes in behavior almost always lead to changes in attitude.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

It would have been easy for someone of her stature to reject outright the critics’ views, refuse to change the show, lose her investors’ money, set back the careers of her young dancers, and go to the grave convinced that the world had misunderstood her masterpiece. Why is denial such a natural tendency? Psychologists have a name for the root cause which has become famous enough that many non-psychologists will recognise the term: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance describes the mind’s difficulty in holding two apparently contradictory thoughts simultaneously: in Tharp’s case, ‘I am a capable, experienced and respected choreographer’ and ‘My latest creation is stupefyingly clichéd.’ This odd phenomenon was first pinned down in an ingenious laboratory experiment half a century ago.

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Carlsmith, ‘Cognitive consequences of forced compliance’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58 (1959), 203–10. 252 ‘It means that the sperm found’: Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (London: Pinter & Martin, 2008), p. 150. 252 Bromgard had spent fifteen years in prison: Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (London: Portobello, 2010), pp.233–8. 253 ‘One of the worst professional errors’: Tavris & Aronson, Mistakes Were Made, p.130. 253 ‘I didn’t promote myself as a star’: Twyla Tharp, Push Comes to Shove (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 82. 253 ‘That experience remains intensely painful’: Tharp, Push Comes to Shove, p. 84. 253 ‘Bob and I had lost a baby’: Tharp, Push Comes to Shove, p. 98. 255 Naturally the subject usually chose: M. D. Lieberman, K. N. Ochsner, D. T. Gilbert, & D. L. Schacter, ‘Do amnesics exhibit cognitive dissonance reduction? The role of explicit memory and attention in attitude change’, Psychological Science, 12 (2001), 135–40. 255 ‘Happiness being synthesised’: Dan Gilbert at TED, February 2004, http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html 256 Taught Petraeus that everyone is fallible: David Cloud & Greg Jaffe, The Fourth Star (New York: Crown, 2009), p. 43. 257 ‘She didn’t try to console me’: Tharp & Reiter, The Creative Habit, p. 221. 257 The reviews are harsh but fair: Reviews by Hedy Weiss, Michael Phillips & Sid Smith, references above. 257 ‘All you need are people’: Tharp & Reiter, The Creative Habit, p. 229. 258 People with regular jobs tend to receive feedback: Andrew Oswald, ‘What is a happiness equation?’

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, 165 Bertrand, Marianne, 135 Bhopal disaster, 184 Billing, Noel Pemberton, 87–8 biomass systems, 170–1 bird flu, 97 Björkman, Martina, 142–3 Blair, Tony, 20, 30, 141 Boulton-Paul Defiant aircraft, 85 BP, 216–19, 245 Bradley, James, 106 Branson, Sir Richard, 112, 243 Brazil, 117, 148 breeding, selective, 175–6 Bremer, Paul, 1700000140345 >58 Brin, Sergey, 232 Bromgard, Jimmy Ray, 252 Buiter, Willem, 205 bulldog, British, 175–6 Bulow, Jeremy, 205 Bunting, Madeleine, 130 Burroughs 3500 computer, 69–71 Bush, Laura, 119 Bush, President George W., 20, 59, 64 business world: evolutionary theory and, 14–15, 16, 17, 18–19, 174–5, 233–4; failure in, 8–10, 11–12, 18–19, 36, 148–9, 224, 239–46; see also corporations and companies; economics and finance Cadbury’s dairy milk chocolate, 165 CAFE environmental standards in USA, 172–3, 176 Canon, 241 Capecchi, Mario, 97–101, 102, 114, 140, 152, 223 Carbon Trust, 163–5 Cardano, Gerolamo, 83 Carlsmith, James, 251> Case Foundation, 119 Casey, General George W., 55, 59, 71 catastrophe experts, 184–6, 191, 194–5, 208 Cave-Brown-Cave, Air Commodore Henry, 81, 83, 85, 88, 114 centralised decision making, 70, 74–5, 226, 227, 228; warfare and, 46–7, 67–8, 69, 71, 76, 78–9 centrally planned economies, 11, 21, 23–6, 68–9, 70 Challenger shuttle disaster, 184 Charles, Prince, 154 Chernobyl disaster, 185 Chile, 3, 69–72, 76, 148 China, 11, 94, 131, 143, 147, 150, 152 Christensen, Clayton, 239–40, 242, 245 Chuquicamata mine (Chile), 3 Churchill, Winston, 41–2, 82, 85 Citigroup, 205131 Clay Mathematics Institute, 110 climate change, 4, 20; carbon dioxide emissions and, 132, 156, 159–65, 166–9, 173, 176, 178–80; ‘carbon footprinting’, 159–66; carbon tax/price idea, 167–9, 178–80, 222; environmental regulations and, 169–74, 176, 177; ‘food miles’ and, 159, 160–1, 168; governments/politics and, 157–8, 163, 169–74, 176, 180; greenhouse effect and, 154–6; individual behaviour and, 158–63, 164, 165–6; innovation prizes and, 109, 179; methane and, 155, 156, 157, 159–60, 173, 179, 180; new technologies and, 94–5; simplicity/complexity paradox, 156, 157–8; Thaler-Sunstein nudge, 177–8; uncertainty and, 156 Coca-Cola, 28, 243 Cochrane, Archie, 123–7, 129, 130, 140, 238, 256 cognitive dissonance, 251–2 Cold War, 6, 41, 62–3 Colombia, 117, 147 complexity theory, 3–4, 13, 16, 49, 72103, 237 computer games, 92–3 computer industry, 11–12, 69, 70–1, 239–42 corporations and companies: disruptive technologies and, 239–44, 245–6; environmental issues and, 157–8, 159, 161, 165, 170–1, 172–3; flattening of hierarchies, 75, 224–5, 226–31; fraud and, 208, 210, 212–13, 214; innovation and, 17, 81–2, 87–9, 90, 93–4, 95–7, 108–11, 112, 114, 224–30, 232–4; limited liability, 244; patents and, 95–7, 110, 111, 114; randomised experiments and, 235–9; skunk works model and, 89, 91, 93, 152, 224, 242–3, 245; strategy and, 16, 18, 27–8, 36, 223, 224–34; see also business world; economics and finance cot-death, 120–1 credit-rating agencies, 188, 189, 190 Criner, Roy, 252 Crosby, Sir James, 211, 214, 250, 256 Cuban Missile Crisis, 41, 63 Cudahy Packing, 9 dairy products, 158, 159–60, 164–5, 166 Darwin, Charles, 86 Dayton Hudson, 243 de Montyon, Baron, 107–8 Deal or No Deal (TV game show), 33–5, 253 decentralisation, 73, 74–8, 222, 224–5, 226–31; Iraq war and, 76–8, 79; trial and error and, 31, 174–5, 232, 234 decision making: big picture thinking, 41, 42, 46, 55; consistent standards and, 28–9; diversity of opinions, 31, 44–5, 46, 48–50, 59–63; doctrine of unanimous advice, 30–1, 47–50, 62–3, 64, 78; grandiosity and, 27–8; idealized hierarchy, 40–1, 42, 46–7, 49–50, 55, 78; learning from mistakes, 31–5, 78, 119, 250–1, 256–9, 261–2; local/on the ground, 73, 74, 75, 76–8, 79, 224–5, 226–31; reporting lines/chain of command, 41, 42, 46, 49–50, 55–6, 58, 59–60, 64, 77–8; supportive team with shared vision, 41, 42, 46, 56, 62–3; unsuccessful, 19, 32, 34–5, 41–2; see also centralised decision making Deepwater Horizon disaster (April 2010), 36, 216–19, 220 Democratic Republic of Congo, 139–40 Deng Xiaoping, 1 Denmark, 148 Department for International Development (DFID), 133, 137–8 development aid: charter cities movement, 150–3; community-driven reconstruction (CDR), 137–40; corruption and, 133–5, 142–3; economic ‘big push’ and, 143–5, 148–9; feedback loops, 141–3; fundamentally unidentified questions (FUQs), 132, 133; governments and, 118, 120, 143, 144, 148–9; identification strategies, 132–5; microfinance, 116, 117–18, 120; Millennium Development Villages, 129–30, 131; product space concept, 145–8; randomised trials and, 127–9, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135–6, 137–40, 141; randomistas, 127–9, 132, 133, 135–40, 258; selection principle and, 117, 140–3, 149; SouthWest project in China, 131; success and failure, 116, 118–20, 130–1; Muhammad Yunus and, 116, 117–18 digital photography, 240–1, 242 Dirks, Ray, 211–12, 213 disk-drive industry, 239–40, 242 Djankov, Simeon, 135 domino-toppling displays, 185, 200–1 Don Basin (Russia), 21–2, 24, 27 dot-com bubble, 10, 92 Dubai, 147, 150 Duflo, Esther, 127, 131, 135, 136 Dyck, Alexander, 210, 213 eBay, 95, 230 econometrics, 132–5 economics and finance: banking system as complex and tightly coupled, 185, 186, 187–90, 200, 201, 207–8, 220; bankruptcy contingency plans, 204; Basel III regulations, 195; bond insurance business, 189–90; bridge bank/rump bank approach, 205–6; capital requirements, 203, 204; centrally planned economiepos=0000032004 >11, 21, 23–6, 68–9, 70; CoCos (contingent convertible bonds), 203–4; complexity and, 3–4; decoupling of financial system, 202, 203–8, 215–16, 220; Dodd-Frank reform act (2010), 195; employees as error/fraud spotters, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215; energy crisis (1970s), 179; evolutionary theory and, 14–17, 18–19, 174–5; improvements since 1960s, 215; inter-bank payments systems, 207; latent errors and, 209–10, 215; ‘LMX spiral’, 183–4, 189; narrow banking approach, 206–7, 215; need for systemic heat maps, 195–6; reinsurance markets, 183; zombie banks, 201–2; see also business world; corporations and companies; financial crisis (from 2007) Edison, Thomas, 236, 238 Eliot, T.S., 260 Elizabeth House (Waterloo), 170–1, 172 Endler, John, 221–2, 223, 234, 239 Engineers Without Borders, 119 Enron, 197–8, 200, 208, 210 environmental issues: biofuels, 84, 173, 176; clean energy, 91, 94, 96, 245–6; corporations/companies and, 159, 161, 165, 170–1, 172–3; renewable energy technology, 84, 91, 96, 130, 168, 169–73, 179, 245; see also climate change Equity Funding Corporation, 212 Ernst and Young, 199 errors and mistakes, types of, 208–10; latent errors, 209–10, 215, 218, 220 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), 188 European Union, 169, 173 Evans, Martin, 100 evolutionary theory, 6, 12–13, 15–17, 174, 258; business world and, 14–17, 174–5, 233–4; Darwin and, 86; digital world and, 13–14, 259–60; economics and, 14–17, 174–5; Endler’s guppy experiments, 221–2, 223, 239; fitness landscapes, 14–15, 259; Leslie Orgel’s law, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180; problem solving and, 14–15, 16; selective breeding and, 175–6 expertise, limits of, 6–8, 16, 17, 19, 66 extinction events, biological, 18–19 Exxon (formerly Jersey Standard), 9, 12, 188, 245 F-22 stealth fighter, 93 Facebook, 90, 91 failure: in business, 8–10, 11–12, 18–19, 36, 148–9, 224, 239–46; chasing of losses, 32–5, 253–4, 256; in complex and tightly coupled systems, 185–90, 191–2, 200, 201, 207–8, 219, 220; corporate extinctions, 18–19; denial and, 32, 34–5, 250–3, 255–6; disruptive technologies, 239–44, 245–6; of established industries, 8–10; government funding and, 148–9; hedonic editing and, 254; honest advice from others and, 256–7, 258, 259; learning from, 31–5, 78, 119, 250–1, 256–9, 261–2; modern computer industry and, 11–12, 239–42; as natural in market system, 10, 11, 12, 244, 245–6; niche markets and, 240–2; normal accident theory, 219; recognition of, 36, 224; reinterpreted as success, 254–5, 256; shifts in competitive landscape, 239–46; ‘Swiss cheese model’ of safety systems, 186–7, 190, 209, 218; types of error and mistake, 208–10; willingness to fail, 249–50, 261–2; of young industries, 10 Fearon, James, 137, Federal Aviation Administration, 210 Federal Reserve Bank, 193–4 feedback, 25, 26, 42, 178, 240; in bureaucratic hierarchies, 30–1; development and, 141–3; dictatorships’ immunity to, 27; Iraq war and, 43–5, 46, 57–8, 59–62; market system and, 141; praise sandwich, 254; public services and, 141; self-employment and, 258; yes-men and, 30 Feith, Douglas, 44, 45 Ferguson, Chris ‘Jesus’, 32 Fermi nuclear reactor (near Detroit), 187 Festinger, Leon, 251 financial crisis (from 2007), 5, 11, 25; AIG and, 189, 193–5, 215–16, 228; bankers’ bonuses, 198; banking system as complex and tightly coupled, 185, 186, 187–90, 200, 201, 207–8, 220; bond insurance business and, 189–90; collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), 190, 209; credit default swaps (CDSs), 187–9, 190, 194; derivatives deals and, 198, 220; faulty information systems and, 193–5; fees paid to administrators, 197; government bail-outs/guarantees, 202, 214, 223; Lehman Brothers and, 193, 194, 196–200, 204–5, 208, 215–16; ‘LMX spiral’ comparisons, 183–4, 189; Repo 105 accounting trick, 199 Financial Services Authority (FSA), 214 Firefox, 221, 230 Fleming, Alexander, 83 Food Preservation prize, 107, 108 Ford Motor Company, 46–7 fossil record, 18 Fourier, Joseph, 155 fraud, corporate, 208, 210, 212–13, 214 Friedel, Robert, 80 Frost, Robert, 260 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical), 248 Gage, Phineas, 21, 27 Galapagos Islands, 86, 87 Gale (US developer), 152 Galenson, David, 260 Galileo, 187 Galland, Adolf, 81 Gallipoli campaign (1915), 41–2 Galvin, Major General Jack, 62, 256 game theory, 138, 205 Gates, Bill, 110, 115 Gates, Robert, 59, 64, 78 Gates Foundation, 110 Geithner, Tim, 193–5, 196 GenArts, 13 General Electric, 9, 12, 95 Gilbert, Daniel, 255, 256 GlaxoSmithKline, 95 Glewwe, Paul, 127–8 Global Positioning System (GPS), 113 globalisation, 75 Google, 12, 15, 90, 91, 239, 245, 261; corporate strategy, 36, 231–4; Gmail, 233, 234, 241, 242; peer monitoring at, 229–30 Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth, 158 Göring, Hermann, 81 government and politics: climate change and, 157–8, 163, 169–74, 176, 180; development aid and, 118, 120, 143, 144, 148–9; financial crisis (from 2007) and, 193–5, 198–9, 202, 214, 215–16, 223; grandiosity and, 27–8; ideal hierarchies and, 46pos=00002pos=0000022558 >7, 49–50, 62–3, 78; innovation funding, 82, 88, 93, 97, 99–101, 102–3, 104, 113; lack of adaptability rewarded, 20; pilot schemes and, 29, 30; rigorous evaluation methods and, 29* Graham, Loren, 26 Grameen Bank, 116, 117 Greece, 147 Green, Donald, 29* greenhouse effect, 154–6 Gulf War, first, 44, 53, 65, 66, 67, 71; Battle of 73 Easting, 72–3, 74, 79 Gutenberg, Johannes, 10 Haldane, Andrew, 195, 258 Halifax (HBOS subsidiary), 211 Halley, Edmund, 105 Halliburton, 217 Hamel, Gary, 221, 226, 233, 234 Hanna, Rema, 135 Hannah, Leslie, 8–10, 18 Hanseatic League, 150 Harrison, John, 106–7, 108, 110, 111 Harvard University, 98–9, 185 Hastings, Reed, 108 Hausmann, Ricardo, 145 Hayek, Friedrich von, 1, 72, 74–5, 227 HBOS, 211, 213, 214 healthcare sector, US, 213–14 Heckler, Margaret, 90–1 Henry the Lion, 149, 150, 151–2, 153 Hewitt, Adrian, 169 Hidalgo, César, 144–7, 148 Higginson, Peter, 230 Hinkley Point B power station, 192–3, 230–1 Hitachi, 11 Hitler, Adolf, 41, 82, 83, 150 HIV-AIDS, 90–1, 96, 111, 113 Holland, John, 16, 103 Hong Kong, 150 Houston, Dame Fanny, 88–9, 114 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), 101–3, 112 Hughes (computer company), 11 Humphreys, Macartan, 136, 137, 138–40 Hurricane aircraft, 82* IBM, 11, 90, 95–6 In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982), 8, 10 India, 135, 136, 143, 147, 169 individuals: adaptation and, 223–4, 248–62; climate change and, 158–63, 164, 165–6; experimentation and, 260–2; trial and error and, 31–5 Indonesia, 133–4, 142, 143 Innocentive, 109 innovation: corporations and, 17, 81–2, 87–9, 90, 93–4, 95–7, 108–11, 112, 114, 224–30, 232–4; costs/funding of, 90–4, 99–105; failure as price worth paying, 101–3, 104, 184, 215, 236; government funding, 82, 88, 93, 97, 99–101, 102–3, 104, 113; grants and, 108; in health field, 90–1, 96; large teams and specialisation, 91–4; market system and, 17, 95–7, 104; new technologies and, 89–90, 91, 94–5; parallel possibilities and, 86–9, 104; prize methodology, 106–11, 112, 113–14, 179, 222–3; randomistas and, 127–9, 132, 133, 135–40, 258; return on investment and, 83–4; skunk works model, 89, 91, 93, 152, 224, 242–3, 245; slowing down of, 90–5, 97; small steps and, 16, 24, 29, 36, 99, 103, 143, 149, 153, 224, 259–60; space tourism, 112–13, 114; specialisation and, 91–2; speculative leaps and, 16, 36, 91, 99–100, 103–4, 259–60; unpredictability and, 84–5 Intel, 11, 90, 95 International Christelijk Steunfonds (ICS), 127–9, 131 International Harvester, 9 International Rescue Committee (IRC), 137–8, 139 internet, 12, 15, 63, 90, 113, 144, 223, 233, 238, 241; randomised experiments and, 235–6, 237; see also Google Iraq war: al Anbar province, 56–7, 58, 64, 76–7; civil war (2006), 39–40; Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), 77; counterinsurgency strategy, 43, 45, 55–6, 58, 60–1, 63–4, 65; decentralisation and, 76–8, 79; feedback and, 43–5, 46, 57–8, 59–62; FM 3–24 (counter-insurgency manual), 63; Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), 51–3, 57, 65; Haditha killings (19 November 2005), 37–9, 40, 42, 43, 52; new technologies and, 71, 72, 74, 78–9, 196; Samarra bombing (22 February 2006), 39; Tal Afar, 51, 52, 53–5, 61, 64, 74, 77, 79; trial and error and, 64–5, 66–7; US turnaround in, 35, 40, 46, 50–1, 53–6, 57–8, 59–61, 63–5, 78; US/allied incompetence and, 38, 39–40, 42–5, 46, 50, 64, 67, 79, 223; Vietnam parallels, 46 J&P Coats, 9 Jacobs, Jane, 87 James, Jonathan, 30 Jamet, Philippe, 192 Janis, Irving, 62 Japan, 11, 143, 176, 204, 208 Jay-Z, 119 Jo-Ann Fabrics, 235 Jobs, Steve, 19 Joel, Billy, 247–8, 249 Johnson, President Lyndon, 46, 47, 49–50, 60, 62, 64, 78 Jones, Benjamin F., 91–2 Joyce, James, 260 JP Morgan, 188 Kahn, Herman, 93 Kahneman, Daniel, 32, 253 Kantorovich, Leonid, 68–9, 76 Kaplan, Fred, 77 Karlan, Dean, 135 Kauffmann, Stuart, 16, 103 Kay, John, 206–7, 208, 215, 259 Keller, Sharon, 252 Kelly, Terri, 230 Kennedy, President John F., 41, 47, 62–3, 84, 113 Kenya, 127–9, 131 Kerry, John, 20 Keynes, John Maynard, 181 Kilcullen, David, 57, 60–1 Klemperer, Paul, 96, 205 Klinger, Bailey, 145 Kotkin, Stephen, 25 Kremer, Michael, 127–8, 129 Krepinevich, Andy, 45 Lanchester, John, 188 leaders: decision making and, 40–2; failure of feedback and, 30–1, 62; grandiosity and, 27–8; ignoring of failure, 36; mistakes by, 41–2, 56, 67; need to believe in, 5–6; new leader as solution, 59 Leamer, Ed, 132* Leeson, Nick, 184–5, 208 Lehman Brothers, 193, 194, 196–200, 204–5, 208, 215–16 Lenin Dam (Dnieper River), 24 Levine, John, 48–9 Levitt, Steven, 132–3 Liberia, 136–9 light bulbs, 162, 177 Lind, James, 122–3 Lindzen, Richard, 156 Livingstone, Ken, 169 Lloyd’s insurance, 183 Lloyds TSB, 214 Local Motors, 90 Lockheed, Skunk Works division, 89, 93, 224, 242 Lomas, Tony, 196, 197–200, 204, 205, 208, 219 Lomborg, Bjorn, 94 longitude problem, 105–7, 108 Lu Hong, 49 Lübeck, 149–50, 151–2, 153 Luftwaffe, 81–2 MacFarland, Colonel Sean, 56–7, 64, 74, 76–7, 78 Mackay, General Andrew, 67–8, 74 Mackey, John, 227, 234 Madoff, Bernard, 208212–13 Magnitogorsk steel mills, 24–5, 26, 153 Malawi, 119 Mallaby, Sebastian, 150, 151 management gurus, 8, 233 Manhattan Project, 82, 84 Manso, Gustavo, 102 Mao Zedong, 11, 41 market system: competition, 10–11, 17, 19, 75, 95, 170, 239–46; ‘disciplined pluralism’, 259; evolutionary theory and, 17; failure in as natural, 10, 11, 12, 244, 245–6; feedback loops, 141; innovation and, 17, 95–7, 104; patents and, 95–7; trial and error, 20; validation and, 257–8 Markopolos, Harry, 212–13 Marmite, 124 Maskelyne, Nevil, 106 mathematics, 18–19, 83, 146, 247; financial crisis (from 2007) and, 209, 213; prizes, 110, 114 Mayer, Marissa, 232, 234 McDonald’s, 15, 28 McDougal, Michael, 252 McGrath, Michael, 252 McMaster, H.R.

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking
by Richard E. Nisbett
Published 17 Aug 2015

Pity the poor atheist if Pascal got the payoffs right in the event that God exists. Only a fool would fail to believe. But unfortunately you can’t just grunt and produce belief. Pascal had a solution to this problem, though. And in solving the problem he invented a new psychological theory—what we would now call cognitive dissonance theory. If our beliefs are incongruent with our behavior, something has to change: either our beliefs or our behavior. We don’t have direct control over our beliefs but we do have control over our behavior. And because dissonance is a noxious state, our beliefs move into line with our behavior.

…

Sanchez-Burks, “Performance in Intercultural Interactions at Work: Cross-Cultural Differences in Responses to Behavioral Mirroring.” 12. Goethals and Reckman, “The Perception of Consistency in Attitudes.” 13. Goethals, Cooper, and Naficy, “Role of Foreseen, Foreseeable, and Unforeseeable Behavioral Consequences in the Arousal of Cognitive Dissonance.” 14. Nisbett et al., “Behavior as Seen by the Actor and as Seen by the Observer.” 15. Ibid. 16. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought; Nisbett et al., “Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic Vs. Analytic Cognition.” 17. Masuda et al., “Placing the Face in Context: Cultural Differences in the Perception of Facial Emotion.” 18.

…

Gilovich, Thomas, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky. “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences.” Cognitive Personality 17 (1985): 295–314. Goethals, George R., Joel Cooper, and Anahita Naficy. “Role of Foreseen, Foreseeable, and Unforeseeable Behavioral Consequences in the Arousal of Cognitive Dissonance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 1179–85. Goethals, George R., and Richard F. Reckman. “The Perception of Consistency in Attitudes.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 9 (1973): 491–501. Goldstein, Noah J., Robert B. Cialdini, and Vladas Griskevicius. “A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels.”

Licence to be Bad
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 5 Jun 2019

Across the world in 2017, more than 170 tonnes of coal were burned every second.19 The enormity of the climate-change problem and the negligible impact of individual actions are two themes that arise repeatedly in focus groups on public attitudes and are echoed by large corporations and governments.20 Together, they are probably the biggest obstacle to radical action to address climate change. But we should be suspicious: as ever when free-riding beckons, it is extremely tempting to let ourselves off the hook, to assume that individual contributions make no difference.21 The psychology of cognitive dissonance tells us that when the truth is uncomfortable, we often respond by falling into self-deception. This need not be due to selfishness: it may be that if I make an uncomfortable effort or sacrifice now, I will gain much more later. But this kind of self-control is hard to achieve. Psychologists have shown that thinking about an experience in the present will be more ‘salient’ – more vivid, more prominent in our minds – than the same experience in the future.

…

air travel, commercial, 63–4 Akerlof, George, 223, 237, 248 altruism, 150–51, 159, 162–4 game theory’s denial of, 31–2, 41, 42–3 misunderstanding of, 13–14, 25, 31–2, 41–3, 112, 178–9 as not depleted through use, 14 seen as disguised selfishness, 11–12, 25, 112, 178–9 Amazon, 155, 178, 208 American Economic Association, 257, 258 Angrist, Joshua, 249 antitrust regulation, 56–8 Apple, 222–3 Aristotle, 14 Arrow, Ken awarded Nobel Prize, 71 and blood donations, 14, 163 at City College, New York, 74–5, 91 collective preference, 73–4, 75–7, 78–82 and democracy, 72–4, 75–7, 78–83, 95, 97 framework presented as scientific, 81–2, 124–5 and free marketeers, 78–9, 82 Impossibility Theorem, 72, 73–4, 75–7, 78–83, 89, 97 and mathematics, 71, 72, 73–5, 76–7, 82–3, 97 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 9 preference satisfaction’, 80–82, 97, 124–5, 129 and Ramsey, 189 at RAND, 70–71, 72–3, 74, 75–6, 77, 78 top-secret-level security clearance, 71–2 ‘A Cautious Case for Socialism’ (1978), 83 ‘On the Optimal Use of Winds for Flight Planning’, 71 Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), 71, 72, 75–7, 78–80, 97 artificial intelligence, 214, 242 Atlas Economic Research Foundation, 7–8 Austen, Jane, 134 austerity policies, recent, 258 Axelrod, Robert, 41 Babbage, Charles, 222 baby-market idea, 61, 138, 145, 146 Bachelier, Louis, 193 Baird, Douglas, 58–9 bandwagon effect, 110 Bank of England, 96, 120, 185, 211–12, 258 bankers excuse/permission to be greedy, 1–2, 204, 238 and Keynesian economics, 5 performance as wholly relative, 204 quantification and recklessness, 213 rigged pay-for-performance contracts, 229–30, 238 role in 2007 crisis, 1–2, 57, 182, 192 as serial offenders over uncertainty, 201 see also financial markets Barro, Josh, 63, 64 Bateson, Gregory, 28 battery-chicken farming, 7 Baumol, William, 90–92, 93, 94 BBC, 48, 98 Beaverbrook, Lord, 157 Becker, Gary amoral understanding of crime, 137, 152 and citizenship rights, 146 and Coase, 69 Freakonomics followers of, 130, 134, 148–9, 156 and Friedman, 126, 131 hidden assumptions of, 130–31, 133–4 human capital idea, 149 and individualism, 134, 135–8 and maximization, 129–31, 133–4, 147 as outsider, 50 and Posner, 56 rejects need for realistic assumptions, 132, 133–4, 148 and sale of body parts, 147–8 sees poor health as just a preference, 135, 136, 140 sees values as mere tastes, 136–8, 140 theories as deeply controversial, 127–9, 130 theories as slippery, 129, 133–4 and ‘universality’ of economics, 125, 126–31, 133–4, 135–8, 147–8 version of ‘rational’ behaviour, 128–9, 135, 140, 151 De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum (with Stigler, 1977), 135–6 The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (1976), 130 The Economics of Discrimination (1957), 126–7 A Treatise on the Family (1981), 127–8, 130–31, 133 behaviourism, 154–8, 237 behavioural economics context and culture, 175–6 framing effects, 170–71, 259 and incentives, 160, 171, 175, 176–7 methods from psychology, 170–71 and Nudge, 171–2 and orthodox economics, 173, 174–5, 247, 255 and physics envy, 175–6 problems with, 173–5, 250–51 ‘self-command’ strategies, 140 theory of irrationality, 12, 171, 250–51 and welfare maximization, 149 Bell, Alexander Graham, 222 bell curve distribution, 191–4, 195, 196, 201, 203–4, 218–19, 257 Bentham, Jeremy, 102 Berlin, Isiah, 166, 167–8 Beveridge Report (1942), 4 Bezos, Jeff, 208 Black, Duncan, 77–8, 95 Blackstone (private equity firm), 235 black swans, 192, 194, 201, 203–4 Blinder, Alan, The Economics of Brushing Teeth (1974), 136 blood donors, 14, 112, 162–3, 164, 169, 176 Borel, Émile, 185* Brennan, William, 56 broadcasting, 48–50, 98 spectrum auctions, 39–40, 47, 49–50 Buchanan, James McGill, 8, 83–5, 87–8, 89, 95, 115 Buffett, Warren, 229, 230, 236 Calcraft, John, 120, 121 Cameron, David, 172 Caplan, Brian, The Myth of the Rational Voter, 245–6 carbon markets, 47, 65–7 Carlson, Jack, 141–2 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), 72, 77 cartels and monopolies, 101, 102, 103–4 Cheney, Dick, 232–3 Chicago, University of, 2, 4, 34, 40, 49–51 antitrust ideas, 56–8 Buchanan at, 84 and Coase, 49–52, 53–4, 55, 56–7, 61, 68–9, 132 Friedman’s dominance, 50, 132 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 revolution of 1968 at, 56, 58–9 zero-transaction-costs assumption, 51–2, 68–9 Chicago law school, 55, 56, 58–9 child labour, 124, 146 China, 65 City College, New York, 74–5, 91 climate change average temperature rises, 205–6, 207 and carbon markets, 47, 65–6 ‘cashing in’ on carbon markets, 67 Coasean worldview on pollution, 65–7, 68 denialists, 8 ‘discount rate’ on future costs, 208–9, 212 discrimination against future generations, 208–9 and free-riding theory, 2, 99, 113–17, 120 Intergovernmental Panel on, 207 measurement in numerical terms, 206–11, 213 and precautionary principle, 211–12 premature deaths due to, 207–9 and Prisoner’s Dilemma, 27 Stern Review, 206, 209–10 threat to economic growth, 209 Coase, Ronald argument given status of theorem, 51–2, 67 awarded Nobel Prize, 52 background of, 47–8 and Chicago School, 49–52, 53–4, 56–7, 61, 68–9, 132 and created markets, 47, 65–7 dismissal of ‘blackboard economics’, 48, 54, 64, 67–9 on Duncan Black, 77 evening at Director’s house (early 1960), 49–51, 132 fundamental misunderstanding of work of, 51, 52–3, 67–9 hypothetical world invoked by, 50–51, 52, 54–5, 62, 68 as Illinois resident, 46–7 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 8 and public-sector monopolies, 48–51 and transaction costs, 51–3, 54–5, 61, 62, 63–4, 68 ‘The Nature of the Firm’ (1932 paper), 48 The Problem of Social Cost’ (1960 paper), 47, 48, 50–51, 52, 54–5, 59 cognitive dissonance, 113–14 Cold War, 18–19, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 181 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 33–4, 140 and Ellsberg, 184, 197, 198, 200 and game theory, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 and Impossibility Theorem, 75–6 RAND and military strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 70, 73, 75–6, 141, 200, 213 and Russell’s Chicken, 33 and Schelling, 138, 139–40 Washington–Moscow hotline installed, 139–40 collective preference and Ken Arrow, 73–4, 75–7, 78–82 Black’s median voter theorem, 77, 95–6 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 communism, 82, 84, 101, 104, 237 Compass Lexecon, 58, 68 Condorcet Paradox, 76, 77 conspiracy theories, 3, 8, 9 cooperation cartels, monopolies, price-fixing, 101, 102, 103–4 and decision-making processes, 108–10 and free-riding theory, 2, 101, 102, 103–10 office teamwork, 109–10, 112 older perspective on, 100–102, 108, 111, 122 and Scandinavian countries, 103 view of in game theory, 21–2, 23, 25–32, 36–8, 41–3 corporate culture and antitrust regulation, 57–8 changes due to Friedman, 2, 152 Chicago approach to regulation, 40 and climate change, 113, 114, 115 executive pay, 215–16, 219, 224, 228–30, 234, 238 Jensen and Murphy’s article, 229 ‘optimal contracting’/pay-for-performance, 228–30, 238 predatory pricing, 57 and tax evasion/avoidance, 105–6 cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 Cowles Commission in Chicago, 78 CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers), 222 criminal responsibility, 111, 137, 152 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 33–4, 140 Damasio, Antonio, 14 data geeks, 248–50 ‘dead peasants insurance’, 124 decision-making processes, 108–10, 122, 170–71 ‘anchoring effect’, 212 authority figure–autonomy contradiction, 180 avoidance of pure uncertainty, 198–9 axioms (abstract mathematical assumptions), 198 Ellsberg Paradox, 184, 199–200 Ellsberg’s experiment (1961), 182–4, 187, 197, 198–200, 205 Linda Problem, 202–3 orthodox decision theory, 183–4, 185–6, 189–91, 193–4, 198–200, 201–2, 203–5, 211, 212–14 and the Savage orthodoxy, 190–91, 197, 198–200, 203 scenario planning as crucial, 251 Von Neumann’s theory of decision-making, 189, 190, 203 see also probability; risk and uncertainty democracy and Ken Arrow, 72–4, 75–7, 78–83, 95, 97 Black’s median voter theorem, 77, 95–6 and crises of the 1970s, 85–6 and economic imperialism, 145–7 equal citizenship principle at heart of, 145–6, 151 free-riding view of voting, 99, 110, 112, 115–16, 120–21 marketing by political parties, 95–6 modern cynicism about politics, 94–7 paradox of voter turnout, 88–9, 95–6, 115–16 paradox of voting, 75–7 politicians’ support for depoliticization, 96–7 post-war scepticism about, 78–9 and public choice theory, 85–6, 95–7 replacing of with markets, 79 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 voter turnout, 88–9, 95–6, 115–16, 120–21 see also voting systems Dennison, Stanley, 13 dentistry, 258–9, 261 Depression (1930s), 3 digital technology, 68, 214, 222–3 data revolution, 247–50 and rising inequality, 215, 220, 242 Director, Aaron, 4–5, 49–51, 132 Disney World, 123 Dodd–Frank Act, 256 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (Lewis Carroll), 72, 77 dot.com bubble, 192, 201 Douglas Aircraft Corporation, 18 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), 86, 89, 95 Dr Strangelove (Kubrick film, 1964), 19, 35, 139 DreamTours Florida, 123 Drucker, Peter, 153 Dulles, John Foster, 20 Dundee School of Economics, 48, 77–8 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, The Visit of the Old Lady, 166 earthquakes, 194–5 Econometrica (journal), 77–8 economic imperialism arrogance of, 246–7 auctioning of university places, 124, 149–50 continuing damage wrought by, 151–2 and democracy, 145–7 emerges into the limelight, 130 Freakonomics, followers of, 130, 134, 148–9, 156 and inequality, 145–7, 148, 151, 207 markets in citizenship duties, 146 origins of term, 125 price as measure of value, 149, 150, 151 purchase of immigration rights, 125, 146 and sale of body parts, 123, 124, 145, 147–8 sidelining of moral questions, 125–9, 135–8, 141–5, 146–7, 148–9, 151–2, 207 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 welfare maximization, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 146–7, 148–9 see also Becker, Gary economic theory Arrow establishes benchmark for, 71 Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 Coase Theorem, 45–7, 48–55, 56–7, 61, 63–6 and data revolution, 247–50 exclusion of by data geeks, 248–50 and financial markets, 9, 12–13, 182, 253 as focus of economics courses, 260 Kahneman and Tversky’s theory of irrationality, 12, 171, 250–51 of labour, 237 marginal productivity theory, 223–4, 228 Pareto efficiency, 217–18, 256* perfect competition, 103, 193–4 profit-maximizing firms, 228–9 rent-seeking, 230, 238 theory of motivation, 157–8, 164, 166–7, 168–70, 178–9 see also game theory; homo economicus; public choice theory; social choice theory economics accidental economists, 47–8 and Arrow’s framework, 78–9, 82 causes of growth, 223, 239 created markets, 47, 65–7 crises of the 1970s, 85–6 digital technology, 68, 214 efficiency as fundamental, 63, 64–5, 141, 153, 155, 193–4, 201, 211, 217–18, 255 empirical research as still rare, 247–8 extension into non-economic aspects of life, 40, 54–60, 65, 123–31, 132–4, 135–6, 145–50 gulf between reality and theory, 10–13, 31–2, 41–3, 51–3, 64–9, 86–9, 133, 136, 144–5, 228–30, 250–53, 260–61 history of, 260 lack of objective ‘facts’, 253 modern debate on, 9 and Olson’s analysis, 104 our love–hate relationship with, 3, 245 as partially self-fulfilling, 12–13, 14, 159, 253 percentage of GDP impact of climate change, 206–11, 213 positional goods, 239–41 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 predatory pricing, 57 principles for new relationship with, 251–61 privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 rise of game theory, 40–41 Smith’s enlightened self-interest, 11 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 vocational role of, 260 see also behavioural economics; free-market economics economics, aims/pretensions to be science arrogance of, 205, 245–7, 258 Arrow’s framework presented as scientific, 72, 81–2, 124–5 attitude to value judgements, 10, 60–61, 64–9, 112, 136–8, 173–4, 204–5, 218, 247 claims of game theory, 21, 24–6, 28–9, 32, 34, 35, 38, 41 and data revolution, 247–50 desire for neutral science akin to physics, 9–10, 20–21, 34–5, 41, 116, 125, 132–3, 151, 175–6, 187–90, 212, 217–18, 246–56 desire for science of social control, 153, 154, 155, 164, 167 Friedman’s ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’, 132–3 hidden political/ethical agendas, 10, 213, 253, 255–8 measurement of risk in numerical terms, 181–4, 187, 189, 190–94, 196–7, 201–2, 203–5, 212–13 natural experiments, 248–50 Pareto improvements, 217–18 and physics envy, 9, 20–21, 41, 116, 175–6, 212, 247 and public choice theorists, 88 quantification of all risks and values, 201–2, 203, 212–13 real world as problem for, 10–13, 31–2, 42–3, 51–3, 64–9, 86–9, 133, 136, 144–5, 228–30, 250–53, 260–61 ‘some number is better than no number’ mantra, 212–13 uncertainty as obstacle to, 190–91, 212–13 and use of mathematics, 9–10, 26, 72, 247, 248, 255, 259 use of term ‘rational’, 12 Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s grand project, 20–21, 24–5, 26, 35, 125, 151, 189 and wealth-maximization approach, 58, 60 economists advice to former Soviet Bloc nations, 257 conflicts of interest, 256–7, 258 data geeks, 248–50 economics curriculum reform needed, 259–60 errors and misjudgements, 13–14, 16, 132–3, 144–5, 256*, 257–8, 260–61 failure to explain ideas, 254–5 insularity of, 246–7 Keynes’ dentistry comparison, 258–9, 261 lack of ethics codes, 257–8 misunderstanding of altruism, 13–14, 25, 31–2, 41–3, 112, 178–9 need to show more humility, 258–9, 260–61 as not separate from economy, 251–3 and ordinary people, 245–6, 254–5, 258, 261 self-image as unsentimental and honest, 10 sneering descriptions of virtuous behaviour, 112 stating of the obvious by, 134, 259 education auctioning of university places, 124, 149–50 Baumol’s cost disease, 91, 92, 93, 94 incentivization as pervasive, 156, 169 value of, 150, 169, 170 ‘efficient market hypothesis’, 193–4, 201, 255 Einstein, Albert, 17, 22, 33, 213 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 19, 20, 231 Ellsberg, Daniel, 182–4, 187, 197–8 Ellsberg Paradox, 184, 199–200 and the ‘Pentagon Papers’, 200 probability experiment (1961), 182–4, 187, 197, 198–200 ‘Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms’ (paper, 1961), 198–9, 200 Engelbart, Douglas, 222–3 Engels, Friedrich, 223 English, Bill, 222–3 Enlightenment thinking, 11, 185 Epstein, Richard, 127 ethics and morality and autonomy, 164, 165–6, 168, 169–70, 180 bad behaviour redefined as rational, 12 and blame for accidents, 55, 60–61 and Coase Theorem, 46–7, 54–5, 56–7, 61, 63–6 Coasean worldview on pollution, 66–7, 68 as conditioned and limited by economics, 3, 10, 15, 43, 55, 60–61, 64–5, 179, 204–5, 218, 247 cooperative behaviour in game theory, 29, 30–32 core principles of current economic orthodoxy, 253 distinction between values and tastes, 136–8 economists’ language on virtuous behaviour, 112 inequality as moral issue, 242–3 influence of recent economic ideas, 1–3, 15–16 Keynes on economics as moral science, 252–3 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 morally wrong/corrupting incentives, 168–9 and Nash program, 25 Nudge economists, 173–4, 251 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers, 118–19 Ramsey Rule on discounting, 208–9, 212 sale of body parts, 123, 124, 145, 147–8 sidelined by economic imperialism, 125–9, 135–8, 141–5, 146–7, 148–9, 151–2, 207 small contributions as important, 110, 114–15, 122 Smith’s enlightened self-interest, 11 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 see also altruism; free-riding behaviour European Commission, 96 Facebook UK, 99 fairness, 1, 149, 218, 228, 253 and Coase, 54, 55 and free-riding behaviour, 107 and game theory, 43 and incentives, 177, 179 and lucky geniuses, 221–3 and Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 60, 61, 62 see also inequality family life, 127–8, 130–31, 133, 156 famine relief, 99, 114–15 Farmer, Roger, 259 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 48–9 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz, 185 financial crisis, global (2007–10) Becker on, 128–9 and bell curve thinking, 192, 193–4, 196, 257 ‘blame the regulators’ argument, 1–2 and financial economists, 9, 88, 260–61 persuasive power of extreme numbers, 181–2 and Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57 underlying maths of, 194, 195–6 financial markets Bachelier’s theory of speculation, 193 bell curve thinking, 192, 193–4, 195, 196–7, 201, 203–4, 257 benchmarking against the market, 204 Black Monday (1987), 192 deregulation of US banks, 194 derivatives, 253 dot.com bubble, 192, 201 East Asian crisis (1997), 192 and economic theory, 9, 12–13, 182, 253 economists’ ignorance of, 260–61 and First World War, 185 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 193–4, 201 persuasive power of extreme numbers, 181–2, 191, 192 and rent-seekers, 230, 238 rigged pay-for-performance contracts, 229–30, 238 First World War, 185, 210, 211–12 Fisher, Antony, 6–8 Forster, E.

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M., 202 Foundation for Economic Education, 7 Franklin, Benjamin, 178 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner, 2005), 130, 148, 156, 160 free trade, 246, 255 freedom, individual, 1, 146, 150, 164, 250–51 Arrow’s view of, 82 and Isaiah Berlin, 167–8 and financial incentives, 167 Hayek’s view of, 5, 6, 89 and Nudge economists, 173 RAND’s self-image as defender of, 78 free-market economics appeal of, 125–6 Buchanan’s ideology, 84 core principles of current orthodoxy, 253 efficient-market hypothesis, 193–4, 201, 255 election of Thatcher/Reagan as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 emergence and spread of modern ideas, 15–16 ethical influence of recent ideas, 1–3, 15–16 free-market zealotry, 84, 255, 257–8 and greed, 1–2, 196, 197, 204, 229, 238 Hayek sees as all of life, 8 influential thinkers behind triumph of, 8–9 and interests of the rich and powerful, 2–3, 8–9, 11, 15, 57–8, 221–2, 224, 228–31, 238 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 3–9, 13, 15, 132 and Olson’s analysis, 104 ‘ordinary people are stupid’ message, 86–7, 160, 175, 245, 251 price as measure of value, 149, 150, 151, 224 ‘public bad, private good’ mantra, 93–4, 97 research institutes and think tanks, 7–8, 15 revolution of 1968, 56, 58–9, 162–3 selfishness assumed as natural, 10–12, 13–14, 41, 86, 178–9 shock troops of at Chicago, 2, 4, 40, 49–51, 54, 55 as ‘universal’ way of thinking, 126–31, 132–4, 135–8, 145–50 free-riding behaviour ‘acceptable’ forms of, 106–7 and ‘bandwagon effect’, 110 and cartels, monopolies, price-fixing, 102, 103–4 and climate change, 2, 99, 113–17, 120 and cognitive dissonance, 113–14 contributions already made by others, 115 and decision-making processes, 108–10, 122 dodgy reputation of, 104–5 and fatalistic view of the world, 117 hidden assumptions about cause and effect, 111 and hippie countercultural, 100 illegally downloaded music, 2, 106, 107 and indirect effects of contributions, 115–16, 122 older perspective on, 99, 100–102, 108, 111, 122 and Mancur Olson, 103–4, 108, 109 Olson’s tipping point/threshold, 116, 119–21, 122 and Plato’s Republic, 100–101, 122 Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers, 118–19 and rational behaviour, 100–101, 102, 103–4, 107–8, 109–10, 115–16 reasons for doing your bit, 108–13, 122 responsibility arguments, 109, 110–11 shift in the status of, 99–100, 121–2 small contributions as important, 110, 114–15, 122 and Sorites paradox, 117–18, 119 and sovereign fantasy, 116–17 tax avoidance and evasion, 2, 99, 105–6, 112–13 and voting, 2, 99, 110, 112, 115–16, 120–21 ‘what if everyone did it?’

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
by Sathnam Sanghera
Published 28 Jan 2021

It is a narrative which is maintained today, with Michael Gove able to talk in an important speech about how we led the world in abolition, without mentioning that we also led the slave trade for decades beforehand. The most disturbing form of erasure, however, is presented in Walvin’s third case study: Thomas Thistlewood, a slave owner in Jamaica. What he demonstrates is not amnesia in a precise sense but the denial, or cognitive dissonance, which surely leads to amnesia. The man was nothing less than a sadist. When he bought his slaves, they were branded with ‘TT’ on their shoulder, renamed and their characteristics listed, and he kept detailed notes in his diary on what he did to them. This tells us that he once broke an English oak stick when beating a slave.

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When Thistlewood left for another plantation, she gave him a gold ring and also visited him in his new post. Their relationship lasted thirty years, she had a son (Mulatto John) and when Thistlewood died in 1785 his will requested her manumission. It would be hyperbolic to say this man is typical of imperial Britons in any way. But his cognitive dissonance, his ability to compartmentalize, his refusal to accept the brutal reality of what he was doing even as he cultivated a sophisticated demeanour, echo a psychological pattern that is common in British approaches to slavery. You see it in the way The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography swerves away from the phrase ‘slave owner’ in favour of euphemistic expressions like ‘plantation owner’ and ‘West Indies merchant’, while slavery is described as possessing ‘considerable property in Jamaica’.

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It is evident when you read historians describe slave owners as ‘adventurers’ and the slavery system as ‘plantation agriculture’, and use euphemistic terms such as ‘appropriation’ and ‘importation’ when they’re talking about theft, kidnapping and forced enslavement. And you see examples of such cognitive dissonance in British attitudes to empire in general. Such as when Jan Morris tells a story about ‘the young Mahdist commander Emir Mahmoud, captured by Kitchener at Berber in 1897’: ‘Chains were riveted around his ankles, an iron halter was put around his neck, his hands were bound behind him, and he was paraded in ignominy through town’ behind Kitchener, sometimes being dragged, sometimes running, being whipped when he fell.

Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It
by Gary Taubes
Published 28 Dec 2010

No wonder obesity is so rarely cured. Eating less—that is, undereating—simply doesn’t work for more than a few months, if that. This reality, however, hasn’t stopped the authorities from recommending the approach, which makes reading such recommendations an exercise in what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” the tension that results from trying to hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously. Take, for instance, the Handbook of Obesity, a 1998 textbook edited by three of the most prominent authorities in the field—George Bray, Claude Bouchard, and W. P. T. James. “Dietary therapy remains the cornerstone of treatment and the reduction of energy intake continues to be the basis of successful weight reduction programs,” the book says.

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But it then states, a few paragraphs later, that the results of such energy-reduced restricted diets “are known to be poor and not long-lasting.” So why is such an ineffective therapy the cornerstone of treatment? The Handbook of Obesity neglects to say. The latest edition (2005) of Joslin’s Diabetes Mellitus, a highly respected textbook for physicians and researchers, is a more recent example of this cognitive dissonance. The chapter on obesity was written by Jeffrey Flier, an obesity researcher who is now dean of Harvard Medical School, and his wife and research colleague, Terry Maratos-Flier. The Fliers also describe “reduction of caloric intake” as “the cornerstone of any therapy for obesity.” But then they enumerate all the ways in which this cornerstone fails.

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That the official embrace of low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets coincided not with a national decline in weight and heart disease but with epidemics of both obesity and diabetes (both of which increase heart disease risk), should make any reasonable person question the underlying assumptions of the advice. But that’s not how people tend to think when confronted with evidence that one of their long-held beliefs is wrong. It’s not how we typically deal with cognitive dissonance. It’s certainly not how institutions and governments do it. For the moment, I’ll just say that the obesity/heart-disease link, combined with the obesity and diabetes epidemics that began more or less coincidentally with the advice to eat less fat, less saturated fat, and more carbohydrates, is a good reason to doubt that it’s the fat and the saturated fat that we have to worry about.

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism
by Hubert Joly
Published 14 Jun 2021

Soon after, an even more direct message came from an employee survey, which showed that people reporting directly to me were not very invested in their work. That stung, especially since, as a whole, the company had quite good levels of employee engagement. I was gripped by what psychologists label cognitive dissonance: I believed I was doing great, yet the data showed I could do better. Cognitive dissonance is so uncomfortable that the typical reaction is to become singularly focused on reconciling the disconnect. Back then, I reconciled it by telling myself there was nothing wrong with me. And if there was nothing wrong with me, then the problem had to be them.

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See also specific businesses call for action for, 233 finances of (see finances) leadership of (see leadership) purpose of, 4–5, 6–7, 51, 63–65, 233 (see also purposeful human organizations) stakeholders of (see customers; employees; shareholders; stakeholders; suppliers) work at (see work) Business Roundtable, 55, 75, 242n10, 242n14 Cales, Amber, 139–140 call for action for boards of directors, 234 for business education institutions, 235 for businesses, 233 for industry sector and community leaders, 234 for investors, analysts, regulators, and rating agencies, 235 for leaders, 232 overview of, 231–232, 236 Calvin, John, 26, 238n5 Canon, 86 capitalism in crisis, 4, 54, 240n1 financial incentives in, 126 leadership for next era of, 5–7 (see also leadership) reinvention of, 62, 65, 73, 74–77 social discord and, 4, 53–54 stakeholder capitalism, 74, 76, 231 Cargill, 111 Carlson, Curt, 224 Carlson Companies challenges as opportunities at, 201 exploring motivating forces at, 137, 222 incentives at, 125, 129 Joly’s departure from, 2 leadership at, 1, 160, 224 lifelong learning at, 191 participative process at, 174 perfectionism challenges at, 41 performance assessments at, 188–189 strategy at, 111, 174, 199 turnaround at, 111 values days at, 226 women in leadership at, 160 Carlson Nelson, Marilyn, 137, 160, 222 Carlson Wagonlit Travel challenges as opportunities at, 201–202 cutting costs not jobs at, 104–105 financial challenges for, 58 human connections at, 148–149, 151 participative process at, 174 perfectionism challenges at, 37, 39–41 positive environment at, 114 purpose at, 142–143 strategy at, 81–82, 174 women in leadership at, 160 work views at, 27 cathedrals, building, 31, 70–71, 73 Chanel, 89 Chaplin, Charlie, 19 Christensen, Clayton, 216–217, 218, 226–227 Churchill, Winston, 215 Cicero, 238n10 Circuit City, 2, 110 Citrin, Jim, 1–3, 13, 98, 195, 225 Clausewitz, Carl von, 201 coaching vs. training, 185–188, 191 Coalition for the American Dream, 91 codes of behavior, 154 codes of ethics, 144 cognitive dissonance, 40 commissions, 124–125, 127, 128 communities business connection to, 68, 72, 242n14 business support for thriving, 88–91 leadership in, 234 companies. See businesses Cook, Tim, 196 Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic agile work methods in, 176 business tied to community health in, 72 capitalism challenges in, 4 challenges as opportunities during, 202–203 human connections in, 149, 156 leadership during, 223, 227–228 purpose focus during, 204, 223 remote working in, 177 work-life balance in, 229 crisis response, 138–140, 223–224, 227.

The Simple Living Guide
by Janet Luhrs
Published 1 Apr 2014

You’ll go through periods of spending less and enjoying the process, then you’ll splurge for no good reason, then revert to saving again. This is the typical process of change. After you ride up and down on these waves for a while, you’ll enter the phase known as cognitive dissonance. This is when you do something you know you shouldn’t be doing, but your human nature takes over and you do it anyway. When you reach this stage of awareness, you’re well on your way to really making changes in your life. Here is an example of cognitive dissonance. Say you suffer a heart attack. Before the heart attack, you rarely exercised and didn’t think much about it. After the attack, your doctor tells you that if you don’t do 30 minutes of cardiovascular work at least four times a week, you’ll wind up back in the hospital.

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Your primal instincts take over and you rationalize why you must have it now, and why just this one little month and the next you won’t save your $50. You buy the coat. When you get home, if you are in the cognitive dissonance stage, you’ll feel guilty about your purchase. With sufficient guilt, you might return the coat and immediately march to the bank to deposit the money. Prior to cognitive dissonance, you would have shopped on automatic pilot and never given your purchase a second thought. In fact, you would have been very proud of yourself that you saved all that money by buying the coat on sale.

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If you invest that $316 at 9 percent return (compound), you will have $8,500 in two years. If you keep going at the same rate, you will have $24,000 in five years. Voilà!—a down payment on a rental house, or a lump sum to invest in, say, the stock market, mutual fund, or what-have-you. Cognitive Dissonance As you begin to focus on the meaning of your life, you’ll likely find that you don’t need all of the things you once thought you needed in order to be happy. In fact, you’ll probably find that the less you have to worry about, rearrange, dust, and insure, the more freed up you are to pursue meaningful activities.

Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery
by Henry Marsh
Published 3 May 2017

Perhaps all that they wanted was the reassurance that if the end was to become particularly unpleasant, it could be brought to a quick conclusion and, in the event, their final days passed peacefully. But perhaps it was because, as death approached, they started to hope that they might yet still have a future. We develop what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’, where we entertain entirely contradictory thoughts. Part of us knows, and accepts, that we are dying but another part of us feels and thinks that we still have a future. It is as though our brains are hardwired for hope, or at least that part of them is. As death approaches, our sense of self can start to disintegrate.

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My understanding of neuroscience means that I am deprived of the consolation of belief in any kind of life after death and of the restoration of what I have lost as my brain shrinks with age. I know that some neurosurgeons believe in a soul and afterlife, but this seems to me to be the same cognitive dissonance as the hope the dying have that they will yet live. Nevertheless, I have come to find a certain solace in the thought that my own nature, my I – this fragile, conscious self writing these words that seems to sail so uncertainly on the surface of an unfathomable, electrochemical sea into which it sinks every night when I sleep, the product of countless millions of years of evolution – is as great a mystery as the universe itself.

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A sceptical consultant, with a row of medical students, looked in my ear and expressed some doubts. I can’t remember what was said, but I do recall trying to persuade myself that there really was a problem with my ear even though I knew that I was malingering. It was my first experience of cognitive dissonance – entertaining entirely contradictory ideas – and the importance of self-deception in trying to deceive others. I then discovered that music lessons for playing the trumpet were on the same day and at the same time as the swimming class with the vile ex-commando, so I took up the trumpet but did not get on with it.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder
by Sean McFate
Published 22 Jan 2019

Old Soviet wargames never achieved so much. War has moved beyond lethality. Today, all instruments of national power must be used, not just the ones that shoot. Nonkinetic weapons can be very effective in war, and cunning strategists can weaponize almost anything, including refugee waves. This causes cognitive dissonance for conventional warriors, who place their faith in firepower, a concept they call the “utility of force.” In doing so, they’re talking about the effectiveness of violence in conflict, and they rate it supreme. For them, the application of enough force can solve any problem. Such thinking led to the meat grinder of World War I and carpet-bombing during World War II.

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Both Nisour and Haditha were comparable crimes, but people’s reaction could not have been more different: mercenaries are butchers, while soldiers make innocent mistakes. This is an irrational prejudice. Murder is murder, no matter what kind of warfighter pulls the trigger. When I point this out, some people grow hostile with the burn of cognitive dissonance. Even enlightened minds balk, so strong is the bias against private warriors. Now that I’m out of the industry, I’m often asked to talk about it in front of large audiences. My best questions come from general audiences, perhaps because they have little received wisdom on the topic and therefore a more open mind.

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Federal Election Commission, 168 Civil affairs, 38, 41, 66–67 Civilian targets, 206–8 Civilian universities, strategic education in, 239–40 Clancy, Tom, 13–14, 21, 23 Clark, Ramsey, 226 Clausewitz, Carl von, 4, 29, 32, 96, 205, 220, 222, 235, 264n, 274n “CNN effect,” 202–3 Coercion, 96–97 Cognitive dissonance, 106, 122 COIN. See Counterinsurgency COINistas, 91, 93–95 Cold War, 21, 33–34, 188 containment policy, 78–79 Fulda Gap, 33, 103–4 “Collateral damage,” 64, 207 Colonialism, 95, 97, 98, 129, 177, 180 Confirmation bias, 48 Congo, 118, 127, 128, 150, 156–57, 182–83 Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 130–31 Conspiracy and deep state, 158–61 Containment policy, 78–79 Contract wars, 128–31 Control the narrative, 41, 66, 67–68, 108–13, 227 Conventional wars, 5–6, 25–42 modeling the future on past, 33–36 redefining war, 179–85 short history of, 30–33 transforming the military, 37–42 use of term, 29 Western way of war, 28–30 Conventional weapon systems, 37–38, 41 Corporations and politics (corporatocracy), 165–68 Corruption, 113, 148–49, 166, 174–75, 216 Counterinsurgency (COIN), 4, 83–102 First Jewish-Roman War, 83–90, 96 foreign legions, 98–102 Iraq War, xiii–xvi, 90–91, 93–95 successful strategies, 95–98 Countermessaging, 111–13 Crimea annexation, 3, 37, 64, 197–98, 203, 237 Cronkite, Walter, 225 Crusades, 74, 127, 144 Cuba, 211 Cultural dominance, 80 “Cyber,” 15 Cyberwar, 13, 14–17, 137–38, 214 Darfur genocide, 3, 146, 182 Dark arts, 203–6 David and Goliath, 223, 227, 229, 231, 233 Deception, 203–6, 211 Deep state, 158–69 Defense budget, 37–38, 41, 46, 47, 50, 102, 106–7, 445 Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIUx), 50 Democracy, 80–81, 95, 165 Denigration campaigns, 108–9, 111–12, 215 Dereliction of duty, 263n DeWe Security, 136 Dick, Philip K., 51 Diplomacy, 31, 41–42, 71, 217 Discrediting, 111 “Domino effect,” 78 Double-crossing, 189 “Double government,” 163–64 “Drain the swamp” strategy, 96 Drones, 46, 235 Drug wars, 9, 134, 149, 153, 171–78, 180, 287n Dulles, John and Allen, 209 Dunford, Joseph, 237–39 Dunlop, John, 207 Durable disorder, 8–10, 33, 80, 150, 245, 247 DynCorp, 131 Economic dominance, 80 Egypt, 126, 162–63 82nd Airborne Division, 23, 34, 91–92 Eisenhower, Dwight, 166–67, 168, 209 Eleazar ben Yair, 89 Elizabeth I of England, 79 English Constitution, The (Bagehot), 163–64 Espionage, 204–5 Evro Polis, 134 “Export and relocate” strategy, 96–97 Extortion, 175, 178, 180, 187, 192 Extrajudicial killings, 93, 95 ExxonMobil, 136, 152, 155 Failed states, 147–50 Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt, 45 Fake news, 111 False-flag operations, 191, 213 False prophets, 12–17 Farrow, Mia, 146, 151, 154 Fawkes, Guy, 159, 160 First Jewish-Roman War, 83–90, 96 First Offset Strategy, 48 Fitzgerald, USS, incident, 52–54 “Flag follows trade” policy, 80 Florentine Republic, 123–24 Florus, 83–84, 86 “Fog of war,” 29, 205 Fonda, Jane, 226–27 “Force projection,” 65, 69, 80, 106 Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL), 118, 120 Foreign bases, 69 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 216 Foreign legions, 98–102 “Forever wars,” 9, 74, 246 Fragile states, 148–49 Fragile States Index, 32 Franklin, Benjamin, 228 Freedman, Lawrence, 11 Freeport-McMoRan, 136 Free trade, 80–81, 165 French Foreign Legion, 99 French invasion of Russia, 230 Friedman, Milton, 180 FSB (Federal Security Service), 207 FUBAR, 71, 119 Fulda Gap, 33, 103–4 Fuller, John “Boney,” 20–21, 238 Future wars, 244–48 “Futurism,” 17 Futurists.

Busy
by Tony Crabbe
Published 7 Jul 2015

No matter how convincingly I’ve argued my case, I am unlikely to have shifted your deep-seated beliefs or fears, formed and reinforced over a lifetime. There is a concept in social psychology called cognitive dissonance that can help here. It describes our desire for consistency between our beliefs and actions. If we consistently act in a way that is not in line with our beliefs, cognitive dissonance shifts our beliefs to align with our actions, which in turn ensures that these behaviors are sustainable, long-term. Let’s imagine you were trying to choose between a Ford F-Series and a Chevrolet Silverado.

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What happens next is interesting: the longer, and the more strongly, you argue for Bonds, the more you begin to convince yourself that the famous left fielder for the Giants really was the greatest baseball player ever to play the game. This isn’t because of your brilliant arguments either; in fact, your opponent is becoming more convinced than ever that Babe Ruth was the best. This is because of cognitive dissonance: when we argue forcefully for something, our beliefs start to come into line with our argument. We’re more likely to persuade ourselves than our opposition! When you apply this to a negotiation, the risk is that the very act of arguing or “negotiating” based on different opinions, can actually drive both opponents further apart, thereby reducing the chances of reaching a workable agreement.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

Unlearning isn’t something we know how to do. Human forgetting is an automatic process, not one that we easily control. Yet unlearn we must, if we wish to reframe. This is especially the case when the new frame is seemingly at odds with the old one, when the new frame needs to overcome the cognitive dissonance that it causes. Such cognitive dissonance may happen in one’s mind, but it can also happen in a community, making it difficult to adopt a new frame. Switching frames in such a situation may require many people to refocus on an alternative frame. That may necessitate discussions, negotiations, and persuasion, which are time-consuming endeavors.

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Anyone who has ever seen or played the game has been mesmerized by the sumptuous elegance of the imaginary world, at once minimalist, intricate, and elaborate. When one starts interacting with the stairs, stones, buttons, dials, and other graphical items, they turn out to be forms that cannot exist in real space but can be used in the virtual world. The cognitive dissonance between the reality we know and the virtual world we navigate is what makes Monument Valley so appealing. Humans are suckers for counterfactuals. Whether reading a book, playing a video game, or losing oneself in a daydream, these mental activities are not cognitive idling. Even a couch potato does more than just sit on the couch like a potato.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

But her general thrust remains much the same – in fact, she adds a few more ways in which technology will definitely improve the world, such as in the developing world. 18.Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (2005). 19.Selective exposure goes back to work by seminal psychologist Leon Festinger (1957), who posited the idea of cognitive dissonance – the discomfort people feel when presented with contradictory information. Selective exposure occurs when, in a bid to avoid cognitive dissonance, people tend to seek only information that confirms their beliefs. 20.Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (2005). 21.Stecklow (2005). 22.Mukul (2006); Raina and Timmons (2011). 23.A phablet is bigger than a smartphone, but smaller than a tablet. 24.That the digital divide is a symptom of other socioeconomic divides was astutely noted about telecenters by Economist (2005).

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American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 5(3):211–240, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/app.5.3.211. Farmer, Paul. (2005). Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. University of California Press. Feenberg, Andrew. (1999). Questioning Technology. Routledge. Festinger, Leon. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press. Findlater, Leah, Ravin Balakrishnan, and Kentaro Toyama. (2009). Comparing semiliterate and illiterate users’ ability to transition from audio+text to text-only interaction. Pp. 1751–1760 in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’09).

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See also Economics Carlin, George, 275(n8) Carr, Nicholas, 23 Caste system, 64, 139 Cause and correlation, 35 Censorship Arab Spring uprising, 33 Chinese Internet, 49–52 limiting technology use in the classroom, 119 Changing Lives (Tunstall), 270(n2) Character human maturation and, 161 learning, 165, 262(n29) strengths, 253(n20) See also Heart, mind, and will Charity compared with mentorship, 205 percentage of GDP, 269(n40) See also Nonprofit organizations; Poverty alleviation Charter schools, 62, 73, 239–240(n51) Check dams, 199 Children child-rearing, 192–193, 270(n1) commitment to save, 212–214 digital natives, 10–11 educational technology, 114–121 natural learners, 11 self-control, 265(n3) sexual abuse, 148, 257(n53) teaching and parenting, 202–203 text-messaging, 56 vaccines, 64–65 video games, 12, 114–115, 117, 122, 228(n20) See also Education and training China agricultural extension programs, 207, 273(n20) carbon reduction, 215–216 education, 13, 145, 229(n29) Internet censorship, 49–52 Max Weber, 176, 255(n7) one-child law, 205 PISA results, 229(n29) social media censorship, 23, 49–52 Toms Shoes manufacturing, 243(n31) See also Confucianism Choudhury, Abdul Mannan, 196–201 Civil Rights Act, 63–64 Civil society, Arab Spring and, 32–35, 37 Classroom management, 115–116, 118–119 Climate change, 23, 134, 215–216 Clinton, Bill, 49, 85 Clinton, Hillary, x, 35–36, 152 Coaching, 205 Cobb-Douglas function, 273–274(n25) Coerced partnership arrangements, 198, 205, 270(n1) Cognitive capacity, 28, 227(n10), 263(n43) Cognitive dissonance, 234(n19) Cognitive Surplus (Shirky), 230(n17) Cohen, Jared, 21, 229(n5) Cohen, Roger, 32–33 Cold chain of vaccine delivery, 65 Coleman, James, 145, 256(n42) Collective action. See also Self-help groups Collectivism, individualism and, 93 Colombia: One Laptop Per Child, 8 Communications Arab Spring suppression of, 33–34 cyberbalkanization, 47 history of technologies, 7–8 latent desires driving habits, 40–41 management, 44–46 personal and political interaction, 46–47 telecenters, 105 texting, 25, 56, 69, 235(n33) unintended consequences, 56 See also Mobile phones; Social media Community efforts.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
by Michael Shermer
Published 8 Apr 2020

He then wrote it up as “Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind” and sold it to John W. Campbell, Jr., who published it in Astounding Science Fiction in 1950. Astounding indeed that anyone would accept such science fiction as fact, but such is the power of belief when coupled to a handful of powerful psychological principles. Consider cognitive dissonance, discovered by the psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954 when he joined a UFO end-of-the-world cult at the mountain top to record what would happen when the mothership failed to arrive at the designated midnight hour on December 21. Festinger saw this as an opportunity to study the phenomenon of mental tension created when someone holds two conflicting thoughts simultaneously: Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen?

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See alternative archaeology Archetype Theory of Truth (Peterson), 304–307 Arden, Jacinda, 29 Arendt, Hannah, 34 Areopagitica (Milton), 3–4 Aristotle, 231 Asimov’s Axiom, 117–118 atheism anti-something movements are doomed to fail, 90 challenging religious beliefs, 86–92 freedom to disbelieve, 86–92 meaning of life and, 103–108 morality and, 87–88 New Atheist movement, 289 power of positive assertions, 90 rational consciousness raising, 91 societal health and, 88 Australia effects of gun law reform, 174–175 Austria effects of gun control, 187–190 authority bias, 24 availability bias, 24 Aveling, Edward, 90, 288 Baby Boomer generation, 65 Bachmann, Michele, 81, 82–83 Baer, Elizabeth, 1–2 Bailey, Ronald, 289 baraminology, 58 Barash, David, 287 Barlow, Connie, 289 Barna, George, 87–88 Baron-Cohen, Simon, 165 Barrow, John, 120 Bastiat, Frédéric, 214–215 Baumeister, Roy, 34–35 Bazile, Leon M., Judge, 72 Beale, Howard, 88 Beckner, Stephen, 300 belief pluralism case for, 81–85 beliefs cognitive biases and, 23–24 believability bias, 24 Bentham, Jeremy, 139 Bentley, Alex, 86 Berg, Alan, 30 Berger, Victor, 2 Berkman, Alexander, 2 Berlin Wall, 217 Berra, Yogi, 289 Bible, 224–225, 317 Big Bang, 121 Big Five personality traits, 260–261 Big Questions Online (BQO) program, 103 bigotry historical influences, 30–31 Bill of Rights, 143 bio-altruism, 106 Biography Bias, 262 birth order personality and, 261–262 Black Lives Matter movement, 132 Black Swan events, 29, 162 Blackburn, Simon, 287 Bligh, William, 156–159 Bod, Rens, 225–226 Boemeke, Isabelle, 74 Boko Haram, 34 Bolt, Robert, 8, 22 boom-and-bust cycles, 121 Boone, Richard, 298 Boonin, David, 44 bottom-up self-organization, 203–205, 215–217 Bouchard, Thomas, 289 Boudreaux, Donald, 212–213 Brandeis, Louis, Justice, 41, 44 brane universes, 123 Breivik, Anders Behring, 29, 165–166 Brexit, 153 Brin, David, 153 Brin, Sergey, 260 Bronowski, Jacob, 299 Brooks, Arthur C., 89, 212 Browne, Janet, 288 Browning, Robert, 160 Bruruma, Ian, 282 Bryan, William Jennings, 48 Buckholtz, Joshua W., 168 Buffett, Warren, 211 Burke, Edmund, 153 Bush, George W., 138 Calhoun, John C., 14 Callahan, Tim, 115–116 Calvin, William, 289 Camus, Renaud, 30 Carlson, Randall, 314 Carroll, Sean, 117, 118, 121 Cassidy, John, 212–213 categorical imperative (Kant), 240 censorship, 1–9arguments against, 19–27 college students’ responses to controversial subjects, 64–78 hate speech, 28–37 Holocaust denial, 38–43 Principle of Interchangeable Perspectives, 78 Ten Commandments of free speech and thought, 7–8 trigger warnings and, 66–67 Center for Inquiry (CFI), 269, 271 Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 250–251 Change.org, 33–34 Christakis, Nicholas, 154–156 Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre responses to, 28–37 Christian, Fletcher, 156–159 Christian values v. the US Constitution, 81–85 Churchill, Ward, 41 civilization free trade institutions, 249–251 how to get to Civilization,1.0, 251–253 influence of political tribalism, 243–246 pre-financial crisis world, 243 Types of civilization, 246–247 Clark, Kenneth, 299 classical liberalism, 136case for, 138–144 Clinton, Bill, 83, 253 Coase, Ronald, 201 Cockell, Charles S., 150–152 Coddington, Jonathan, 59 cognitive biases, 23–24 cognitive dissonance, 95–96 Colavito, Jason, 321 collective action problem, 198–201 college faculty political bias among, 75–76 college students consequences of left-leaning teaching bias, 75–76 drive to censor controversial subjects, 64–78 Free Speech Movement of the late 1960s, 64–65 Generation Z and how they handle challenges, 64–65 microaggressions, 68–70 provision of safe spaces for, 67–68 trigger warnings, 66–67 views on freedom of speech, 64–78 colleges avoidance of controversial or sensitive subjects, 25 causes of current campus unrest, 71–76 disinvitation of controversial speakers, 25 lack of viewpoint diversity, 75–76 speaker disinvitations, 70–71 ways to increase viewpoint diversity, 76–78 Collins, Francis, 60 Collins, Jim, 263–264 Columbine murders, 169 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), 271 communication microaggressions, 68–70 competitive victimhood, 132 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 280, 283 confirmation bias, 24, 316–318 conjecture and refutation, 8, 23 conscription as slavery, 1–2 conservatism, 134–136 conservatives Just World Theory, 255 Strict Father metaphor for the nation as a family, 193–197 consistency bias, 24 conspiracy theories Intelligent Design advocates, 55–63 contingency influence on how lives turn out, 258–264 Copernican principle, 120 Core Theory of forces and particles, 118 correspondence theory of truth, 305, 306 Cosmides, Leda, 238 Costly Signaling Theory, 208 Coulter, Ann, 13 Cowan, David, 263 Craig, William Lane, 104, 108–109 Craig’s Categorical Error, 109 Creation Science, 50 creationism freedom of speech issue, 44–54 level of support in America, 46 question of equal coverage in science teaching, 50–54 variety of creationist theories, 50–52 view of Richard Dawkins, 293–294 why people do not support evolution, 47–50 Cremo, Michael, 316 Crichton, Michael, 123 Cruise, Tom, 100 cry bullies, 77 cults Scientology as a cult, 96–98 culture of honor, 73 culture of victimhood, 73 Darley, John, 317 Darrow, Clarence, 52–53 Darwin, Charles, 280connection with Adam Smith, 203–205 development of the theory of evolution, 44–46 impact of the Darwinian revolution, 44–47 on science and religion, 90 On the Origin of Species, 104–105 problem of the peacock’s tail, 200 skepticism, 270, 287–288 Darwin Awards, 207 Darwin economy, 199–201 Darwinian literary studies, 306 Darwinian universes, 122 Darwinism misinterpretation for ideological reasons, 60–61 neo-Darwinism, 62 scientific questioning, 61–63 Dawkins, Richard, 55, 61, 87, 89, 104at the Humanity 3000 event (2001), 289–291 influence of, 287–289 on creationism, 293–294 on pseudoscience, 292–294 on religion, 287–289, 293–295 scientific skepticism, 291–295 sense of spirituality, 295–296 Day-Age Creationists, 51 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 139 Debs, Eugene V., 2 Declaration of Independence, 27, 72 Defant, Marc, 314 Del Ray, Lester, 95 delegative democracy, 149 Dembski, William, 49, 55, 63, 280 democracy delegative democracy, 149 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 freedom of speech and, 26 impact of cyber-technology, 153 representational democracy, 149 Dennett, Daniel, 87, 287 Denying History (Shermer and Grobman), 38, 42, 78 Descartes, René, 230 Deutsch, David, 287 devil what he is due, 8–9 who he is, 8–9 Diamond, Jared, 147–148, 208–209, 228, 314, 321, 322 Diderot, Denis, 270 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 Dirmeyer, Jennifer, 215 District of Columbia v.

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United States, 1 Schopf, William, 62 Schumpeter, Joseph, 206 Schwarz, Benjamin, 277 science evolution–creationism controversy, 44–54 freedom of speech and inquiry, 19–27 impact of the Darwinian revolution, 44–47 questioning Darwinism, 61–63 scrutiny of ideas, 24–25 search for truth, 26–27 separation from religion, 62–63 Scientific American, 5, 62, 101, 103, 110, 254, 255, 259, 264, 311, 314 scientific and philosophical revolution (seventeenth century), 223emergence of Enlightenment humanism, 223–228 scientific creationism, 49 scientific humanism, 236 scientific naturalism, 236emergence of Enlightenment humanism, 223–228 Is-Ought fallacy, 228–235 scientific realism, 306 Scientology, 93–94characteristics in common with cults, 96–98 cognitive dissonance effects, 95–96 creation by L. Ron Hubbard, 95 genesis story, 94–95 origin myths of religions and cults, 101–102 public suspicion of, 99–101 threat from Anonymous group, 99–101 Scopes, John T., 48, 52 Scott, Eugenie, 55, 59–60 Second Law of Thermodynamics, 109, 237–238, 309–310 Second World War, 11, 49, 165 self-justification bias, 24 selfish genes, 106 Sharansky, Natan, 249 Sharman, Eleanor, 73 Shepherd, Lindsay, 303 Shrout, Derek, 171 Singer, Peter, 240 Sitchin, Zecharia, 315 Skeptic magazine, 21, 64, 77, 78, 93, 100, 110, 115, 161, 269, 272, 283, 285, 297, 300, 321 Skeptic.com, 181 Skeptical Inquirer, 271 skeptical movement influence of Paul Kurtz, 269–275 Skepticblog.org, 282 skepticism history of, 269–271 scientific skepticism of Richard Dawkins, 291–295 view of Charles Darwin, 287–288 Skeptics Society, 269, 272, 283 Skilling, Jeffrey, 61 Skousen, Mark, 284 slavery conscription as, 1–2 Smith, Adam, 61, 139, 203–205, 231, 243 Smith, Gary, 263–264 Smith, Quentin, 113 Smolin, Lee, 122 Snowden, Edward, 2 Snyder, Mark, 317 social contract, 240 social movements puritanical purging, 74–75 social spending extent in different countries, 140–142 importance for society, 140–142 societal health relationship to religiosity, 88 Socrates, 269 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 36 South Park, 95 Sowell, Thomas, 256–257 Sparks, John C., 251–253 Sparks’ Law, 253 species altruism, 106 Spencer, Richard, 13, 14 Spinoza, Baruch, 225, 240, 300 Standard & Poor’s, 206 Standard Model of elementary particles, 118 Star Trek, The Next Generation, 304 Starbucks, 136 Stark, Rodney, 96 start-up businesses chances of success, 262–264 status quo bias, 24 Stea, Jonathan N., 308 Stein, Ben Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (documentary film), 55–63 Stenger, Victor, 119, 123 Stern, Charlotte, 75 Sternberg, Richard, 57–59 Strict Father metaphor for the nation as a family, 193–197 string universes, 123 Strossen, Nadine, 13–14 Sulloway, Frank J., 45, 261–262 sunk-cost bias, 24 supernatural forces, 116–117 symbiogenesis, 62 Tarrant, Brenton, 29, 30–31, 33 Taunton, Larry Alex The Faith of Christopher Hitchens, 276–281 taxation, 203argument for wealth redistribution, 210–213 “sin taxes”, 201–202 Taylor, Jared, 13, 14 Taylor, John, 318–319 Ten Commandments of free speech and thought, 7–8 Terminiello, Arthur, 15 terrorism death rates compared to gun violence deaths, 191–192 The Age of Reason (Paine), 4 The Believing Brain (Shermer), 24 The Edge of Reason?

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It
by Matthew Williams
Published 23 Mar 2021

A recently initiated young man may ask himself, ‘Why did people I trust require me to endure having my penis mutilated to become a man?’ This constant search for an answer, over months and years after the ritual, creates deep symbolic meanings that are group-specific. The psychological theory of cognitive dissonance shows that people who go through unpleasant initiations end up more bonded to the group because they strive to rationalise why they accepted the challenge and why the peers they trust insisted upon it.36 Tentative conclusions include ‘I did it to prove my loyalty and commitment to the group’ and ‘They insisted we endure the pain to weed out the freeloaders.’37 In addition, extreme acts forced upon the uninitiated create a sense of shared trauma which comes to define them.

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Hamid et al., ‘Neuroimaging “Will to Fight” for Sacred Values: An Empirical Case Study with Supporters of an Al Qaeda Associate’, Royal Society Open Science 6 (2019). 31. ibid. 32. H. Whitehouse, ‘Dying for the Group: Towards a General Theory of Extreme Self-Sacrifice’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41 (2018), 1–62. 33. E. Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse [The Elementary Forms of Religious Life], Paris: Alcan, 1912; L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962. 34. F. J. P. Poole, ‘The Ritual Forging of Identity: Aspects of Person and Self in Bimin-Kuskusmin Male Initiation’, in Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea, ed. G. H. Herdt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982; H.

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Whitehouse, ‘Rites of Terror: Emotion, Metaphor, and Memory in Melanesian Initiation Cults’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1996), 703–15. 35. F. Barth, Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. 36. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. 37. J. A. Bulbulia and R. Sosis, ‘Signalling Theory and the Evolution of Religious Cooperation’, Religion 4 (2011), 363–88; A. Cimino, ‘The Evolution of Hazing: Motivational Mechanisms and the Abuse of Newcomers’, Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011), 241–67; J. Henrich, ‘The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation and Religion: Credibility Enhancing Displays and Their Implications for Cultural Evolution’, Evolution and Human Behavior 30 (2009), 244–60. 38.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

Always strive to disentangle the facts of a situation from the elements of human psychology. Stress-Influence Tendency and Cognitive Dissonance Stress (n.): a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances. In the fast-paced world of the stock market, adrenaline tends to produce faster and more extreme reactions. Some stress can improve performance, but heavy stress often leads to dysfunction in our cognitive apparatus. One form of stress is cognitive dissonance. We experience this type of stress when we simultaneously hold onto two contradictory thoughts, beliefs, opinions, or attitudes.

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Bias from consistency and commitment tendency. This bias causes us to remain consistent with prior commitments and ideas, even in the face of disconfirming evidence. This includes confirmation bias—that is, looking for evidence that confirms our beliefs and ignoring or distorting disconfirming evidence to reduce the stress from cognitive dissonance. We tend to double down on our failed efforts because of the sunk cost fallacy. The more time or money we spend on something, the less likely we are to abandon it. When we have made an investment, we tend to seek evidence to confirm that we made the right decision and to ignore information that shows we made the wrong one.

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In November 2016, I sold my entire holding in SKS Microfinance (now known as Bharat Financial) because I believed that its microfinance business (which depended heavily on cash collections) would be adversely affected by the Indian government’s demonetization announcement and that it would result in a spike in SKS’s nonperforming assets. I was experiencing severe mental stress at the time, as SKS’s stock price was rapidly falling off a cliff. But what I did immediately after my sale of SKS’s stock exemplified cognitive dissonance at its finest. I deployed the sale proceeds into buying shares of Manappuram Finance because I had been closely following it over the past few months and had been enthused by the prospects of its fast-growing microfinance subsidiary. Fortunately, I realized my folly quickly and exited the stock at a minor loss.

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease
by Gary Taubes
Published 25 Sep 2007

Now Reaven is saying not to eat high carbohydrates. We have to eat something.” “Sometimes we wish it would go away,” Silverman added, “because nobody knows how to deal with it.” This is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, or the tension that results from trying to hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously. When the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn discussed cognitive dissonance in scientific research—“the awareness of an anomaly in the fit between theory and nature”—he suggested that scientists will typically do what they have invariably done in the past in such cases: “They will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.”

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And because dietary carbohydrates and particularly refined carbohydrates elevate blood sugar and insulin and, presumably, induce insulin resistance, the implication is that eating these carbohydrates increases heart-disease risk not only in diabetics but in healthy individuals. By this reasoning, the atherogenic American diet is a carbohydrate-rich diet. Hence, cognitive dissonance. The logic of this argument has to be taken one step further, however, even if the cognitive dissonance is elevated with it. Both diabetes and metabolic syndrome are associated with an elevated incidence of virtually every chronic disease, not just heart disease. Moreover, the diabetic condition is associated with a host of chronic blood-vessel-related problems known as vascular complications: stroke, a stroke-related dementia called vascular dementia, kidney disease, blindness, nerve damage in the extremities, and atheromatous disease in the legs that often leads to amputation.

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This offers yet another reason to believe the carbohydrate hypothesis of heart disease, since metabolic syndrome is now considered perhaps the dominant heart-disease risk factor—a “coequal partner to cigarette smoking as contributors to premature [coronary heart disease],” as the National Cholesterol Education Program describes it—and both triglycerides and HDL cholesterol are influenced by carbohydrate consumption far more than by any fat. Nonetheless, when small, dense LDL and metabolic syndrome officially entered the orthodox wisdom as risk factors for heart disease in 2002, the cognitive dissonance was clearly present. First the National Cholesterol Education Program published its revised guidelines for cholesterol testing and treatment. This was followed in 2004 by two conference reports: one describing the conclusions of a joint NIH-AHA meeting on scientific issues related to metabolic syndrome, and the other, in which the American Diabetes Association joined in as well, describing joint treatment guidelines.

The Power of Passive Investing: More Wealth With Less Work
by Richard A. Ferri
Published 4 Nov 2010

This group was deemed to be more knowledgeable about investment matters than the architects. They overestimated their past performance by 3.4 percentage points.9 The overall results are consistent with the theory of cognitive dissonance. Investors would rather alter the facts than admit they have no special investment skills. This makes it difficult to fix flawed investment strategies. Selective Memory as a Profession Wall Street has turned cognitive dissonance into a business model. Have you ever heard a brokerage firm ever say they were wrong about an investment recommendation? Their analysts say they were early or late on a call, but never wrong.

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Van den Assem, Guido Baltussen, and Richard H. Thaler, “Deal or No Deal? Decision Making under Risk in a Large-Payoff Game Show,” American Economic Review 98, no. 1 (March 2008): 38–71. 8. Calmetta Coleman, “Beardstown Ladies Fess Up to Big Goof,” Wall Street Journal, Mar. 18, 1998, cl. 9. William N. Goetzmann and Nadav Peles, “Cognitive Dissonance and Mutual Fund Investors,” Journal of Financial Research 20, no. 2 (1997): 145–58. 10. John Maynard Keynes. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1964), 148. 11. Richard H. Thaler, “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 1, no. 1 (1980): 39–60. 12.

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health
by David B. Agus
Published 29 Dec 2015

People who use motivated reasoning respond defensively to contrary evidence. They actively discredit such evidence or its source without logical or evidentiary justification. It’s confirmation bias to the extreme. Why do we defend obvious falsehoods? It can’t be just to always feel as if we’re right. Social scientists posit that our desire to avoid “cognitive dissonance,” as they call it, drives motivated reasoning. In other words, self-delusion feels good. Dan Kahan is a professor of law at Yale Law School. He explains a classic example of motivated reasoning by describing an experiment done in the 1950s when psychologists asked students from two Ivy League universities to watch a film that featured a set of controversial calls made by referees during a football game.3 The game happened to be between teams from their respective schools.

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“nonself” in, 34 body mass index (BMI), 22, 134, 141 Boston, Mass., 84 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, The, 178 Boston University, 47 Bowerman, Bill, 199 brain: decision making in, 227 sleep’s importance to, 208–10 brain cancer, 30 Brave New World (Huxley), viii, 159, 238 Brazil, 199 BRCA genes, 8, 21, 118 breast cancer, 8, 53, 55, 60, 61, 118, 171, 190, 211 genetic mutation and, 21–22 mastectomies and, 21–22 obesity and, 133 statin use and, 220 Breast Cancer Prevention Trial, 53 Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 84 Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, 23, 24 Broedel, Max, 73 Brown University, 58 Brunet, Anne, 63 bubonic plague, 95–101 Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 2 butterfly effect, 236–37 California, 5, 12, 47, 103 tobacco control program in, 237 California, University of: at Berkeley, 25 at Irvine, 3 at San Francisco, 3 Caltech, 102 Cambridge, University of, 125, 134 Cameron, David, 67 Canada, 4, 11 cancer, 41, 108, 128, 175, 215, 237 aggressiveness of, 53–54 alternative treatments for, 18 aspirin and, 216–17 chemotherapy for, 29 childhood, 6, 49, 170–71 context and, 13–14 diet and, 163 early detection and treatment of, 172 fitness and, 190–94 genetic mutations and, 14, 21–22, 50 genotyping of, 117–18 immunotherapy for, 28–33 inflammation in, 175–77 lifestyle and, 153, 168–69 measurement of success in treating of, 32–33 metastasis in, 60–62 molecular therapies for, 23–24, 49–50, 54–55 muscle mass and, 195 p53 gene and, 57–58 Peto’s paradox and, 57 plasma transfusions and, 5 precision medicine and, 115 radiation therapy for, 29 random mutations in, 169–74, 176 as runaway cell copying, 59 self-seeding in, 61 statins and, 218–20 treatment resistance in, 190–91 Watson supercomputer and treatment of, 88–89 see also specific types of cancer cardiovascular disease, 86, 121, 128, 147, 216 airport noise and, 92 risk factors for, 47 Carlson, Mary, 212, 213 Carnegie Mellon University, 214 CAR T cells, 29–30 CBS This Morning, 67 CCR5 gene, 24, 25 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 212–13 Celebrex (celecoxib), 62 celiac disease, 113, 164 cell division, 5 cells: death of (apoptosis), 59 endoplasmic reticulum in, 40 oxidative damage to, 40 receptors on, 59 Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development (Duke University), 45 Center for Translational Neuromedicine (University of Rochester), 208 Center for Translational Research in Aging and Longevity (University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences), 194 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 47, 103, 133, 205 ceritinib (Zykadia), 53 change, self-assessment of, past vs. future in, 38–40, 39 chaos theory, 236–37 Charaka, 113 Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine, 204 checkpoint blockage therapy, 29–30 chemotherapy, 29, 60, 190–91 exercise and, 191, 192 Chicago, University of, 17 children, obesity and overweight in, 133 Chittagong University, 232 cholera, 234 cholesterol, 150, 195, 217, 219 dietary vs. blood, 162 online calculator for, 218 chronic disease, 128–29 age-related, 128, 136 diet and, 141–44 management of, 144–46 overweight and, 141 sleep habits and, 147 chronological age, 45, 46, 46, 47, 135–36, 232 circadian rhythm, 123, 138, 139–40, 148, 205 Circulation, 86 climate change, 159 Clinical Practice Research Datalink, 219 clinical trials, 52 double-blind, 53, 155 IRBs and, 52 randomized, 52–53 ClinVar, 9 coarse graining, 229–32, 230 cognitive abilities, 45, 46 cognitive dissonance, 159 Cohen, Jacques, 111–12 colds, 205, 214 Cold War, 94 Coley, William B., 27–29, 28, 33, 48 colitis, 121–22 Collins, Francis, 114, 118 colonoscopies, 93 Colorado, 47 colorectal cancer, 55, 123–24, 190, 217 statin use and, 220 Columbia University, 138 complex carbohydrates, 162 comprehensive metabolic panel (CMP), 151 Congress, US, 114, 237 context: adapting to new data in, 159 aging and, 45 baselines for, 150 changes in, 22 databases as, 83, 91–94 data mining and, 101 diet and, 163, 165 disease and, 13–14, 20 genes and, 14, 20–21, 118 health and, 48, 76–78, 84, 89–90, 91–94, 101, 113, 114–15, 117, 124–25 heart disease and, 22 identifying and optimizing, 135–52 lab tests in, 150–52 medical data and, 78–82 medical education and, 75 Cooper Center Longitudinal Study, 192 coordination, 45 Cornell University, 2 coronary artery disease, 151 cortisol, 123 counterfeit drugs, 10–11 C-reactive protein, 175 CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), 24–25, 26, 45 Critical Care, 222 Crohn’s disease, 25, 121 CTLA-4, 29–30 cystic fibrosis, 115–16 Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Vertex, 115–16 cytokines, 123 cytoplasm, 111 cytosol, 40 Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Profile program of, 118 Dannon, 235 Dartmouth College, 157 Darwin, Charles, 112 data, medical: context and, 78–82 individual’s role in collection of, 81 databases, medical, 82–83, 95 as context, 83, 91–94 security of, 88–89 data mining, 84–89, 92 context and, 101 infectious diseases and, 100–101 Davos, Switzerland, 161 Dawkins, Richard, 17 death, leading causes of, 129 death certificates, 96 decision-making, 225, 227–28 dehydration, 234 dementia, 5, 41, 90, 91, 151, 204, 210, 215, 221 see also Alzheimer’s disease depression, 122, 211, 215 exercise and, 186 Dhaka, 232 diabetes, 22, 24, 25, 47, 59, 108, 114, 123, 128, 147, 151, 166, 175, 186, 187, 188, 215, 221, 237 gut bacteria and, 120–21 incidence of, 120–21 diet, 22, 114 chronic disease and, 141–44 as contextual, 163 honesty about, 133–34 low-cholesterol, 162 low-fat, 162 moderation in, 144 research on, see nutritional studies weight and, 141 diphtheria, 161 disease: autoimmune, 85, 125, 175 context and, 13–14, 20 genetic markers for, 22, 113–14, 127 surrogate markers for, 127–28 see also chronic disease; infectious diseases; noncommunicable diseases disorders, inherited, newborn screening and, 12 DNA, see genes, genome DNA mismatch repair, 32, 57 docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), 182 dopamine, 211 Doudna, Jennifer A., 25 dreaming, 203 drug abuse, 22 drugs, see medications Duke Cancer Institute (DCI), 191 Duke University, 30 Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development at, 45 Dulken, Ben, 63 Dunedin Study, 45–47, 46 Dyerberg, Jorn, 182–83 Dyson, Esther, 173 Earls, Felton, 213 East Africa, 44, 107 Eat, Sleep, Poop (Cohen), 137 eating patterns, heart disease and, 138–40 Ebola, 18, 221–22 E. coli, 123 eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), 182 Einstein, Albert, 2, 223 Elder, William, Jr., 115–16 electrodermal response, 230–31 Elledge, Stephen J., 84 emotions, touch and, 214 emulsifiers, microbiome and, 121–22 “end of history illusion,” 38–40, 39 End of Illness, The (Agus), 18 endoplasmic reticulum, 40 endorphins, 211 energy levels, 149 England, see Great Britain environment, see context epidemics: global spread of, 103 prediction of, 103–4 epigenetics, 20–21 esomeprazole (Nexium), 86 esophageal cancer, 217 estrogen, 64 ethics: genome editing and, 24–25 medical advances and, 10, 24 technology and, 25–26 Europe, 77 European Journal of Immunology, 34 exercise, 21, 114, 140, 185–201 chemotherapy and, 191, 192 honesty about, 133–34 ideal amount of, 196–200 intensity of, 197–98 life expectancy and, 189–90 mortality rates and, 148 Exeter, University of, 157 “Experimental Prolongation of the Life Span” (McCay, Lunsford, and Pope), 2 experimental treatments, quicker access to, 56 Facebook, 27 fasting lipid profile, 150 feebleness, aging and, 43 fertility, aging and, 43 Field, Tiffany, 214 financial industry, information technology and, 89 Finland, 220 fish oil, 182–83 Florida, 103 flu vaccine: misinformation about, 157–58 public distrust of, 160 FODMAPs (fermentable oligo-di-monosaccharides and polyols), 164 Fodor, George, 183 food, safety of, 11 Food and Drug Administration, US (FDA), 2, 18, 51, 55, 56, 86, 111, 112, 127–28, 146, 182, 201 Accelerated Approval provisions of, 128 Foundation Medicine, 50 Framingham Heart Study, 47, 118 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 169 free radicals, 208 fruit flies, eating pattern studies with, 138–40 fungi, 119 gait, 45 galvanic skin response (GSR), 230–31 gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), 86 Gates, Bill, 2 Genentech, 56 genes, genome, 45, 83–84 aging and, 20, 41 bacterial, 107, 119 context and, 14, 20–21, 118 DNA mismatch repair and, 32 expression of, 20–21, 125, 139 mitochondrial, see mitochondrial DNA sequencing of, 20, 23, 49–52, 112 SNPs in, 113–14 as switches, 41 viruses and, 119–20 genes, genome, editing of, 24–25, 45 ethics of, 102–5 genetically modified foods (GMOs), 18 genetic markers, 22, 113–14, 127 genetic mutations: aging and, 41 cancer and, 14, 21–22, 50 disease risk and, 9, 12 genetic screening, 103, 117, 137 flawed results in, 8–10 of newborns, 11–12 Georgia State University, 121 Gewirtz, Andrew, 121 Gibson, Peter, 164 Gilbert, Daniel, 38, 39, 40 Gillray, James, 161 Gladwell, Malcolm, 225, 227, 228 Gleevec (imatinib), 55 glial cells, 209 glioblastoma, 30 “Global Recommendations on Physical Activity for Health” (WHO), 187 gluten, debate over, 163–65 Goldstein, Irwin, 211 Google, 87, 88, 101 Google Flu Trends, 101 Grameen Bank, 232, 233–34, 235 Grameen Danone, 235 Graunt, John, 100 Great Britain, 96, 97, 100, 110, 155 Black Death in, 95–101, 98, 99, 100 Greatist.com, 200 Greenland, 182 Grove, Andy, 7, 7 growth factors, 59 gun violence, 91 gut: inflammation of, 120, 122 microbiome of, see microbiome H2 blockers, 86 habits and routines, 136, 137–41, 228, 237–38 see also diet; lifestyle choices Harlow, Harry, 213 Harvard Medical School, 84 Harvard School of Public Health, 142–43 Harvard University, 3, 23, 24, 37, 178, 186, 196, 212, 213, 216 hash tables, health care and, 87–88 Hawaii, 47 HDL cholesterol, 150 health: biological age and, 47 context and, 48, 76–78, 84, 89–90, 91–94, 101, 113, 114–15, 117, 124–25 family history of, 136–37 honesty about, 131–34 inflection point in, 8 lifestyle and, see lifestyle choices optimism and, 65–69 personal baselines for, 150 retirement and, 91–92 technology and, 37–70 health and fitness apps, 200 Health and Human Services Department, US, 103 health care: Affordable Care Act and, 69–70 hash tables and, 87–88 individual’s responsibility in, 12–13, 26, 70, 75, 78, 131–32 misinformation about, 14–15, 18, 19, 154, 157–58 politics and, 11–12 portable electronic devices and, 79, 90–91 Health Professionals Follow-up Study, 142–43, 217 health threats, prediction of, 103–4 heart: biological age of, 47–48 health of, 48 heart attacks, 76, 86, 182, 217, 218 heart disease, 59, 128, 150, 166, 175, 183, 186, 187, 215, 217, 221 context and, 22 diet and, 163 eating patterns and, 138–40 lifestyle choices and, 22 muscle mass and, 195 heart rates, 231 heart rate variability (HRV), 230 Heathrow Airport, 92 “hedonic reactions,” 38–40 heel sticks, 11–12 hemoglobin A1C test, 151 hepatitis B, 175 hepatitis C, 175 Herceptin (trastuzumab), 55 high blood pressure, 22, 188, 195 high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP) test, 151 hippocampus, 214 Hippocrates, 71, 113, 122, 216 HIV/AIDS, 18, 24, 25, 59, 84, 127–28, 131, 159 Hoffmann, Felix, 215, 216 Holland, 41 Homeland Security Department, US, 103 homeostasis, 137–38, 140 Homo sapiens, evolution of, 107 honesty: about health, 131–34 nutritional studies and, 162 hormones, 219 hormone therapy, 201 Horton, Richard, 178 Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled (Hospital for Special Surgery), 28 house calls, 80 Houston Methodist, 86 “how do you feel” question, 231 hugs, 214 Human Genome Project, 113, 120 human growth hormone, 200 Human Molecular Genetics, 65 human papilloma virus (HPV), 161, 175 Hurricane Sandy, 84 Huxley, Aldous, viii, 6, 159, 238 Hydra magnipapillata, 42, 42 hyperglycemia, 122 hypertension, 125, 195, 203 IBM, 88–89 imatinib (Gleevec), 55 immune reactions, 5 immune system, 175, 190, 209, 211 aging and, 44 impact of hugs on, 214 immunotherapy, 28–33 polio virus and, 30, 31 incentives, 235–36 Indiana University Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing’s Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, 94–95 infant mortality, 87, 97 infants: genetic screening of, 11–12 premature, 87 infections, 175–76 infectious diseases, 129 antibiotic-resistant, 67–69, 68 data mining and, 100–101 inflammation, 34, 151, 174–77, 181, 187, 190, 195, 215–22 inflammatory bowel disease, 121 inflection points, 7–8, 7 influenza, 161 risks from, 157 vaccine for, see flu vaccine information, sorting good from bad, 19–20 information technology, financial industry and, 89 inherited disorders, newborn genetic screening and, 12 insomnia, 122 Institute for Sexual Medicine, 211 insulin, 56, 190 insulin sensitivity, 5, 87, 120, 122, 151, 195 insurance companies, off-label drugs and, 55 Intel, 7 International Agency for Research on Cancer, 170 International Prevention Research Institute, 180 intuition, 224–29 Inuits, 182–83 in vitro fertilization (IVF), three-person, 109–12, 110 Ioannidis, John, 178 IRBs (institutional review boards), 52 iron deficiency, 231 irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), 164 Islam, 234 Italy, 183 ivacaftor (Kalydeco), 115–16 JAMA Internal Medicine, 142, 143, 192, 196 Jenner, Edward, 160, 161 Jobs, Steve, 2, 23–24, 26, 49 Johns Hopkins Hospital, 71, 72, 128 Hurd Hall at, 74 Osler Medical Housestaff Training Program at, 73–75, 74 Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, 32 Johns Hopkins University, 23, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 215 Jolie, Angelina, 21 Jones, Owen, 43 Journal of Sexual Medicine, 211 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 72, 114–15, 173, 201, 220, 221 Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, 154 Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 169 Journal of Urology, 168 journals, medical, misinformation in, 154, 179 J.

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L., 159 mental health, 145 portable electronic devices and, 90–91 metabolic syndrome, 121, 122 metabolomics, 188 metastasis, 60–62 Metchnikoff, Élie, 33–35, 33, 35, 48 Miami, University of, Miller School of Medicine at, 214 mice and rats: aging experiments with, 1–3, 3, 4 cancer treatment experiments with, 60–62 digestive tract experiments with, 120, 121–22 microbiome, 48, 85, 119–25 beneficial bacteria and, 33–34 diabetes and, 120–21 emulsifiers and, 121–22 gastric surgery and, 123 sleep and, 122–23 microfinance, 232–33 Middle East, 77 mild cognitive impairment (MCI), 203–4 Minnesota, 103 misinformation, medical, 153–84 anecdotal evidence in, 156 cognitive dissonance and, 159 media and, 153–54 in medical studies, 177–84 motivated reasoning and, 157–61 in peer-reviewed journals, 154 post hoc reasoning in, 156 sweeping statements in, 165, 166–69, 184 Wikipedia and, 154 Mississippi, 47 Missouri, 205 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 23, 24, 236 Mitalipov, Shoukhrat, 109 mitochondria, 106–8, 106, 119 mitochondrial diseases, 106, 106, 108–12 mitochondrial DNA, 106, 106, 107–8 mutations in, 107–8 replacement of, 109–12, 110 mitochondrial electron transport chain (mETC), 139–40 “Mitochondrial Eve,” 107 MMR vaccine, 156 moderation, in diet, 144 Monash University, 164 Montana, 3 mood, monitoring of, 149 morbidity, sleep habits and, 146–47 Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 138 mortality rates: aging and, 42–43 decline in, 6–7 exercise and, 148 sleep habits and, 146, 147 motivated reasoning, medical misinformation and, 157–61 motivation, 149 MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), 230 multimorbidity, 129 multiple sclerosis, 59 muscle mass, 194–96, 199 muscle strength, 45 mutation, see genetic mutations MyBabyFace (app), 87 Napoli, Mike, 202–3 National Cancer Institute (NCI), 53, 114, 196 National Cancer Institute Cohort Consortium, 189 National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 47, 141 National Institutes of Health (NIH), 114, 117–18, 205 National Sleep Foundation (NSF), 206 natural immunity, 33–34 Nature, 41, 95, 121, 123 NCI-MATCH (Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice), 117 near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), 66 Nedergaard, Maiken, 208–10 Neogest (app), 87 Neurology, 203 newborns: genetic screening of, 11–12 premature, 87 Newcastle University, 108 New England Journal of Medicine, 8, 9, 24, 32, 178, 183, 218 New Jersey, 111 New Mexico, 68 Newtown shooting, 91 New York, N.Y., 28, 116 New York Academy of Medicine, 2 New York Cancer Hospital, 28 see also Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center New York University, 204 New Zealand, 45, 46 Nexium (esomeprazole), 86 night blindness, 235 NIH Human Microbiome Project, 120 Nike, 199 Nobel Peace Prize, 232 Nobel Prize, 33, 34, 102 “nocebo” effect, 165 noncommunicable diseases, premature deaths from, 130, 131, 132 Northeastern University, 68 Northwestern University, 41 Norton, Larry, 60–61, 62 Nottingham, University of, 87 Nurses’ Health Study, 142–43, 216–17 nursing college, 235 nutritional studies, 161–69 honesty and, 162 lack of reliable data from, 162–63, 164 Nyhan, Brendan, 157, 158, 160 Obama, Barack, 11, 114, 115, 117 obesity and overweight, 22, 47, 121, 122, 123, 147, 188, 194, 215 breast cancer and, 133 chronic disease and, 141 honesty about, 132–34 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 122 Obstetrics & Gynecology, 132–33 Olser Library of Medicine (McGill University), 73 omega-3 fatty acids, 182–83 omeprazole (Prilosec), 86 “On Lines and Planes of Closest Fit to Systems of Points in Space” (Pearson), 95 Only the Paranoid Survive (Grove), 7 open-access model, 179 opioids, 145 optimism, health and, 65–69 Oregon, University of, 199 Oregon Health & Science University, 109 Ornish, Dean, 166–68 Osler, William, 15, 37, 71–73, 72, 73, 75, 126, 145, 153, 223 Othello (Shakespeare), 202 Ottawa, University of, 183 overweight, see obesity and overweight Oxford University, 216 oxidative stress, 175 oxytocin, 211 p53 gene, 57–58 pain relievers, risks of, 145–46 Paleo diet, 142, 163 parabiosis, 1–4, 3, 21 parasites, spread of, 103 Parkinson’s disease, 59, 108, 163 pattern recognition, 227 PD-L1, 29–30 Pearson, Karl, 95 Pediatric MATCH, 117 Pediatrics, 133 pelvic bone cancer, 176 Pennington Biomedical Research Center, 192 Pennsylvania, University of, 73, 75 Perelman School of Medicine at, 208 perceptual intuition, 228–29 personalized medicine, see precision medicine Peto, Richard, 57 Peto’s paradox, 57 PET (positron-emission tomography) scan, 230 pharmaceutical industry, 166 drug prices and, 56–57, 115–17 public distrust of, 18, 19, 69, 157 pharmacogenomics, precision medicine and, 115 phenylalanine, 12 phenylketonuria (PKU), 12 Philosophical magazine, 95 physical activity, 140 physicians: house calls by, 80 public distrust of, 17–19, 157 pit latrines, 234 Pittsburgh, University of, 196, 214 placebos, 53 plaques, 183 plasma transfusions, 4–5 plate discipline, 204 Plato, 185 PLOS Medicine, 178 pneumonia, 161 polio virus, in immunotherapy, 30, 31 Pope, Frank, 2 population growth, technology and, 27 portable electronic devices, health care and, 79, 90–91 Post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, 156 precision medicine, 8, 20, 36, 102–25 art vs. science in, 112, 118 cancer treatment and, 115 context and, 114–15, 117 cost of, 56–57 historical roots of, 113 pharmacogenomics and, 115 technology and, 37–70 Precision Medicine Initiative, 114, 117 “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Apr 2015

During the 1980s and 1990s, the field received approximately $20 billion in subsidies from philanthropic foundations and governmental aid. A report from the consultancy firm Monitor has stressed that before the field was financially promising, ‘subsidies in the form of grants, soft loans, and guarantees from philanthropists and aid donors’ were key to the field’s growth.37 A curious sort of cognitive dissonance is at play here. Microfinance advocates often berate governments for placing regulatory caps on interest rates – and yet all admit that without government support the field would have withered long ago. As Lester Frank Ward presciently observed, those who decry state interference are typically the same people whose capital and investment choices depend on state support.38 It is now over a century since Ward wrote those words.

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The website notes that from 1994 to 2006, Bill and Melinda donated more than $26 billion, resulting in savings of 8.3 per cent, or just over $2 billion. And yet, is a gift from the Gates Foundation to a highly profitable company really the best use of money that, if it had been taxed as income rather than placed in a trust, could have benefited federal or state relief programmes? The cognitive dissonance I’ve described above – the continued insistence that new entrepreneurial movements are playing a revolutionary role in global poverty reduction despite the lack of clear evidence – is the truly distinctive aspect of social entrepreneurship. Unlike ideas of corporate social responsibility which were popular in the 1980s and 1990s – and which often had an aura of expiation about them, implying that socially oriented philanthropy was needed to make amends for corporate abuses – the new social investors believe that business success is evidence of social value.

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Thiel bankrolled much of the Tea Party darling Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign, and he serves as chair of the board of Palantir, a firm specializing in intelligence-gathering and data-mining solutions for the US government’s defence community. Thiel is also a steering committee member of the Bilderberg Group, the crown jewel of elite international meetings – a Bilderberg invitation makes a Davos invite look like coffee at the local Walmart.16 Thiel and his fellow philanthrocapitalists exhibit the same cognitive dissonance, the same double-mindedness, as the Mont Pelerin enthusiasts who succeeded in shaping government policies in the name of laissez-faire non-interference. They wilfully entrench the market dominance of actors shown to have been complicit in market distortions, such as Goldman Sachs, even as they lament the way that ‘marketplace imperatives’ direct health investment where it is least needed.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

See also Spike Lee and Norbert Schwarz, “Dirty Hands and Dirty Mouths: Embodiment of the Moral-Purity Metaphor Is Specific to the Motor Modality Involved in Moral Transgression,” Psychological Science 21, no. 10 (2010): 1423–5. 22 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1. 23 Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino, and Maryam Kouchaki, “The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty,” Administrative Science Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2014): 705–35. 24 Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino, and Maryam Kouchaki, “Learn to Love Networking,” Harvard Business Review 94, no. 5 (2016): 104–7. 25 Casciaro, Gino, and Kouchaki, “The Contaminating Effects,” 705–35. 26 Vera Cordero in discussion with the authors, September 2018 and February 2019. 27 Julie Battilana et al., “Associação Saúde Criança: Trying to Break the Cycle of Poverty and Illness at Scale,” Harvard Business School Case 419-048, 2018. 28 Battilana et al., “Associação Saúde Criança.” 29 Casciaro, Gino, and Kouchaki, “Learn to Love Networking,” 104–107. 30 This act of convincing ourselves our behaviors are moral when they are not is one way we overcome cognitive dissonance by adding a consonant cognition. See Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957). 31 “Princess Diana: A ‘Modern’ Mother Who Ripped Up the Rule Book,” HistoryExtra, November 3, 2020, https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/princess-diana-mother-parenting-william-harry-mother-son-relationship/. 32 David Eagleman, Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2020). 33 Jamil Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (New York: Crown, 2019). 34 C.

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Norton, 2011), 77. 64 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (New York: Start Publishing LLC, 2013). 65 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Thomas E. Hill, trans. Arnulf Zweig (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 66 Yong Huang, “Confucius and Mencius on the Motivation to be Moral,” Philosophy East and West 60, no 1. (2010): 65–87. 67 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford University Press, 1957). 68 Eliza Barclay and Brian Resnick, “How Big Was the Global Climate Strike? 4 Million People, Activists Estimate,” Vox, September 22, 2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/9/20/20876143/climate-strike-2019-september-20-crowd-estimate. 69 Wilson, On Human Nature, 163. 70 Peter L.

The Internet of Money
by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Published 28 Aug 2016

I don’t have a Swiss bank account in my pocket. I have a Swiss bank, with the ability to generate 2 billion addresses off a single seed and use a different address for every transaction. That bank is completely encrypted, so even if you do unlock the phone, I still have access to my bank. That represents the cognitive dissonance between the powers of centralized secrecy and the power of privacy as a human right that we now have within our grasp. If you think this is going to be easy or that it’s going to be without struggle, you’re very mistaken. 3.10. Bitcoin, the Zombie of Currencies If you read anything about bitcoin, you’ll see the very same things that they said about the internet in the early '90s.

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When people hear that message, maybe the next day they come to one of these meetups and they meet a dentist who owns bitcoin, an architect who owns bitcoin, a taxi driver who uses bitcoin to send money back to their family—normal people who use bitcoin to give themselves financial power and financial freedom. Every time that message is broken by cognitive dissonance, bitcoin wins. All bitcoin really has to do is survive. So far, it’s doing pretty well. 3.11. Currencies Evolve In the new network-centric world, currencies occupy evolutionary niches. They evolve, like species, based on the stimulus they have from their environment. Bitcoin is a dynamic system with software developers that can change it.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything
by Peter Morville
Published 14 May 2014

And we routinely use a handful of “kinesthetic image schemas” as short-cuts.xxxviii Figure 2-22. The experiential basis of metaphors. There’s nothing wrong with using metaphors, provided we’re aware of their source, and realize they contain baggage that shifts from intent to interpretation. Using “department head” may induce cognitive dissonance in an organization that’s flipped the org chart by practicing servant leadership. Isn’t the head on top, like the upper class? Our corporeal experience is embodied in language and subtly changes how we think. This occurs all the time in our use of binary oppositions. In-Out, Up-Down, Front-Back, Self-Other, Us-Them, More-Less, Male-Female, True-False, Fact-Fiction, Public-Private, Open-Closed, Yes-No, Hot-Cold, Reason-Emotion, Mind-Body, Man-Nature, Love-Hate, Win-Lose, Good-Evil While there are no opposites in nature, we use dualism to create order and make sense of experience.

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After the Gates Foundation spent $2 billion to replace large schools with small ones and realized only modest gains, Gates publicly concluded they’d made an expensive mistake, and decided to switch direction. In Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), we’re reminded such honest admissions are refreshing because they’re so rare. The main problem isn’t that we aim to deceive others; it’s that we fool ourselves. The engine of self-justification is cognitive dissonance, the state of tension that occurs when we hold ideas or beliefs that are psychologically inconsistent. If a “good person” does a “bad thing” self-deception kicks in. And, if on opposite sides of a decision, time will tear us apart. Imagine two students with similar attitudes and abilities who struggle with the temptation to cheat on a test.

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are
by Rachel Bloom
Published 17 Nov 2020

Maybe to some sort of magical womb tree along with every other fetus whose mom is currently masturbating. They are safe in the tree, guarded by asexual fairies, until their moms cum, after which point the fetuses are free to reenter the womb. Having a baby inside me just does not compute with pleasure. They are two different and disparate things. Yet, I don’t feel this cognitive dissonance regarding sex during pregnancy. Sex, after all, is what makes babies in the first place. It’s natural and beautiful and, during pregnancy, it’s the only time in my life I’ve ever been able to stomach the label “making love.”* But I don’t extend the same sentimentality to when I’m gettin’ down to a Pornhub video called “Schoolgirl slut sucks cock to get an A.”

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No one wants to know who in the group hasn’t seen Citizen Kane. 9. Back to Disneyland again. The entirety of Splash Mountain / parts of Small World / half of the Jungle Cruise is racist. I have no idea what to do about it, but it does need to be verbally acknowledged at some point on each ride. The discussion around this cognitive dissonance must last twice as long if everyone in your party is white.* 10. If English is your native language and you always mix up “their” and “they’re,” then YOU ARE NOT A RAVEN-CLAW. 11. If I’m showing you one of my many childhood home movies (again, there are seventy-two of them), please do not comment on the action until I press pause. 12.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011

“Altruistic Punishment in Humans.” Nature 415:137–40. Feld, Scott L. 1981. “The Focused Organization of Social Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 86 (5):1015–35. Ferdows, Kasra, Michael A. Lewis, and Jose A. D. Machuca. 2004. “Rapid-Fire Fulfillment.” Harvard Business Review 82 (11). Festinger, Leon. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Fiorina, Morris P., Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope. 2005. Culture Wars? The Myth of a Polarized America. New York: Pearson Longman. Fischhoff, Baruch. 1982. “For Those Condemned to Study the Past: Heuristics and Biases in Hindsight.” In Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, ed.

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Mehta. 2002. “Studying Rare Events Through Qualitative Case Studies: Lessons from a Study of Rampage School Shootings.” Sociological Methods & Research 31 (2):174. Harford, Timothy. 2006. The Undercover Economist. New York: Oxford University Press. Harmon-Jones, Eddie, and Judson Mills, eds. 1999. Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Harsanyi, John C. 1969. “Rational-Choice Models of Political Behavior vs. Functionalist and Conformist Theories.” World Politics 21 (4):513–38. Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

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See Nickerson (1998) for a review of confirmation bias. See Bond et al. (2007) for an example of confirmation bias in evaluating consumer products. See Marcus (2008, pp. 53–57) for a discussion of motivated reasoning versus confirmation bias. Both biases are also closely to related to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957; Harmon-Jones and Mills 1999) according to which individuals actively seek to reconcile conflicting beliefs (“The car I just bought was more expensive than I can really afford” versus “The car I just bought is awesome”) by exposing themselves selectively to information that supports one view or discredits the other. 16.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

If anything, the story that the television news was telling ended up more accurate than the one President Johnson’s staff was feeding him. The cognitive dissonance between the stories we were trying to tell ourselves about who we were as a nation and a people began conflicting with the stories that we were watching on TV. In a world still organized by stories, news about Vietnam atrocities and Watergate crimes can only mean there are bad people who need to be punished. This cognitive dissonance amounted to a mass adolescence for America: the stories we were being told about who we were and what we stood for had turned out to be largely untrue.

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This activates the mirror neurons in our brains, feeding us a bit of positive reinforcement, releasing a bit of dopamine, and leading us further down that line of thought. Without such organic cues, we try to rely on the re-Tweets and likes we get—even though we have not evolved over hundreds of millennia to respond to those symbols the same way. So, again, we are subjected to the cognitive dissonance between what we are being told and what we are feeling. It just doesn’t register in the same way. We fall out of sync. We cannot orchestrate human activity the same way a chip relegates tasks to the nether regions of its memory. We are not intellectually or emotionally equipped for it, and altering ourselves to become so simply undermines the contemplation and connection of which we humans are uniquely capable.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin
Published 31 Aug 2012

“I started to think about it,” she said, lounging back on her friend’s couch, putting her socked feet up on the coffee table. “What do I need a man for? I don’t need him financially. I don’t need him to do activities. I have lots of friends here. So fuck it.” One problem I had with our conversation was the cognitive dissonance produced by the difference between the voice and the person: The distinctive thing about Sabrina is her effortless, natural beauty. It’s hard to describe her physically without resorting to Nancy Drew–era clichés such as “youthful” and “fresh.” She is half Asian, with creamy skin and long black hair and clear green eyes.

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In fact, they are seen as violating some essential quality of femininity—warmth, maternal instinct, communal feeling. Deep down we—men and women both—are not gender blind. We still expect women to act one way and men to act another. More than that, men and women both resist thinking any differently because it causes too much confusion and cognitive dissonance. We can glimpse the massive paradigm shift just on the horizon but we are not quite ready for it—a resistance that will fade as more and more women reach visible positions of power. IN 2008, at a time when Citigroup was becoming a model of big bank failure and corruption, its top executives held their regular Monday morning meeting.

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See also Silicon Valley California, University of, 156 Davis, 201 San Diego, 188 Cambridge University, 174 Canadian Medical Association, 68 Capone, Al, 178 Carbone, June, 88 Carnegie Mellon University, 207–8 Carroll, Jason Michael, 95 Carter, Jimmy, 92 Cassidy, Sukhinder Singh, 226 Census Bureau, U.S., 92, 153 Center for American Progress, 49, 124 Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 20 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 19, 200 Central California Research Laboratories, 170 Chasing Stars (Groysberg), 203 Cheers (television show), 56 Chicago, University of, 185, 251 Business School, 216, 218 Chicopee (Massachusetts), 179 Child care, 14, 54, 218, 221–22, 224, 242, 264 government options for, 244 jobs in, 9, 118, 124 China, 5, 166 China Post, The, 239 Christians, 97 evangelical, 92, 284n Chung, James, 107 Chung, Vivien, 251–52 Citigroup, 205 Civil rights, 132, 148 Civil Rights Commission, U.S., 146 Civil War, 128 Clerical schools, 120, 130 Clovis (California), 169 Coal (television show), 87 Cognitive dissonance, 33 Cohen, Bernard, 68 Cold War, 152 Colorado, 170 Colombia, 55, 81, 237 Color Me Flo (Kennedy), 65 Columbia University, 119 Business School, 200 Comedy Central, 126–27, 143 Competition, 52, 174, 244 academic, in Korea, 232–33 for college admissions, 160 in traditional societies, 174, 188–89 Confucianism, 233, 234, 257 Congress, U.S., 205 Cookie magazine, 11 Coontz, Stephanie, 51 Cooper, Hannah, 113–17, 119–20, 123–24, 126–27, 130, 141–43 Cornwell, Patricia, 176 Cosby, Bill, 90 Cosmopolitan magazine, 31, 40 Creal, Cameron, 156 Creative Korea party, 249 Crime, violent, 175–85 against women, decline in, 19, 176, 182 committed by women, 176–78, 184–85 Daily Beast, The, 219, 228 “Dancing on My Own” (song), 44 Dating sites, 52, 255 Daum, Meghan, 31 Delahunty, Jennifer, 158–59 Deloitte Consulting, 141, 226 Delta Kappa Epsilon, 17 Democratic Party, 148 Denney, Leandra, 88 Denny’s, 179 Despentes, Virginie, 238, 256 Diana Chronicles, The (Brown), 228 Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Kinney), 190 DiPrete, Thomas A., 159 Divided Labours (Browne), 174 Divorce, 39–40, 49, 66–68, 94, 98, 101, 269 in Asia, 6, 238, 255 of breadwinner wives and unemployed husbands, 51, 81–82 and career opportunities for women, 152–53, 157 custody of children after, 125 financial impacts of, 68, 91, 283n murder as alternative to, 170, 172 regional differences in rates of, 92 Doctors, female, 59, 117, 132, 255–56 specialties chosen by, 118, 140 Domestic violence, 14, 170, 183 Drew, Ina, 202–3 Druggists’ Bulletin, 129 Drug Topics magazine, 131 Duke University, 43 Dunham, Lena, 43 Dushane, Melodi, 179 eBay, 224 Ebony magazine, 89 Economist, The, 253 Ecuador, 55 Edge City (Garreau), 133 Edin, Kathryn, 92–93 Education Department, U.S., 161, 224 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 41, 63 Eliot, George, 163 Eliot, Lise, 161, 174 Ellis, Bret Easton, 173 El-Scari, Mustafaa, 89–90 Empowerment, 30, 38, 45, 190 EMTs, 264 Engineers, 13, 54, 73, 80, 108, 150, 196 England, Paula, 24–25 Enlightened Power (Gergen), 199 Ericsson, Ronald, 11–13 Ernst & Young, 226 Erotic capital, 30, 37–38 Esteve, Albert, 237–38 Evans, Harry, 228 Evans, Jenelle, 179 Ewha University, 232–33, 239 Facebook, 181, 195, 197, 215, 224, 225, 230 Faludi, Susan, 9 Farber, Henry, 86 Farrell, Warren, 69, 72 Fast-food restaurants, female violence in, 179 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 176 Fels, Anna, 217 Feminism, 11, 12, 14–15, 21, 50, 60, 65–66, 75–76, 155, 182, 233 accusations against, 160 career opportunities and, 115, 124, 129, 152, 198, 215, 219 changing cultural norms in response to, 175 erotic capital and, 30 in Iceland, 202 motherhood and, 75–76, 93, 125 second-wave, 58 sexual norms and, 37–38, 41 Title IX complaints filed by, 17 in views of murders by women, 178 Financial planning, 118 Fiorina, Carly, 219 Fisher, Helen, 266 Flaubert, Gustave, 118 Flexibility, workplace, 140 Florida, Lottery, winners in, 94 Florida State University, 42 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 12 Food preparation, 118, 124 Forbes magazine, 205 Forensic pathology, 118 Fort Lauderdale (Florida), 81, 180 Fortune 500 companies, 81, 198 Fortune magazine, 205 Fox Television, 225 France, 117, 237, 251, 252 Frankel, Lois, 34, 209 Franklin, Bernard, 154, 156 Friedan, Betty, 53 From Chivalry to Terrorism (Braudy), 266–67 Fulbright scholarships, 255 G.I.

The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness
by Suzanne O'Sullivan
Published 31 Mar 2021

I would also suggest this feeling was so compelling, they struggled to let go and risk thudding back to normality. The community’s ability to disregard the inconvenient truths that sonic weapons don’t exist and sound doesn’t damage the brain was also an example of a common response to the experience of cognitive dissonance. This refers to the discomfort we feel when faced with information that doesn’t match a strong belief. Such is the feeling of unease created by cognitive dissonance, it often sees us rationalize what may at first seem like an irrational opinion or choice. False beliefs, like the certainty of the existence of a sonic weapon, are at the heart of the development of many functional disorders.

…

Psychosomatic and functional disorders break the rules of every other medical problem because, for all the harm they do, they are sometimes indispensable. There are simply not enough words to express everything a person feels. The complexity of human emotions cannot be distilled into something rational and well thought-out for every person in every situation. Cognitive dissonance exists, as do moral dilemmas, inconceivable choices, inequality and despair. Life will always find a way to set traps that seem impossible to escape. People are not machines, making decisions from algorithms, logical and free of emotion, so perhaps we need release valves and coping mechanisms, face-saving ways of addressing conflict and grappling with ambivalence.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by Richard V. Reeves
Published 22 May 2017

The problem is that many of these efforts are likely to run into the solid wall of upper middle-class resistance, even those that simply require a slightly higher tax bill. A change of heart is needed: a recognition of privilege among the upper middle class. That’s one reason I have written this book, in the hope that it can help to hold up a mirror. Some of us in the upper middle class already feel a degree of cognitive dissonance about the advantages we pile up for our own kids, compared to the truncated opportunities we know exist for others. We want our children to do well, but also want to live in a fairer society. My friend and colleague E. J. Dionne put it to me this way: “I spend my weekdays decrying the problem of inequality, but then I spend my evenings and weekends adding to it.”

…

When the daughter of a liberal columnist failed to make it into a highly selective private school, he called a well-placed friend who called a family member who happens to run the school. Then she got in. Each of these individuals is thoughtful and liberal enough to know, at some level, their actions were morally wrong. In each case, their actions conferred an unfair advantage. If more of us start to feel Dionne’s cognitive dissonance, some political space might open up for the kind of reforms I discuss at the end of this book. These make some demands of the upper middle class, not least when it comes to paying for them. The big question is whether we are willing to make some modest sacrifices in order to expand opportunities for others or whether, deep down, we would rather pull up the ladder.

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin
by Eric Voskuil , James Chiang and Amir Taaki
Published 28 Feb 2020

The following is a short list of commonly-banned popular things: Drugs Gambling Prostitution Religion Speech Assembly Trade Migration Weapons Labor Books Money This error may arise from failure to accept the Axiom of Resistance [122] while continuing to work in Bitcoin. This is likely to produce cognitive dissonance [123] . The subsequent search for relief may lead one here. However the error eventually becomes undeniable, which may lead to a rage-quit [124] . Hoarding Fallacy There is a theory that an increased level of hoarding produces an increased level of security in a coin . This is the similar to the Dumping Fallacy [125] but is not necessarily based on a split .

…

* * * [10] https://libbitcoin.info [11] https://bitcoincore.org [12] Chapter: Dedicated Cost Principle [13] https://www.dtu.dk/english [14] https://twitter.com [15] https://libbitcoin.info [16] https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Cryptoeconomics [17] Chapter: Inflation Principle [18] Chapter: Savings Relation [19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Taaki [20] Chapter: Foreword [25] https://libbitcoininstitute.org [26] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation [27] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/exemption-requirements-501c3-organizations [28] Chapter: Value Proposition [51] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises [52] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [53] Chapter: Inflation Principle [54] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [55] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [56] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [57] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [83] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_geometry [84] Chapter: Permissionless Principle [85] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [86] Chapter: Hearn Error [87] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity [88] Chapter: Value Proposition [89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal [90] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [91] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [92] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [93] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [94] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [95] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [96] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [98] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [99] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [100] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [101] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [102] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [103] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [104] http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm [105] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [106] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [107] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ [110] Chapter: Fragmentation Principle [111] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [112] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [115] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [116] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [117] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [118] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [119] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [120] Chapter: Reservation Principle [121] Chapter: Blockchain Fallacy [122] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [123] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance [124] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rage_quit [125] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [126] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [127] Chapter: Inflation Principle [128] Chapter: Lunar Fallacy [131] Chapter: Hearn Error [132] Chapter: Value Proposition [134] Chapter: Other Means Principle [135] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [136] https://www.imf.org [137] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [138] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [139] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [140] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [141] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [142] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [143] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [144] Chapter: Hearn Error [145] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [146] Chapter: Public Data Principle [147] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [148] Chapter: Other Means Principle [149] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [150] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz [151] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [152] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/1075 [153] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [154] https://www.asicboost.com/patent [155] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [156] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [157] Chapter: Public Data Principle [158] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [159] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [160] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [161] Chapter: Value Proposition [162] Chapter: Other Means Principle [174] https://coinweek.com/bullion-report/bitcoin-vs-gold-10-crystal-clear-comparisons [175] Chapter: Stability Property [176] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [177] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [178] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [181] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [182] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymizer [183] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [184] Chapter: Social Network Principle [185] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(discrete_mathematics)#Directed_graph [186] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting) [189] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [190] Chapter: Public Data Principle [191] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [192] Chapter: Cockroach Fallacy [193] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain [194] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography [195] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software [196] Chapter: Prisoner’s Dilemma Fallacy [201] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [203] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [204] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [205] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [206] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [207] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy [208] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_market [209] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177 [210] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [211] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [212] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [213] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_surface [214] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [215] Chapter: Centralization Risk [216] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [217] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [218] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer [220] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [221] Chapter: Scalability Principle [222] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [223] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [224] Chapter: Value Proposition [225] Chapter: Other Means Principle [226] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [227] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [229] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [230] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [231] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [232] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [233] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [234] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value [235] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [236] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility [237] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [238] https://mises.org/library/what-has-government-done-our-money/html/p/81 [246] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [247] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [248] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [249] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/081616/understanding-taxes-physical-goldsilver-investments.asp [250] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [251] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [252] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_rate#Parallel_exchange_rate [261] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [262] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [263] Chapter: Reservation Principle [264] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [265] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [266] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note [273] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [274] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [275] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [276] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [277] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort [278] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking [279] Chapter: Thin Air Fallacy [280] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [281] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_window [282] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_the_Federal_Reserve_System [283] https://www.frbdiscountwindow.org/pages/discount-rates/current-discount-rates [309] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [310] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/16/how-tight-jeans-almost-ruined-americas-money [311] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html [312] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [313] https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona [314] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [315] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard [316] Chapter: Value Proposition [320] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_of_return [324] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [328] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [329] https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/board/default.htm [330] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [331] https://www.coindesk.com/uasf-revisited-will-bitcoins-user-revolt-leave-lasting-legacy [332] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [337] Chapter: Efficiency Paradox [338] Chapter: Stability Property [339] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [340] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [341] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [342] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [343] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [344] Chapter: Relay Fallacy [345] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [346] Chapter: Efficiency Paradox [347] http://primecoin.io [349] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox [351] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [352] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [355] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonic_function [356] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [357] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_of_value [358] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value [359] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake [360] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [361] Chapter: Utility Threshold Property [362] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [364] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [365] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_function [366] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicprofit.asp [367] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [368] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference [369] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [370] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [371] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring [372] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [375] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game [376] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win-win_game [377] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory [379] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [380] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [381] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [382] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [385] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [386] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [387] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [388] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale [389] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [390] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ [391] Chapter: Relay Fallacy [392] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [393] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [394] https://www.federalreserve.gov [395] Chapter: State Banking Principle [396] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement [397] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender [398] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Note [399] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [400] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 [401] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund [404] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost [405] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [406] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [407] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [410] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [411] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcFC.pdf [413] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [414] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [416] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility [418] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [419] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam [420] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [423] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [424] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [425] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [426] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game [427] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [428] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system [429] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [430] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [431] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale [432] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy [433] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [434] http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-definition-of-bitcoin [435] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [436] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [437] Chapter: Brand Arrogation [438] https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core [439] https://libbitcoin.info [440] Chapter: Maximalism Definition [441] Chapter: Custodial Risk Principle [443] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function [444] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [446] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [447] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [448] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [450] Chapter: Utility Threshold Property [451] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [452] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law#Reverse_of_Gresham's_law_(Thiers'_law) [453] Chapter: Fragmentation Principle [460] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [461] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [462] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [463] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [464] Chapter: Network Effect Fallacy [465] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [466] Chapter: Replay Protection Fallacy [467] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value [474] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [475] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [476] Chapter: Substitution Principle [478] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [479] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [482] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [483] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [484] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [485] https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf [486] Chapter: Energy Waste Fallacy [487] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [488] Chapter: Proof of Memory Façade [489] Chapter: Energy Waste Fallacy [490] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [491] Chapter: Other Means Principle [495] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [496] Chapter: Value Proposition [497] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [498] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [499] Chapter: Proof of Memory Façade [500] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [501] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [502] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [503] Chapter: State Banking Principle [504] https://www.frbdiscountwindow.org [505] https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance [507] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [508] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_(economics) [509] Chapter: Replay Protection Fallacy [510] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value [511] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [515] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [516] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/996 [517] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [518] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_reserves [519] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States [520] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#Money_creation_by_commercial_banks [521] Chapter: State Banking Principle [522] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/current/default.htm [543] Chapter: Savings Relation [544] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference [545] Chapter: Unlendable Money Fallacy [548] Chapter: Production and Consumption [561] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [562] Chapter: Unlendable Money Fallacy [563] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value [564] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [565] Chapter: Production and Consumption [566] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [569] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [570] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [571] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [572] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [573] Chapter: Thin Air Fallacy [574] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-reserve_banking [602] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [603] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [604] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining [605] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [607] Chapter: Risk Free Return Fallacy [635] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) [636] Chapter: Production and Consumption [637] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [639] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [640] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [641] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [642] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [643] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump [644] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [645] Chapter: Savings Relation [646] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [647] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility [648] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [649] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_axiom [650] Chapter: Production and Consumption [651] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [652] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste [653] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [654] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/926 [655] Chapter: Expression Principle [656] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [657] Chapter: Pure Bank [658] Chapter: Reservation Principle [659] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [661] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_axiom [662] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [663] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [664] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [665] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste [666] Chapter: Pure Bank [667] Chapter: Reserve Definition [668] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend [677] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking [678] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve [679] https://www.fdic.gov [680] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_window [681] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [682] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [683] Chapter: Inflation Principle [684] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [685] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation [686] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [687] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage [688] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency) [689] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(finance) [690] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maturity_(finance) [691] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [692] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost [693] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_interest [699] Chapter: Savings Relation [700] Chapter: Inflation Principle [704] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [705] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [706] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [707] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/989 [708] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_requirement [709] Chapter: Expression Principle [715] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [726] Chapter: Savings Relation [727] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [732] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [733] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [734] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [735] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [739] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [740] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [741] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [742] Chapter: Inflation Principle [756] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [757] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [758] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [759] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [760] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_of_exchange [761] https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/778 [762] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [763] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity [764] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) [765] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [766] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency [767] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [779] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [780] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note [788] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender [789] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [790] Chapter: Stability Property [791] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money [797] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [798] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power [799] Chapter: Inflation Principle [803] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money [808] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [809] https://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Contractual+Claim [810] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [811] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization [812] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknote [813] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate [814] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_money [815] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/electronic-money.asp [816] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [819] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_money [823] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [824] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency [825] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [826] Chapter: Reserve Definition [827] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Regression_theorem [828] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [829] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [830] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [831] https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/778 [833] Chapter: Collectible Tautology [837] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [838] Chapter: Savings Relation [843] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-free_interest_rate [844] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [855] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [856] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_money [857] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [858] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [860] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [861] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [874] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_past_each_other [875] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [876] Chapter: Value Proposition [877] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallism [878] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [879] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism [880] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [886] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run [887] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [888] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort [889] Chapter: State Banking Principle [890] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [891] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_equation [892] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [893] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [894] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [895] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [897] Chapter: Inflation Principle [898] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [899] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [901] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [905] https://medium.com/@paulbars/magic-internet-money-how-a-reddit-ad-made-bitcoin-hit-1000-and-inspired-south-parks-art-b414ec7a5598 [906] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [907] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [908] Chapter: Stability Property [909] https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/25/could-the-price-of-bitcoin-go-to-1-million.aspx [910] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product [911] https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25 [912] Chapter: Stock to Flow Fallacy [913] Chapter: Reservation Principle [914] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [915] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [916] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/949 [917] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [918] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [919] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [920] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [921] Chapter: State Banking Principle [922] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(finance) [923] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [924] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States [931] Chapter: Permissionless Principle [932] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [933] https://voxeu.org/index.php?

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

An early exposé was the sociologist Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and recent summaries include Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me), Robert Trivers’s Deceit and Self-Deception, and Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite.23 Among the signature phenomena are cognitive dissonance, in which people change their evaluation of something they have been manipulated into doing to preserve the impression that they are in control of their actions, and the Lake Wobegon Effect (named after Garrison Keillor’s fictitious town in which all the children are above average), in which a majority of people rate themselves above average in every desirable talent or trait.24 Self-serving biases are part of the evolutionary price we pay for being social animals.

…

In the examples I mentioned in introducing the Moralization Gap, perpetrators rationalize a harm they committed out of self-interested motives (reneging on a promise, robbing or raping a victim). But people also rationalize harms they have been pressured into committing in the service of someone else’s motives. They can edit their beliefs to make the action seem justifiable to themselves, the better to justify it to others. This process is called cognitive dissonance reduction, and it is a major tactic of self-deception.285 Social psychologists like Milgram, Zimbardo, Baumeister, Leon Festinger, Albert Bandura, and Herbert Kelman have documented that people have many ways of reducing the dissonance between the regrettable things they sometimes do and their ideal of themselves as moral agents.286 One of them is euphemism—the reframing of a harm in words that somehow make it feel less immoral.

…

Yet the mere process of identifying our inner demons may be a first step to bringing them under control. The second half of the 20th century was an age of psychology. Academic research increasingly became a part of the conventional wisdom, including dominance hierarchies, the Milgram and Asch experiments, and the theory of cognitive dissonance. But it wasn’t just scientific psychology that filtered into public awareness; it was the general habit of seeing human affairs through a psychological lens. This half-century saw the growth of a species-wide self-consciousness, encouraged by literacy, mobility, and technology: the way the camera follows us in slow-mo, the way we look to us all.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
by Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton
Published 15 Mar 1991

This combination of support and attack may seem inconsistent. Psychologically, it is; the inconsistency helps make it work. A well-known theory of psychology, the theory of cognitive dissonance, holds that people dislike inconsistency and will act to eliminate it. By attacking a problem, such as speeding trucks on a neighborhood street, and at the same time giving the company representative positive support, you create cognitive dissonance for him. To overcome this dissonance, he will be 30 tempted to dissociate himself from the problem in order to join you in doing something about it. Fighting hard on the substantive issues increases the pressure for an effective solution; giving support to the human beings on the other side tends to improve your relationship and to increase the likelihood of reaching agreement.

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator
by Jung H. Pak
Published 14 Apr 2020

Each of these gestures was interpreted as a hopeful sign that Kim wanted to take North Korea in a new direction. His engagement with China, South Korea, and the United States since January 2018 has revived this line of thinking, even amid fresh reports about North Korea’s progress in its ballistic missile and nuclear programs. Observers find the cognitive dissonance of Kim’s actions both disconcerting and promising. But pitted against this hope is the sense that we are certainly heading toward catastrophe. When one considers the frighteningly rapid advancement of North Korea’s cyber, nuclear, and conventional capabilities, the countless rows of soldiers marching in impossible unity at military parades, and the belligerent threats, Kim is suddenly no longer the crazy fat kid but a ten-foot-tall giant with untold and unlimited power: unstoppable, unpredictable, undeterrable, omnipotent.

…

The United Nations in 2019 reported that of the 25 million citizens, nearly 11 million are undernourished, 140,000 children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition or wasting, and nearly 20 percent of children are stunted, making these citizens more vulnerable to diseases such as tuberculosis. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that millions do not have access to basic sanitation facilities or clean water. Kim’s recognition of the cognitive dissonance between government propaganda and lived realities might be driving his efforts to create “Pyonghattan,” a way to combat fraying ties between the jangmadang generation and the regime, and keep the state relevant despite the decimation of the public distribution system. But if people are not convinced by soft power, Kim has all of the tools of repression built by his grandfather and his father to enforce compliance.

…

The picture of the two leaders slurping the beloved noodle dish lit up South Korean social media. Inspired South Koreans waxed poetic about the noodles, and a cold-noodle mania swept the country, with long lines forming outside restaurants that served the dish. Kim and Moon even held hands at one point and capped off the summit by watching a concert. The cognitive dissonance was overwhelming. Kim’s metamorphosis had begun. A THAW AT THE WINTER OLYMPICS Kim Jong Un’s image rehabilitation began with his New Year’s address, the same speech in which he barked about the “nuclear button” on his desk, celebrated North Korea’s “powerful nuclear deterrent,” and uttered not-so-veiled hints about being able to hit the United States, given the regime’s professed successes in developing intercontinental ballistic missiles during the previous year.

The Passenger
by The Passenger
Published 27 Dec 2021

It was the only one of Ireland’s four provinces with a majority-Protestant population, most of whom were descendants of 17th-century colonial settlers and committed to the country’s union with Britain. That distinction was a major reason for the partition and for the decades of ethno-nationalist violence referred to, with rueful Irish stoicism, as the Troubles. ‘I experience the North as a realm of deep cognitive dissonance, beginning with the uncanniness of crossing a largely invisible border.’ I experience the North as a realm of deep cognitive dissonance, beginning with the uncanniness of crossing a largely invisible border. I’ll see the Union Jack flying from a lamp post or pay for something using pounds rather than euros, and I’ll find myself wondering why everyone is just going around acting as if they were in Britain.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
by Joseph Henrich
Published 7 Sep 2020

Alternatively, maybe he’s sick or injured? Dispositionalism emerges psychologically in two important ways. First, it makes us uncomfortable with our own inconsistencies. If you’ve had a course in Social Psychology, you might recognize this as Cognitive Dissonance. The available evidence suggests that WEIRD people suffer more severely from Cognitive Dissonance and do a range of mental gymnastics to relieve their discomfort. Second, dispositional thinking also influences how we judge others. Psychologists label this phenomenon the Fundamental Attribution Error, though it’s clearly not that fundamental; it’s WEIRD.

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Many had simply assumed that they could confidently make claims about human brains, hormones, motivations, emotions, and decision-making based on studies with American college students or any other WEIRD sample.54 TABLE 1.1. KEY ELEMENTS IN WEIRD PSYCHOLOGY Individualism and Personal Motivation ■  Self-focus, self-esteem, and self-enhancement ■  Guilt over shame ■  Dispositional thinking (personality): Attribution Errors and Cognitive Dissonance ■  Low conformity and deference to tradition/elders ■  Patience, self-regulation, and self-control ■  Time thrift and hard work (value of labor) ■  Desire for control and love of choice Impersonal Prosociality (and Related Worldviews) ■  Impartial principles over contextual particularism ■  Trust, fairness, honesty, and cooperation with anonymous others, strangers, and impersonal institutions (e.g., government) ■  An emphasis on mental states, especially in moral judgment ■  Muted concerns for revenge but willingness to punish third parties ■  Reduced in-group favoritism ■  Free will: notion that individuals make their own choices and those choices matter ■  Moral universalism: thinking that moral truths exist in the way mathematical laws exist ■  Linear time and notions of progress Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities and Biases ■  Analytical over holistic thinking ■  Attention to foreground and central actors ■  Endowment effect—overvaluing our own stuff ■  Field independence: isolating objects from background ■  Overconfidence (of our own valued abilities) Despite the growing evidence, many psychologists and economists remain either in shock or denial, as it turns out that much of the material in textbooks and academic journals, as well as in popular works of nonfiction, don’t actually tell us about human psychology, but merely reflect WEIRD cultural psychology.

…

Understanding this helps explain why WEIRD people are so much more likely than others to impute the causes of someone’s behavior to their personal dispositions over their contexts and relationships (the Fundamental Attribution Error), and why they are so uncomfortable with their own personal inconsistencies (Cognitive Dissonance). Reacting to this culturally constructed worldview, WEIRD people are forever seeking their “true selves” (good luck!). Thus, while they certainly exist across societies and back into history, dispositions in general, and personalities specifically, are just more important in WEIRD societies.46 THE ENDOWMENT EFFECT Traditionally, Hadza hunter-gatherers engaged in no commerce among themselves and little trade with other groups.

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference
by David Halpern
Published 26 Aug 2015

They generated useful resources but, perhaps more importantly, they created a sense of common purpose. An everyday assumption is that attitudes shape behaviours. Yet psychological studies have shown that very often it works the other way around: behaviours shape attitudes.7 It is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: when there is a discrepancy between a person’s attitudes and their behaviour, such as when you find yourself doing a ‘boring’ task for little reward, your attitude will often move into line with your behaviour (e.g. you conclude that the task is not so dull after all, and that it enables you to relax and clear your mind).

…

Chapter 1: Early Steps 1 One of the most basic psychological effects is how familiarity breeds liking, from random sequences of notes to how much we like and trust institutions. 2 I’m grateful to Rory Sutherland for first drawing my attention to the fascinating example of how Frederick the Great encouraged Prussians to adopt the potato. 3 Quoted in Quarterly Journal of Military History, August 2009. 4 UCLA Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health; http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/victoria.html. 5 The Rotherhithe Tunnel was opened around 1908, and today carries the A101 road from Limehouse to Rotherhithe. As its sharp turns are now considered dangerous, it has a speed limit of just 20 mph. 6 Heide, Robert, and Gilman, John, Home Front America: Popular Culture of the World War II Era. p.36 ISBN 0-8118-0927-7 OCLC 31207708. 7 Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. A classic illustration of the effect, was a study in which students had to do a boring, repetitive task, but were then paid either $1 or $20 to persuade someone in the waiting room that it was fun. When subsequently asked to rate the experiment, those paid just $1 were much more likely to rate it as interesting than those paid $20.

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(page numbers in italics refer to illustrations) advertising: and alcohol 100–1 and humour 100 and shock 98–100, 100 and smoking 99, 100 airport expansion 98 alcohol 100–1, 127 and calories 100 and pregnancy 126–7 Alexander, Danny 281 anaesthetics 17 ‘animal spirits’ 207, 210, 211 Aos, Steve 282 Ariely, Dan 96–7, 134, 325 Aristotle 221, 240 Armstrong, Hilary 34 Asch, Solomon 26 ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) 189 Ashford, Maren 57, 83 attentional spotlight 83–4 Ayres, Ian 142 Bazerman, Max 134, 325 Beales, Greg 36 Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) (see also nudging): arguments lost by 212–14 becomes social-purpose company 350 beginnings of x–xi, 50–8, 56, 58, 341 current numbers employed by xiii, 341 current trials by 341 expansion of xiii governments follow 11 initial appointments to 56–7, 56 initial scepticism towards 9 most frequent early criticisms of 333 naming of x–xi, 52–3 objectives of 54–5 and transparency, efficacy and accountability, see under nudging and webpage design 275–9, 276 World Bank’s request to 125 year of scepticism experienced by 274 behavioural predators 312–13 Benartzi, Shlomo 64 benefits, see welfare benefits Bentham, Jeremy 221–2 BIG lottery 283 ‘Big Society’ 43, 50, 142, 250 BIT, see Behavioural Insights Team Blair, Tony 151, 225 and behavioural approaches in government 302 Brown takes over from 36, 260–1 review into tenure of 34 Strategy Unit of 31 Tories’ admiration of 50 Bogotá 135, 146 Bohnet, Iris 123 Britton, John 188 Brown, Gordon 34 becomes PM 36, 260–1 Byrne, Liam 47 Cameron, David 151 BIT set up by 8 and Coalition Agreement 38 and data transparency 159 Hilton appointed by 43 and randomised controlled trials 274 and response to notes 186 and smoking 194 and well-being 225–8, 227, 250 car tax 3, 91, 92, 275–8 carrier bags 23 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Chand, Raj 146 charities 116–20, 142–4, 144 and reciprocity 116 Chetty, Raj 64 childbirth, see pregnancy and childbirth Cialdini, Robert 34–6, 47, 107–8, 109, 113, 121–2, 308, 312 Clegg, Nick, and Coalition Agreement 38 Cochrane, Dr Archie 269–71, 295, 297 Cochrane Collaboration 271 cocktail-party effect 86 cognitive dissonance 21 cognitive psychology 27–9, 28 Colbourne, Tim 215 College of Policing 282, 289 Collins, Kevan 283, 285 Community First 254–5 commuting 219–20, 263–4 conflict and war 20–1, 27, 87, 344–5 consumer feedback 161–9, 167 improvements driven by 168–9 in public sector 163–9, 167 cooling-off periods 77 Council Tax 95 crime prevention (see also theft): ‘scared straight’ approach to 266–8, 267 and ‘What Works’ institutes 289 Darley, J. 27, 110 data transparency 153–84 and better nudges 179–80 and consumer feedback 161–9, 167 improvements driven by 168–9 in public sector 163–9, 167 and food labelling 172, 178 and machine-readable code 154, 157, 159 and RACAP 157 in restaurants 178 and understandable information 176–9 on cancer 178–9 on car safety 177–8 on financial products 177 and utility suppliers 154–60, 155 Davey, Ed 157 Deaton, Angus 243 decision fatigue 141 Deep Blue 7 Diener, Ed 231 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) 272 discontinuity design 161–2 doctors’ handwriting 72, 72 Dolan, Paul 47–8, 220 Down, Nick 113 drivers’ behaviour 18, 18 Duckworth, Angela 247 Dunn, Elizabeth 220, 237, 250, 256 Durand, Martine 243 Dweck, Carol 343 e-cigarettes 188–97, 193, 215 estimated years of life saved by 195, 216 and non-smokers 193–4 and quit rates 192–3, 193 by socio-economic grouping 195 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282 EAST (Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely) framework 10, 60, 149, 349 Attractive 80–105, 81, 85, 94 Easy 62–79, 68, 72, 73 and jobcentres 200 Social 106–25, 115, 118, 120, 122 (see also social influence) Timely 126–49, 129 Easterlin, Richard 238 eating habits 139, 171, 307 (see also obesity/weight issues) and choice 306–7 and food pyramid/plate illustrations 41, 41 and food tax 301–2 and healthy/unhealthy food 41, 82, 101–2, 216, 302 ‘mindless’ 171 Economic and Social Research Council 283 economy, UK 205–12 econs 6–7, 178, 223 education 137, 282 financial 64 further 146–7 and timely intervention 146–7 and ‘What Works’ institutes 283–7, 284, 286 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 Effectiveness and Efficiency (Cochrane) 295 endowment effect 140 Energy Performance Certificate 179 energy ratings 135 energy and utility suppliers, see utility suppliers Enterprise Bill 159 Epley, Nick 260–1 established behaviour, see habits ethnicity, and recruitment 137–9, 344 experimental government 266–98, 270, 272, 276 and crime prevention 266–8, 267 ethics of 325–8 (see also nudging: and accountability) and growth vouchers 279–80 and organ donation 275–9, 276 and overseas health-aid programmes 273 and radical incrementalism 291 and ‘What Works’ institutes 281–90, 292–4 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Crime Reduction 289 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282, 288 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 experimental psychology 24–6 farmers 145 ‘fat tax’ 301–2 (see also eating habits) fertiliser 145 Feynman, Richard 296, 297 financial crisis 45, 46, 206, 336 (see also UK economy) financial products 177, 206 fines, collecting 3–4, 52, 89, 90–1 Fischhoff, Baruch ix Fisher, Ronald 291 Fiske, Susan 84, 86, 325, 345 food pyramid/plate illustrations 41, 41 forms, prefilling 73–4 fossils 35 Frederick the Great 15, 16 Freud, Lord 279 Gallagher, Rory 55, 88–9, 158, 197–8, 204, 343, 349 gender equality, and company boards 123 Genovese, Kitty 109–10 Gigerenzer, Gerd 178 Gilbert, Danny 139, 220 Gino, Francesca 347 giving 116–20, 142–4, 144, 250 God Complex 269 Gove, Michael 287 Grant, Adam 347 Green Book 46, 228, 258, 259 Grice, Joe 233 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 222–4, 255 (see also UK economy) Grove, Rohan 211 growth vouchers 279–80 Gyani, Alex 197–8, 203, 204, 343, 349 habits: and early intervention 128–32 key moments to prompt or reshape 132–9 and tax payments 131 Hallsworth, Michael 48, 113 Hancock, Matthew 279 hand washing 99, 140 happy-slave problem 231 Haynes, Laura 56–7 hearing 25 Heider, Fritz 345 Helliwell, John 226–7, 232 Henry VIII 17 herd instinct 161 Heywood, Sir Jeremy 2, 215, 217, 281 The Hidden Wealth of Nations (Halpern) 44 Highway Code 20 Hillman, Nick 165 Hilton, Steve x, 43–4, 51, 53–4, 159, 190, 214, 215, 225–6, 247, 250 and randomised controlled trials 274 hindsight bias ix HMRC 2–3, 8, 87–8, 89, 113, 115, 118, 120, 181–2 (see also tax payments) BIT member’s secondment to 113 non-tax-related business communications sent via 210–11 and online tax forms 74 and randomised controlled trials 274 Homer, Lin 210 honesty 133–4 honours 98 horses’ behaviour 18–19, 19 hospitals: and doctors’ handwriting 72, 72 and patient charts 72–3, 73 Hume, David 221 Hunt, Stefan 209 Hurd, Nick 250 Hutcheson, Francis 221 hyperbolic discounting 139 imprinting 128–9, 129 infant development 128–30 (see also pregnancy and childbirth) and early mother–child ‘meshing’ 129 (see also imprinting) in geese 128–9, 129 and mother’s depression 129 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Cialdini) 34–5, 312 Inglehart, Ronald F. 229 Inland Revenue, see HMRC Institute for Government 40, 46–50 J-PAL 294 jobcentres 120–1, 197–205, 200, 201, 343, 349 (see also unemployment) John, Peter 96 The Joyless Economy (Scitovsky) 223 judges 140 Kahneman, Daniel 27, 29–30, 32, 48, 220, 226, 230 BIT’s work commended by 11 Kasparov, Garry 7 Kennedy, Robert F. 218, 222 Kettle, Stuart 125 Keynes, John Maynard 210, 211–12 King, Dom 48, 72 Kirkman, Elspeth 121, 146 knife crime 122 Kuznets, Simon 222 Laibson, David 64–5, 245, 307 Latene, B. 27, 110 Layard, Richard 225, 242, 248 Lazy Town 82 Legatum Institute 242–3 letters/messages, simplifying 71–3 and handwriting 72 in hospitals 72–3, 73 and prefilled forms 73–5 Letwin, Oliver 213, 217, 281, 295 Life satisfaction (discussion paper) 225 (see also well-being) Linos, Elizabeth 137, 344 List, John 286 litter 23, 35, 94, 107–8, 114 Loewenstein, George 307, 324, 345 loft/wall insulation 3, 75–6 Lorenz, Konrad 128–9, 129 lotteries, as incentive 94–6 Luca, Michael 161–2, 166, 177 Lyard, Richard 238 Lyons, Michael 250 MacFadden, Pat 34 Mackenzie, Polly 51, 215 Major, John 46 Manzi, James 295–6 Marcel, Anthony 136 Martin, Steve 113 Matheson, Jill 227 Mayhew, Pat 66 Mazar, Nina 347 Meacher, Michael 224 mental health 246–9 Merkel, Angela 243 midata, see data transparency Milgram, Stanley 26, 327 Miliband, Ed 34 military recruitment advertising 87 Milkman, Katherine 323 Mill, John Stuart 221 MINDSPACE framework 49–50, 50, 60, 72 motorcycle helmets 66–7 Mulgan, Geoff 225, 301–2 Mullainathan, Sendhil 343 National Citizenship Service (NCS) 251–2, 251 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 195, 271, 281, 290 Nesta 350 Nguyen, Sam 55, 197–8, 343 The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 240 nicotine-replacement therapy (NRT) 193, 193 (see also smoking) 9/11 28 Norton, Mike 256, 347 Nudge (Thaler, Sunstein) ix–x, 6–7, 39, 157, 234 Nudge Unit, see Behavioural Insights Team nudging (see also Behavioural Insights Team; EAST framework): and accountability 324–5 and experimentation, ethics of 325–8 and the public voice 328–32, 329 defined and discussed 22–4 and efficacy 304, 315–24 and familiarity with approach 319–24 relative 318–19 improving, with better data 179–80 rediscovery of 13 and subconscious priming 136 and transparency 304–15 and behavioural predators 312–13 and choice 306, 314–15 and effective communication vs propaganda 307–11, 311 Nurse Family Partnership 129 Obama, Barack 39–40, 254 acceptance speech of 38 Obama, Michelle 101 obesity/weight issues 101, 170–3, 307 (see also eating habits) in children, levelling of 173 and food labelling 172 and ‘mindless’ eating 171 O’Donnell, Sir Gus (later Lord) 45–6, 47, 57, 225, 227, 227, 242, 258 OECD 293, 340 Office of War Information (US) 21 Olds, David 130 online shopping 109 Ord, Toby 273 organ donation 9, 37, 52, 275–9 Orwell, George 309, 311 Osborne, George 45 and data transparency 159 O’Shaughnessy, James 247 Overman, Henry 288 Paley, William 221 paternalism x, 33, 51, 316 Pelenur, Marcos 135 pensions xii, 9, 62–5, 331 and choice 307 PMSU’s paper on 33 people’s parliaments 332 perception 24–5, 25 Personality responsibility and behaviour change (discussion paper) 301–2 police, ethnic recruits into 137–9, 344 potato consumption 15–16 pregnancy and childbirth 126–7 (see also infant development) Prescott, John 302 Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (PMSU) 31–3, 47, 53, 225, 337 and Personality responsibility and behaviour change paper 301–2 psychological operations (PsyOps) 30, 308–9, 333 Putnam, Robert 253 radical incrementalism 291 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) 8, 113, 132, 182, 252, 270, 274–5, 283, 297–8, 339 and HMRC 274 Raseman, Sophie 157 RECAP 157 recycling 35 Red Tape Challenge 57 Reeves, Richard 51 Revenue and Customs, see HMRC road fuel 23 road traffic, see vehicles Roberto, Christine 101, 178 Rogers, Todd 146, 321 Rolls-Royce 208 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 21 Ruda, Simon 125, 137, 214, 344 Sainsbury, Lord (David) 46–7 Sanders, Michael 57, 116, 119, 142–3, 146 Scheving, Magnús 81, 82–3 Scitovsky, Tibor 223 Scott, Stephen 247 Seligman, Marty 232, 247 Sen, Amartya 231 Service, Owain 2, 56, 69 Sesame Street 101 Shadbolt, Sir Nigel 158 Shafir, Eldar 343, 345 sight 24–5, 25 Silva, Rohan x–xi, 43–5, 51, 53–4, 159 Singer, Tania 345 small businesses 205–9 passim (see also UK economy) smart disclosure 157 smoke detectors 99 smoking 9, 23, 99, 100, 138 and e-cigarettes 188–97, 193, 215 estimated years of life saved by 195, 216 and non-smokers 193–4 and nicotine-replacement therapy (NRT) 193 and pregnancy 126–7 prevalence of 189 and quit rates 192–3, 193 by socio-economic grouping 195 SNAP framework 48 social influence 26–7, 106–25 and bystander intervention 110 dark side of 109–10 and litter 107–8, 114 norms of: descriptive vs injunctive 108 picking apart 107–11 in policy 111–15 and online shopping 109 and personal touch 119–21 and reciprocity 115–17 social psychology 107 Soman, Dilip 337 Southern Cross station staircase 85 speed bumps 76–7 Sportacus 81–3, 81 Stanford Prison 26–7 Steinberg, Tom 254 stickk.com 142 subconscious priming 136 suicide 67–9, 68, 77 Sunstein, Cass ix–x, 6–7, 22, 39–42, 44, 57, 73, 305, 307, 314 and RACAP 157 supermarkets 80–1, 84, 86, 171–2 and food labelling 173, 178 Sutherland, Rory 187–8 tailored defaults. 307 tax payments 3, 8, 23, 52, 87–8, 88, 89, 112–14, 118, 120, 131, 181–2 in Central America 125 Council Tax 95 and habits 131 and lottery incentive 96–7 and online tax forms 74–5 and randomised controlled trials 274 road duty 3, 91, 92, 275–8 social-norm-based approach to 113, 115 Tetlock, Philip 192 Thaler, Richard 6–7, 22, 39, 44, 50, 51, 53, 57, 305 and BIT’s name 53 and RACAP 157 theft (see also crime prevention): mobile phones 173–6, 174, 175 and target-hardening 78, 214 vehicles: cars 169–70 motorcycles 66–7 time, perception of 128 time-inconsistent preferences 128, 139–45 Times 301–2 tobacco, see smoking Turner Lord (Adair) xii, 33, 331 Tversky, Amos 27, 29, 230 UK economy 205–12, 215, 216 (see also financial crisis; Gross Domestic Product) unemployment 120–1, 122, 197–205, 200, 201, 216, 343, 349 (see also jobcentres) and well-being 255–6 utilitarianism 221–2 utility suppliers: and data transparency 154–60 switching among 153–4, 155–6, 155, 160, 213 vehicles 18–20 safety of 177–8 and speeding 76–7, 92–5, 100 varied penalties for 147 thefts of: cars 169–70 motorcycles 66–7 Victoria, Queen 17 visas 132 Vlaev, Ivo 48 Volpe, Kevin 320 voter registration 95–6 Walsh, Emily 123 Wansink, Brian 171, 306 war 20–1 war and conflict 20–1, 27, 87, 344–5 weight, see obesity/weight issues welfare benefits 8 and conditional cash transfers 135, 145 and timing of payments 135 well-being 218–65 and community 249–55, 251 and commuting 219–20, 263–4 by country 229, 238, 243 drivers of 235–41 material factors 237–9 social factors 239–41 (see also well-being: and community) sunny disposition 235–7 early concepts of 220–2 and GDP 222–4, 255 and governance and service design 258–62 and happy-slave problem 231 and income, work and markets 255–7 and Life satisfaction paper 225 measuring 222–4 big questions concerning 231–3 subjective 228–31 and mental health 246–9 and National Citizenship Service programme 251–2, 251 by occupation 244 and policy 242–3, 258 subjective 224, 228–31 and giving 250 (see also giving) by occupation 244–5 and prostitutes 231–2 UK government’s programme on 226–8, 233–5, 234, 240 unemployment’s effects on 255–6 and utilitarianism 221–2 What Works institutes 281–90, 292–4, 340 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Crime Reduction 289 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282, 288 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 When Harry Met Sally 160–1 ‘wicked problems’ 170 Willetts, David 165 World Bank 125, 293, 309, 340 World Values Survey (WVS) 229 yelp.com 161–2 Young, Lord 279 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS THERE ARE MANY people who deserve thanks and credit for the work and results of the Behavioural Insights Team that this book describes, and a rather shorter list for the writing and editing of the book itself.

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time
by Maria Konnikova
Published 28 Jan 2016

When we should be cutting our losses, we instead recommit—and that is entirely what the breakdown is meant to accomplish. Leon Festinger first proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance, today one of the most famous concepts in psychology, in 1957. When we experience an event that counteracts a prior belief, he argued, the resulting tension is too much for us to handle; we can’t hold two opposing beliefs at the same time, at least not consciously. “The individual strives,” Festinger wrote in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, “toward consistency within himself.” True, here and there one might find exceptions. But overall, “It is still overwhelmingly true that related opinions or attitudes are consistent with one another.

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A., ref1, ref2 Carnegie, Andrew ref1 Carnegie, Dale ref1, ref2 Carney, Bruce ref1 Carr, Sarah ref1 Carro, Gregory ref1 Catch Me If You Can, ref1 caterpillars ref1 Cayuga, HMCS ref1, ref2 Cerf, Moran ref1, ref2 Chabris, Christopher ref1 Chadwick, Cassie ref1 Chaiken, Shelly ref1 chameleon effect ref1 change strategies ref1, ref2, ref3 Chaucer, Geoffrey ref1 Chen, Peter ref1 choices ref1, ref2, ref3 Chonko, Lawrence ref1 Choong, Lee ref1, ref2 Christie, Richard ref1 Cialdini, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Clore, Gerald ref1 Codol, Jean-Paul ref1 cognitive dissonance ref1 Cohen, Steven ref1 coins ref1, ref2 commons ref1 communities ref1 Confidence Man, The (Melville), ref1 confirmation bias ref1, ref2, ref3 Consumer Fraud Research Group ref1 control, illusion of ref1 conversations ref1 convincer ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Cooke, Janet ref1 corporate fraud ref1 Craigslist ref1, ref2 credibility ref1 creeping determinism ref1 Crichton, Judy ref1 Crichton, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Crichton, Sarah ref1 cuckoo finch ref1 cults ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 culture ref1 Cummine, Andrew ref1 Curry, Robert ref1 Dal Cin, Sonya ref1 dark triad of traits ref1, ref2 psychopathy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Davis, Barbara ref1 Dean, Jeremy ref1 DeBruine, Lisa ref1 decision making ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Dedalus Foundation ref1, ref2 default effects ref1, ref2 Demara, Ferdinand Waldo, Jr., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 Crichton and ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 at monasteries ref1, ref2, ref3 as navy surgeon ref1, ref2, ref3 “papering” tactic of ref1 as prison warden ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 school gifts from ref1 Demara, Ferdinand Waldo, Sr., ref1 Demara, Mary McNelly ref1, ref2 determinism, creeping ref1 Deveraux, Jude ref1 De Védrines, Christine ref1 De Védrines, Ghislaine ref1, ref2 “Diddling” (Poe), ref1 disasters ref1 disrupt-then-reframe ref1 Dittisham Lady, ref1, ref2 door-in-the-face ref1, ref2 Drake, Francis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Dunbar, Robin ref1, ref2, ref3 Dunning, David ref1 Dutch tulip mania ref1 Dylan, Bob ref1 Ebola crisis ref1 Egan, Michael ref1 Eiffel Tower ref1 Ekman, Paul ref1, ref2, ref3 elaboration likelihood model ref1 elder fraud ref1 Elizabeth I, Queen ref1 Emler, Nicholas ref1, ref2 emotions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 anticipation of ref1 donations and ref1 stories and ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 endowment effect ref1, ref2 entrapment effect ref1 environment ref1 Epley, Nicholas ref1, ref2, ref3 Epstein, Seymour ref1, ref2 Erdely, Sabrina Rubin ref1 Evans, Elizabeth Glendower ref1 even-a-penny scenario ref1, ref2 exceptionalism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 expectancies ref1, ref2 exposure ref1, ref2 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Mackay), ref1 Eyal, Tal ref1 Facebook ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 facial expressions ref1, ref2, ref3 Fallon, James ref1 familiarity ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Farms Not Factories ref1 FBI ref1, ref2, ref3 fear ref1 Feldman, Robert ref1 Fenimore, Karin ref1 Festinger, Leon ref1, ref2, ref3 Fetzer, Barbara ref1 Figes, Orlando ref1 Fischhoff, Baruch ref1, ref2 Fiske, Susan ref1 Fitzgerald, Alan and Eilis ref1 Fitzgerald, Elizabeth (Madame Zingara), ref1, ref2 fix ref1 Folt, Carol ref1 football ref1 foot-in-the-door ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Frampton, Anne-Marie ref1, ref2, ref3 Frampton, Paul ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Frank, Jerome ref1 Franklin, Benjamin ref1, ref2 Franklin Syndicate ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Fraser, Scott ref1 Freedman, Ann ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Freeman, Jonathan ref1 French, John ref1, ref2 Fund for the New American Century ref1 future ref1 predicting ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Galinsky, Adam ref1 gambler’s fallacy ref1, ref2 Gant, Robert ref1 Geis, Florence ref1 genetics ref1 Gerard, Harold ref1 Gerhartsreiter, Christian ref1 Gifford, Adam Lord ref1 Gilbert, Daniel ref1, ref2 Gilligan, Andrew ref1 Gilovich, Thomas ref1 Glass, Stephen ref1, ref2 Goetzinger, Charles ref1 Gondorf, Fred and Charles ref1 Goodrich, Judge ref1 Gordon, John Steel ref1 gorilla experiment ref1 gossip ref1, ref2, ref3 Goya, Francisco ref1 Grazioli, Stefano ref1 Great Imposter, The (Crichton), ref1, ref2, ref3 Green, Melanie ref1, ref2 Green Dot cards ref1 Greg ref1 grifter ref1 grooming ref1 groups, belonging to ref1 Guillotin, Joseph ref1 Gur, Ruben ref1 Gurney, Edmund ref1 Hancock, Jeffrey ref1 Hansen, Chris ref1 Hanson, Robert ref1 happiness ref1, ref2, ref3 Hare, Robert ref1 Harley, Richard ref1 Harlow, E.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society
by Paul Verhaeghe
Published 26 Mar 2014

The selection of certain symptoms — increasingly, of certain behaviour — as indicators of mental illness is far from value-free; rather, the reverse. And the majority of research findings may be, as we know, refuted by other findings, but this is ignored by the dominant paradigm. The psychological explanation for this is known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. As far as the DSM is concerned: with the best will in the world, the scientific underpinning for its approach is extremely weak. The reason that so little attention is paid to the failure of current psychiatric diagnostics is thus fairly straightforward: the dominant paradigm allows no other viewpoint.

…

The current emphasis on competency-oriented education is driving our youngsters straight into the competition-and-career cluster, with all the associated values following in their wake. What the advocates of the system fail to realise is that this automatically undermines other norms and values. There is no such thing as competitive solidarity. Indeed, its impossibility is clearly illustrated by what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. When you hold strongly to a particular value-laden cluster, you simply can’t take in information that contradicts it, however objective and factual. Someone who sets great store by solidarity, public-spiritedness, and spirituality will find it almost impossible to take in information about the advantages of individualism, competitiveness, and materialism.

Influence: Science and Practice
by Robert B. Cialdini
Published 1 Jan 1984

Fenigstein, A., Scheier, M. F., & Buss, A. H. (1975). Public and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43, 522–527. Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117–140. Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1964). When prophecy fails. New York: Harper & Row. Fiske, S. T., & Neuberg, S. L. (1990). A continuum of impression formation: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation.

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Dyads and triads at 35,000 feet: Factors affecting group process and aircraft performance. American Psychologist, 39, 885–893. Fox, M. W. (1974). Concepts in ethology: Animal and human behavior. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freedman, J. L. (1965). Long-term behavioral effects of cognitive dissonance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1, 145–155. Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 195–203. Frenzen, J. R., & Davis, H. L. (1990). Purchasing behavior in embedded markets.

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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3, 248–251. Szabo, L. (2007, February 5). Patient protect thyself. USA Today, p. 8D. Taylor, R. (1978). Marilyn’s friends and Rita’s customers: A study of party selling as play and as work. Sociological Review, 26, 573–611. Tedeschi, J. T., Schlenker, B. R., & Bonoma, T. V. (1971). Cognitive dissonance: Private ratiocination or public spectacle? American Psychologist, 26, 685–695. Teger, A. I. (1980). Too much invested to quit. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon. Tesser, A., Campbell, J., & Mickler, S. (1983). The role of social pressure, attention to the stimulus, and self-doubt in conformity.

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics
by Rod Hill and Anthony Myatt
Published 15 Mar 2010

With about three cancer deaths associated with every 170 tons of asbestos (Tossavainen 2004), these exports should eventually result in about 4,400 deaths a year. Choosing false beliefs Even if workers know there may be risks to their work, will they evaluate them properly? The textbook model assumes that they will and that appropriate compensation for the extra risk will result. This won’t happen if workers experience what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. People can choose their beliefs about the world, using information selectively to reinforce a belief they would prefer to have (Akerlof and Dickens 1982). In this case, workers have to reconcile their view of themselves as smart people who make the right choices with the actual job they choose.

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Brock (2004) The Bigness Complex: Industry, labour and government in the American economy, 2nd edn, Stanford Economics and Finance, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Adler, M. (2010) Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the science that makes life dismal, New York: New Press. Akerlof, G. A. and W. T. Dickens (1982) ‘The economic consequences of cognitive dissonance’, American Economic Review, 72(3): 307–19. Akerlof, G. A. and R. J. Shiller (2009) Animal Spirits: How human psychology drives the economy and why it matters for global capitalism, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Akerlof, G. A. and J. L. Yellen (1988) ‘Fairness and unemployment’, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 78(2): 44–9.

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M., 189 Canada, asbestos trade of, 161–2 cancer, 85, 232; epidemic of, 163–4; lung cancer, 159, 163–4; work related, 160 see also asbestos, cancers arising from capabilities, measurement of, 89 capital, nature of, 181 Card, D., 33, 39 Carlin, George, 81 Chamberlin, E., 128 Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand, 115 297 Channel One, 80 chemicals, registration of, 160 child labour, prohibition of, 173 child mortality, 83, 216; in Philippines, 239 child poverty, 210 children, vulnerable to advertising, 81–2 choice: freedom of, 42; individual, 38; public, 110, 112; rational, 9 17, 22, 110, 150, 163 Chomsky, Noam, 113, 114, 254 Chrysotile Institute, 162 cigarettes see tobacco industry Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA), 112 Clark, J. B., 179–80 climate change, 112, 152–3, 154–7, 165, 253; denial of, 156 closed-end mutual funds, 147 coffee, price of, 233–4 cognitive dissonance, 162 Cohen, Avi, 105, 106, 181, 182–3 Colander, David, 116, 132, 141, 154, 206, 232 collective good, 111, 152 see also public goods Colombia, US military aid to, 240 Commercial Alert, 82, 84 Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) (2000), 262 common resources, use of, 152 communities, destruction of, 16, 18 community: notion of, 25–6; omitted from analysis, 251–3; relation to individual, 17–18 comparative advantage, 28–30, 222, 224, 227, 230–1; evaluation of, 43–5; technological change and, 228 comparative static analysis, 48–9, 64 compensation principle, 225–6, 245 competition, 13; imperfect, model of, 66, 106; perfect, 46, 53, 54–7, 60, 65, 93, 102, 104, 107–8, 130, 131, 132, 138, 169, 194, 204, 230 (analysis of, 118–22; efficiency of, 121–2; flawed nature of, 135–8; in labour markets, 63; incompatible requirements of, 65–6; limits of, 118–49; overemphasis on, 247–8) competitive market, definition of, 46 competitive model, 106; as useful approximation, 57–62; empirical testing of, 184–5; inconsistency of, 64–5 computer waste, disposal of, 232 conspicuous consumption, 90, 158, 205 consumer loans, 260 consumer’s surplus, 75–6, 221 consumerism, 79, 248; formation of, 74 see also conspicuous consumption consumers, people as, 74–92 contracts, 60; perceived costlessness of, 245–6; relational, 141–2, 250, 256 conventions, 169 Cook, P.

The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes From an Uncertain Science
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Published 12 Oct 2015

Born in Hertfordshire in 1702, Thomas Bayes was a clergyman and philosopher who served as the minister at the chapel in Tunbridge Wells, near London. He published only two significant papers in his lifetime—the first, a defense of God, and the second, a defense of Newton’s theory of calculus (it was a sign of the times that in 1732, a clergyman found no cognitive dissonance between these two efforts). His best-known work—on probability theory—was not published during his lifetime and was only rediscovered decades after his death. The statistical problem that concerned Bayes requires a sophisticated piece of mathematical reasoning. Most of Bayes’s mathematical compatriots were concerned with problems of pure statistics: If you have a box of twenty-five white balls and seventy-five black balls, say, what is the chance of drawing two black balls in a row?

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web
by Cole Stryker
Published 14 Jun 2011

These shared points of reference make up life as much as our inside jokes at work or gossip at church. Clay Shirky has made waves in the last few years as being a kind of Marshall McLuhan for the Web 2.0 era. Throughout his two books, Cognitive Dissonance and Here Comes Everybody, Shirky provides the kind of commentary that fills one with excitement for being a part of the web right now. We’re making things happen! It’s a new stage in human social evolution! Look at all the cool stuff the Internet lets us do! In Cognitive Dissonance, Shirky uses the lolcats found at http://www.icanhascheezburger.com as a convenient representative for what he calls “the stupidest possible creative act,” as opposed to, say, improving a Wikipedia entry or creating a platform for financing human rights projects in the third world.

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves
by Dan Ariely
Published 27 Jun 2012

They found that after giving a short lecture about the benefits of a certain drug, the speaker would begin to believe his own words and soon prescribe accordingly. Psychological studies show that we quickly and easily start believing whatever comes out of our own mouths, even when the original reason for expressing the opinion is no longer relevant (in the doctors’ case, that they were paid to say it). This is cognitive dissonance at play; doctors reason that if they are telling others about a drug, it must be good—and so their own beliefs change to correspond to their speech, and they start prescribing accordingly. The reps told us that they employed other tricks too, turning into chameleons—switching various accents, personalities, and political affiliations on and off.

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Abagnale, Frank, 173 academia: conflicts of interest in, 82, 84–85 financial services industry’s influence in, 84–85 group-based projects in, 217–18 pharmaceutical companies’ influence in, 82 academic credentials, misrepresentation of, 135–36, 153, 154 accounting firms: collaborative dishonesty in, 218–21 “in good faith” notion and, 219–20 Adam and Eve, 98 Adams, Mike, 107 advertising agencies, link between creativity and dishonesty in, 186–87 aesthetic preferences, impact of favors on, 75–77 Afghanistan War, 152 altruistic cheating, 222–23, 225–26, 232 supervisory effect and, 227–28 American Medical Association, 79 Amir, On, 15, 18, 31–32, 39, 262 Apple, 184 atheists, swearing on bible and, 40, 41, 42 Atlantic, 214–15 Austen, Jane, 154–55 Avnaim-Pesso, Liora, 102 Ayal, Shahar, 197, 225, 263 bacterial infections, 192–93 Balleisen, Ed, 188 bankers, cheating among politicians vs., 243 banks: small misbehaviors of, 240 see also financial services industry Barkan, Racheli, 21, 23, 262 Barlow, John Perry, 1, 2 baseball, steroids in, 156 Bateson, Melissa, 224 Baumeister, Roy, 100, 104, 262–63 Baylor College of Medicine, 75–77 Bazerman, Max, 45, 260 Becker, Gary, 3–4, 14, 26 Be’er Sheva, Israel, farmer’s market in, 23–24 being caught, probability of, 4–5, 13, 14, 27 varying, in matrix task, 20–22 benevolent behavior, 23–24 Bible, as moral reminder, 40, 41, 42 billable hours, overstating of, 35–37 blind customers, benevolent behavior toward, 23–26 brain: higher connectivity in, 170 left-right split in, 164–65 of pathological liars, 169–70 Broken Windows Theory, 214–15, 249 businesspeople, self-monitoring of, 56–57 business schools, 248 group-based projects in, 217–18 cab drivers, benevolent behavior of, toward blind customer, 25–26 CAD/CAM equipment, in dentistry, 67–71 Cain, Daylian, 89 Canada, cheating in, 242 care for customers, in illegal businesses, 138–39 car mechanics, 93 Carnegie Mellon University, 197–207 car recommendation software, “fixing” answers in, 166–67 Cary, Apoth E., 246 cashless society, implications for dishonesty in, 34 Catch Me If You Can (Abagnale), 173 certificates for (false) achievements, 153–54 Chance, Zoë, 145, 264 charitable behavior, 23–24 cheating: aggressive cheaters and, 239 altruistic, 222–23, 225–26, 227–28, 232 being made blatantly aware of, 156–57 being watched and, 223–25, 227 collaborative, see collaborative cheating desire to benefit from, 12–14, 27, 29, 237 ego depletion, 104–6, 111–12 fake products’ impact on, 125–31 in golf, 55–65 honor codes and, 41–45 increasing creativity to increase level of, 184–87 as infection, 191–216; see also infectious nature of cheating infidelity and, 244–45 on IQ-like tests, self-deception and, 145–49, 151, 153–54, 156–57 reducing amount of, 39–51, 248–54 removing oneself from tempting situation and, 108–11 signing forms at top and, 46–51 Ten Commandments and, 39–40, 41, 44 what-the-hell effect and, 127–31, 136 see also dishonesty China, cheating in, 241–42 Chloé accessories, studies with, 123–34 Civil War veterans, 152 classes, infectious nature of cheating in, 195–97 Coca-Cola, stealing money vs., 32–33 cognitive dissonance, 81 cognitive load: ability to resist temptation and, 99–100 judges’ parole rulings and, 102–3 Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), 173–74 coin logic, 167–68 collaborative cheating, 217–35 altruism and, 222–23, 225–26, 227–28, 232 being watched or monitored and, 223–25, 227–28, 234–35 emphasis on working as group or team and, 217–18 infectious nature of cheating in relation to, 221–22 social utility and, 222–23 companies: being one step removed from money and, 34–37 irrationality of, 51 see also corporate dishonesty compliments, insincere, 159 conflicts of interest, 67–95, 238, 248 in academia, 82, 84–85 in dentistry, 67–71, 93, 94, 230 disclosure and, 88–92 dots task and, 129 eradication of, 92–95 exclusion of experimental data and, 86–88 expert witnesses and, 85–86 in financial services industry, 83–85, 93, 94 governmental lobbyists and, 77–78, 94 honesty threshold and, 130–31 inherent inclination to return favors and, 74–75 medical procedures and, 71–74, 92–94, 229 pharmaceutical companies’ influence in academia and, 82 pharma reps and, 78–82 what-the-hell effect and, 129–31 congressional staffers, cheating among, 243 Congress members, PAC money misused by, 208–10 contractors, 93 Conway, Alan, 150–51 Cooper, Cynthia, 215 Cornell University, 250–51 corpora callosa, 164–65 corporate dishonesty: cheating a little bit and, 239–40 Enron collapse and, 1–3, 192, 207, 215, 234 recent spread of, 192, 207–8 cost-benefit analysis, 4–5, 26–27, 237, 239 infectious nature of cheating and, 201–3, 205 see also Simple Model of Rational Crime counterfeits, see fake products creativity, 88, 163–89, 238 brain structure and, 164–65 dark side of, 187–89 fooling oneself and, 165–67 increasing, to increase level of cheating, 184–87 infidelity and, 244 intelligence vs., as predictor of dishonesty, 172–77 link between dishonesty and, 170–72, 186–89 logical-sounding rationales for choices and, 163–64 measures of, 171 moral flexibility and, 186–87 pathological liars and, 168–70 revenge and, 177–84 credit card companies, 239–40 crime, reducing, 52 cultural differences, 240–43 Danziger, Shai, 102 decision making: creating efficient process for, 167–68 effectiveness of group work in, 217–18 rationalization process and, 163–67 Denfield, George, 75 dentists: continuity of care and, 228–31 treating patients using equipment that they own, 67–68, 93–94 unnecessary work and, 67–71 depletion, see ego depletion dieting, 98, 109, 112–13, 114–15 what-the-hell effect and, 127, 130 “dine-and-dash,” 79 diplomas, lying about, 135–36, 153, 154 disabled person, author’s adoption of role of, 143–44 disclosure, 88–92, 248 study on impact of, 89–92 discounting, fixed vs. probabilistic, 194 dishonesty: causes of, 3–4, 5 collaborative, see collaborative cheating cultural differences and, 240–43 discouraging small and ubiquitous forms of, 239–40 importance of first act of, 137 infectious nature of, 191–216; see also infectious nature of cheating intelligence vs. creativity as predictor of, 172–77 link between creativity and, 170–72, 186–89 opportunities for, passed up by vast majority, 238 of others, fake products and assessing of, 131–34 rational and irrational forces in, 254 reducing amount of, 39–51, 248–54 society’s means for dealing with, 4–5 summary of forces that shape (figure), 245 when traveling, 183n see also cheating dissertation proposals and defenses, 101 distance factors, 238 in golf, 58–59 stealing Coca-Cola vs. money and, 32–33 token experiment and, 33–34 doctors: consulting for or investing in drug companies, 82, 93 continuity of care and, 228–29 lecturing about drugs, 81 pharma reps and, 78–82 treating or testing patients with equipment that they own, 92–94 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 234 dots task: conflict of interest and, 129 description of, 127–29 link between creativity and dishonesty and, 171–72, 185–86 what-the-hell effect and, 129–31 downloads, illegal, 137–39 dressing above one’s station, 120–21 Ebbers, Bernie, 13 ego depletion, 100–116, 238, 249 basic idea behind, 101 cheating and, 104–6 in everyday life, 112–16 removing oneself from tempting situations and, 108–11, 115–16 of Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones, 103 sometimes succumbing to temptation and, 114–15 sudden deaths among students’ grandmothers at exam time and, 106–8 ego motivation, 27 England, cheating in, 242 Enron, 1–3, 192, 207, 215, 234 essay mills, 210–13 exams, sudden deaths among students’ grandmothers and, 106–8 exhaustion, 249 consumption of junk food and, 97–98 judges’ parole rulings and, 102–3 see also ego depletion experimental data, exclusion of, 86–88 expert witnesses, 85–86 explanations, logical-sounding, creation of, 163–65 external signaling, 120–22 dressing above one’s station and, 120–21 fake products and, 121–22 failures, tendency to turn blind eye to, 151 “fair,” determination of what is, 57 fake products, 119, 121–40, 238 illegal downloads and, 137–39 misrepresentation of academic credentials and, 135–36 rationalizations and, 134–35 self-signaling and, 123–26, 135 signaling value of authentic version diluted by, 121–22 suspiciousness of others and, 131–34 what-the-hell effect and, 127–31, 135 farmer’s market, benevolent behavior toward blind customer in, 23–24 fashion, 117–26 counterfeit goods and, 119, 121–22, 121–40, 123–26; see also fake products dressing above one’s station and, 120–21 external signaling and, 120–22 self-signaling and, 122–26 Fastow, Andrew, 2 favors, 74–82 aesthetic preferences and, 75–77 governmental lobbyists and, 77–78 inherent inclination to return, 74–75 pharma reps and, 78–82 see also conflicts of interest Fawal-Farah, Freeda, 117, 118 FBI, 215 Fedorikhin, Sasha, 99–100 Feynman, Richard, 165 financial crisis of 2008, 83–85, 192, 207, 234, 246–47 financial favors, aesthetic preferences and, 77 financial services industry: anonymous monitoring and, 234–35 cheating among politicians vs., 243 conflicts of interest in, 83–85, 93, 94 government regulation of, 234 fishing, lying about, 28 Frederick, Shane, 173 friends, invited to join in questionable behavior, 195 fudge factor theory, 27–29, 237 acceptable rate of lying and, 28–29, 91 distance between actions and money and, 34–37 getting people to cheat less and, 39–51 infidelity and, 244 rationalization of selfish desires and, 53 stealing Coca-Cola vs. money and, 32–33 Gazzaniga, Michael, 164–65 Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), 219–20 generous behavior, 23–24 Get Rich Cheating (Kreisler), 14 Gilovich, Tom, 250, 263–64 Gino, Francesca, 45, 104, 123, 127, 131, 145, 170, 184, 197, 225, 234–35, 242, 258–59 Glass, Ira, 6 Gneezy, Ayelet, 177, 257–58 golf, 55–65 cheating by “average golfer” vs. study participants and, 63–64 mistallying score in, 61–64 moving location of ball in, 58–59, 63 mulligans in, 60–61, 63–64 self-monitoring in, 56–57 survey on cheating in, 57–64 government regulations, 234 grandmothers, sudden deaths of, at exam time, 106–8 gray matter, 169–70 Green, Jennifer Wideman, 117 grocery shopping, ego depletion and, 109, 112–13 group or team work, 220–23 performance unaffected by, 233 possible benefits of, 223 predominance of, in professional lives, 217–18, 235 social utility and, 222–23 see also collaborative cheating Grüneisen, Aline, 210–11, 257 guilt, self-inflicted pain and, 250–52 Harford, Tim, 3–4 Harper’s Bazaar, 117–18 Harvard Medical School, 82 Harvey, Ann, 75 Henn, Steve, 209 heretics, external signaling of, 120 Hinduism, 25 honesty threshold, 130–31 honor codes, 41–45, 204 ideological organizations, 232n “I knew it all along” feeling, 149 illegal businesses, loyalty and care for customers in, 138–39 impulsive (or emotional) vs. rational (or deliberative) parts of ourselves, 97–106 cognitive load and, 99–100 ego depletion and, 100–106 exhaustion and, 97–98 Inbar, Yoel, 250, 264 infectious nature of cheating, 191–216, 249 bacterial infections compared to, 192–93 in class, 195–97 collaborative cheating in relation to, 221–22 Congress members’ misuse of PAC money and, 208–10 corporate dishonesty and, 192, 207–8 cost-benefit analysis and, 201–3, 205 essay mills and, 210–13 matrix task and, 197–204 positive side of moral contagion and, 215–16 regaining ethical health and, 214–15 slow and subtle process of accretion in, 193–94, 214–15 social norms and, 195, 201–3, 205–7, 209 social outsiders and, 205–7 vending machine experiment and, 194–95 infidelity, 244–45 “in good faith” notion, 219–20 Inside Job, 84–85 insurance claims, 49–51 intelligence: creativity vs., as predictor of dishonesty, 172–77 measures of, 173–75 IQ-like tests, cheating and self-deception on, 145–49 certificates emphasizing (false) achievement and, 153–54 increasing awareness of cheating and, 156–57 individuals’ tendency to turn a blind eye to their own failures and, 151 IRS, 47–49 Islam, 249 Israel, cheating in, 241 Italy, cheating in, 242 Jerome, Jerome K., 28 Jobs, Steve, 184 Jones, Bobby, 56 Jones, Marilee, 136 Judaism, 45, 249 judges, exhausted, parole decisions and, 102–3 junk food, exhaustion and consumption of, 97–98 Keiser, Kenneth, 135 Kelling, George, 214–15 John F.

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 31 Aug 2012

No one learns something new and then holds it entirely independent of what they already know. We incorporate it into the little edifice of personal knowledge that we have been creating in our minds our entire lives. In fact, we even have a phrase for the state of affairs that occurs when we fail to do this: cognitive dissonance. Ordering our surroundings is the rule of how we as humans operate. In childhood we give names to our toys, and in adulthood we give names to our species, chemical elements, asteroids, and cities. By naming, or, more broadly, by categorizing, we are creating an order to an otherwise chaotic and frightening world.

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actuarial escape velocity, 53 Akaike Information Criterion, 69–70 Albert, Réka, 103 aluminum, 53 Ambient Devices, 195 amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), 98, 100–101 anatomy, 23 Anaxagoras, 201 Anaximander, 201 Andreessen, Marc, 123 Annals of Internal Medicine, 107 apatosaurus, 79–82 apoptosis (programmed cell death), 111, 194 Aral, Sinan, 143 Arbesman, Harvey, 96–98, 100–101 Arbesman, Samuel, 79 Ariely, Dan, 172 Asimov, Isaac, 35–36 asteroids, 22, 23, 51, 85–86, 183–84 athletes, 51 Atlantic, 86, 198 Australia, 57, 59, 60 automated discovery programs, 112–14 Automated Mathematician, 112 Babbage, Charles, 106–7 Back to the Future (film), 211 Bak, Per, 137–38 Barabási, Albert-László, 103 Battle of New Orleans, 70 Bede, 115–16 Being Wrong (Schulz), 174–75, 201–2 Berlin, 64 Berman, David, 81–82 Bettencourt, Luís, 135 Bingham, Alpheus, 96–97 biomarkers, 98 Black Death, 52, 64, 71, 73 board games, 2, 51 Bohemian Journal of Counting, 86 Bone Wars, 80, 169 bookkeeping, double-entry, 200 Book of Lost Books, The: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read (Kelly), 115 Boston Globe, 86 Bowers, John, 85–86 Boyle, Robert, 94 Bradley, David, 62–63 brain, 205, 207 branching process, 104 Bremer, Arthur, 66 British Medical Journal, 83, 212 brontosaurus, 79–82, 169 Brooks, David, 198 Brooks, Rodney, 46 bubonic plague, 52 Black Death, 52, 64, 71, 73 “Bully for Brontosaurus” (Gould), 82 calculations, 43–44 calculus, 67 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 90 Caplan, Bryan, 58 Cardarelli, François, 146 Carroll, Sean, 36–37 carrying capacity, 45 cell death, programmed, 111, 194 cell phone calls, 69, 77 Census of Marine Life, 37–39 Chabon, Michael, 184 Chabris, Christopher, 178 chain letters, 91–93 change: fast, 207–9 slow, 171, 172, 190, 191 change blindness, 177–79 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 90 chemical elements, 6, 22, 23, 50–51 atomic number of, 150–51 atomic weight of, 150–52 periodic table of, 50, 150–52, 182 thermal conductivity of, 33–35 Christakis, Nicholas, 21, 75 Christensen, Clayton, 45 chromosomes, 1–2, 89, 92, 143 cirrhosis, 28–30 Cisne, John, 116 citations, 17, 31–32, 90–91, 108 cities, 135–36, 202 citizen science, 19–21 Clarke, Arthur C., 18–19 classification systems, 204–5 Clay Mathematics Institute, 133 climate change, 203 clinical trials, 107–9, 157, 160 coelacanths, 26–27 cognitive biases, 175–76, 177, 188 cognitive dissonance, 4 Colbert, Stephen, 193 Cole, Jonathan, 48–49 Cole, Stephen, 162, 163 computation, human, 20 computers, 20, 41, 53, 110 automated discovery programs, 112–14 Babbage and, 106–7 games and, 2, 51 information transformation and, 43–44, 46 Moore’s Law and, 42 confirmation bias, 177 Consumer Price Index (CPI), 196 Cope, Edward, 80, 81, 169 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 206 CoPub Discovery, 110–12 Cosmos, 121, 129 Couric, Katie, 41 Courtenay-Latimer, Marjorie, 26–27 Cowen, Tyler, 23 cryptography, 134 cumulative knowledge, 56–57 Daily Show, The, 159 Darwin, Charles, 79, 80, 105, 166, 187 data science, 167–68 Davy, Humphry, 51 decline effect, 155–56, 157, 162 de Grey, Aubrey, 53 demographics, 204 Dessler, A.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America
by Shawn Lawrence Otto
Published 10 Oct 2011

The key lies in emphasizing the process, which granulates the frame from an authoritarian assertion to an antiauthoritarian exploration of the senses and intellect: “Look, see it yourself?” This has the same effect as Locke’s careful definition of knowledge: It removes science from a rhetorical frame conflict and refocuses the mind on observable reality, causing cognitive dissonance and questioning. When the evolution question is worded with the qualifier “according to the theory of evolution,” that emphasizes process. We could also ask it with the qualifier “according to observations of the fossil record” and would likely get a similar result. This is because science is a physical, objective subset of the broader worldviews that it was carved out from, and that’s okay.

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But without that, they find it paralyzing and are motivated to disregard the message.”23 SPEAKING CONSERVATESE When the just world belief is held along with a high level of patriotism, this effect seems to be multiplied, Willer and Feinberg found in a follow-up study.24 “Conservatives are on average more patriotic,” says Willer. “One thing that sets up is a great deal of cognitive dissonance when it comes to global warming. You think America is great, you know it’s a greenhouse-gas emitter, and then you’re told that greenhouse gases are bad for the world.” They found that if you experimentally increase people’s patriotism, their belief in global warming tends to go down. In other experiments, Feinberg and Willer found that liberals moralize environmental issues and conservatives don’t.25 So they wondered, “What if you tried to make conservatives think of global warming as a moral issue?

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Sometimes this process can take years to have an impact. But eventually, it does. “I went to the county fairs and I’d meet lots of people,” relates Sanders. “A not infrequent response was ‘Oh, since you’re a scientist you probably believe in global warming.’ This was from people who didn’t. So there was this cognitive dissonance. They know that my being a scientist would make me think that global warming was real, and they both didn’t believe it themselves and thought that there was some dispute about it. And they would maintain the position that it’s an open scientific question. But in person at least, I didn’t feel like they were hostile to me.

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy
by Seth Mnookin
Published 3 Jan 2012

But when it comes to decisions around emotionally charged topics, logic often takes a back seat to what are called cognitive biases—essentially a set of unconscious mechanisms that convince us that it is our feelings about a situation and not the facts that represent the truth. One of the better known of these biases is the theory of cognitive dissonance, which was developed by the social psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s. In his classic book When Prophecy Fails, Festinger used the example of millennial cults in the days after the prophesied moment of reckoning as an illustration of “disconfirmed” expectations producing counterintuitive results: Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong; what will happen?

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Some of the others have been alluded to earlier in this book: When SafeMinds members set out to write an academic paper about a hypothesis they already believed to be true, they set themselves up for expectation bias, where a researcher’s initial conjecture leads to the manipulation of data or the misinterpretation of results, and selection bias, where the meaning of data is distorted by the way in which it was collected. In addition to being a natural reaction to the experience of cognitive dissonance, the hardening conviction on the part of vaccine denialists in the face of studies that undercut their theories is an example of the anchoring effect, which occurs when we give too much weight to the past when making decisions about the future, and of irrational escalation, which is when we base how much energy we’ll devote to something on our previous investment and discount new evidence indicating we were likely wrong.

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conferences, 185, 195, 196, 291, 296, 303 Autism Society of America, 82 Autism Speaks, 33, 232, 239–44, 246–47, 248 Autism Tissue Program, 230 “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact” (Kanner), 76–77 autistic enterocolitis, 234 autoimmune disorders, 42n availability cascades, 196–200 availability entrepreneurs, 198 Aventis Pasteur, 116n, 150 B12 injections, 216n baby boomers, 268 Baby Laughs (McCarthy), 250 Bacon, Francis, 155 Bailey, Helen, 19 Bailey, Stetson, 19 Barclay, Sarah, 161–62 Barnsley Health Authority, Department of Public Health Medicine of, 114 Baron-Cohen, Simon, 17n Barr, Richard, 101–2, 115, 236, 301 Bartlett, Josiah, 29 baseball, 197 BBC-TV, 160–63 behavioral disorders, 251, 253 behavioral medicine, 268 Bell, Alexander Graham, 209 Bell, Vaughan, 85 Belli, Melvin, 50–52 Belly Laughs (McCarthy), 250 Bernard, Bill, 135–36 Bernard, Fred, 135, 136 Bernard, Jamie, 135, 136 Bernard, Sallie McConnell, 134–36, 141, 142, 149, 206, 208 on CAN merger, 233 IOM committee review and, 170, 171 Bernard, Tom, 134–35 Bernier, Roger, 223 Bettelheim, Bruno, 77–79, 82 Bible, 25, 197n big bang theory, 158 biowarfare, 28–29, 37 Biran, Adam, 26 Birt, Liz, 141, 142, 170, 186, 206, 208 fundraising of, 229, 238 Birt, Matthew, 141, 186, 263 birth defects, 146 “birther movement,” 8 Blaxill, Mark, 171, 174, 208, 222 Bleuler, Eugen, 76 blindness, 20, 23, 100, 153 blood plasma, 182 Blossom (cow), 31n Boston, Mass., 25, 27, 65 Boston Globe, The, 306–7 bowel, see inflammatory bowel disease Bowman, Brian, 267 Boxer, Barbara, 95 Boylston, Zabdiel, 25 brain, 40, 85, 89, 107, 111, 254, 280, 285 autism tissue collected from, 230 fluid in, 271 brain damage, 3, 5, 100 decision making and, 192–93 thimerosal and, 286, 287–88 vaccines and, 67, 69, 71, 73, 179n, 182, 183 brain tumor, 93, 192 Brand Sense, 258 breast cancer, 138–40, 193, 270 Brent, Jeffrey, 290 Brent, Robert, 152, 224–26 Brown University, 171 Brumback, Roger, 219 Bundaberg, Australia, 118–19 Burton, Dan, 130–31, 141, 142, 168, 205 Bush, Barbara, 110 Bush, George W., 9, 110, 204 Bush, Jenna, 110 Bush, Laura, 110 Bustin, Stephen, 290 Byers, Vera, 288, 294 Byrne, Rhonda, 269 caffeine, 93 California, 18n, 19, 36, 167, 186–87, 229, 272 vaccination rates in, 305 measles outbreak in, 19 mumps outbreak in, 306 pertussis outbreak in, 306 California, University of, at Los Angeles, 70 California, University of, at Santa Cruz, 235n California Department of Public Health, 306 Callous Disregard (Wakefield), 303–4 Calman, Kenneth, 100 calomel, 119–20 Campbell-Smith, Patricia, 288 Canada, 28 cancer, 58, 120, 260 breast, 138–40, 193, 270 drinking milk and, 48n Cardiff University, 163 Carnegie, Andrew, 41 Carrey, Jim, 14n, 256, 258 Carter, Jimmy, 65 case series, 110 Casey, Rhonda, 90, 91 Catholic Church, 81n, 100 cats, 40n, 120 causation, correlation and, 47, 48n, 209 Cedillo, Michael, 181–87, 190–91, 192, 285, 295–97 Cedillo, Michelle, 181–86, 192, 285–97 Omnibus Proceeding and, 190–91, 285, 290, 291, 295–97 Cedillo, Theresa, 181–87, 190–91, 192, 196, 285, 295–97 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 54, 72, 108, 147–50, 195, 199, 221, 223, 280–81 1999 recommendations on thimerosal and, 6, 125–30, 140 Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of (ACIP), 152–53, 173 anonymous messages sent to, 200 Blaxill’s views on, 222 flu and, 62, 63, 64 Kirby’s book and, 207, 213 McCarthy and, 255 Morgellons syndrome and, 95–96 pertussis and, 280–81 “Unexplained Dermopathy Project” of, 96n vaccine compensation and, 147, 148 vaccine safety and, 148, 150, 170, 171, 173 central nervous system, 40, 120 cerebral palsy, 151, 164 Chadwick, Nicholas, 291–92 Chain, Ernst Boris, 36 Chávez, Hugo, 8 chelation therapy, 235, 260, 261, 263–64 Chen, Robert, 108, 110–11, 150 Kennedy on, 223, 226 Cherry, James, 70 Chicago, University of, 78n chicken pox vaccine, 7 childhood disintegrative disorder, 81 Childhood Neurology (textbook), 289 child rearing, obsession with, 6, 9–10 Chin-Caplan, Sylvia, 286, 292, 293n, 296–97 Chinese herbs, 288 cholera, 39–40 Christian Science, 33–34, 268 cigarette taxes, 210 Civil Registration System, Danish, 154 Clements, John, 150, 223–24 Clinton, Hillary, 95 clustering illusion, 193 CNN, 84, 88, 90, 204 Coalition for Sensible Action for Ending Mercury Induced Neurological Disorders, see SafeMinds Coast to Coast (radio show), 90n Coca-Cola Bottling Co., 51 cocaine, 94 coffee, 93 cognitive biases, 15, 193–95 cognitive defects, 121, 235n cognitive dissonance, 15, 194 cognitive relativism (truthiness), 9 Cohen, Richard, 66 Colbert, Stephen, 9 Colorado, 57, 83 “commonsense” assumptions, 18 Community Health Council, 101 compensation systems, vaccines, 12, 146–48, 175, 178, 179, 180, 220 Condé Nast, 74n confirmation bias, 194–95 Congress, U.S., 64, 65, 95, 125, 167, 257 drug safety and, 146 swine flu and, 147 vaccine compensation and, 148, 178 Connecticut, 305 conspiracy theories, 237 constipation, 116, 144 of Michelle Cedillo, 183 Consumer Protection Act, 102 Continental Army, 27–29 control studies, 109–10, 153 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 81n Cornell University, 235n correlation, causation and, see causation, correlation and coughing, 274–75, 276, 280–81 cowpox, 31–32 creationism, 197n “Crimes in the Cowpox Ring” (Little), 35 Crohn’s disease, 103–5 Crystals, 251, 253 Cure Autism Now (CAN), 137, 142, 228, 232, 233 Cure Within, The (Harrington), 268 Curtis, Valerie, 26 Cutter Laboratories (Cutter Incident), 46–47, 49–53, 55, 146 cysteine, 143 cytomegalovirus, 289 dancing cat disease, 120 Daniels, Mitch, 204 Darwin, Charles, 158n Davis, case study, 286–87 Dawbarns, 115–16 “Deadly Immunity” (Kennedy), 221–27 deafness, 20, 100 death threats, 200, 230 debates, interpretation of facts and, 198–99 Debold, Sam, 187–89 Debold, Vicky, 187–89, 196 decision making, emotions and, 192–93 Deer, Brian, 236, 237, 300, 302 Defeat Autism Now!

Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies
by Jeremy J. Siegel
Published 18 Dec 2007

The propensity to shut out bad news was even more pronounced among analysts in the Internet sector. Many were so convinced that these stocks were the wave of the future that, despite the flood of ghastly news, many downgraded these stocks only after they had fallen 80 or 90 percent! The predisposition to disregard news that does not correspond to one’s worldview is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we encounter when we confront evidence that conflicts with our view or suggests that our abilities or actions are not as a good as we thought. We all display a natural tendency to minimize this discomfort, which makes it difficult for us to recognize our overconfidence.

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.): historical, 66, 67i increasingly favorable tax factors for equities and, 72–73 inflation and, 70–72, 71i total after-tax returns index and, 66, 68–69, 68i, 69i Capitalization-weighted indexing, 351–352, 352i fundamentally weighted indexation versus, 353–355 Carnegie, Andrew, 57 Carvell, Tim, 107n Cash flows, from stocks, valuation of, 97–98 Cash market, 257 Cash-settled futures contracts, 257 CBOE Volatility Index, 281–282, 282i Celanese Corp., 60i, 64 Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) index, 45, 46i, 141 Central bank policy, 247 (See also Federal Reserve System [Fed]) Chamberlain, Lawrence, 82 Chamberlain, Neville, 78 Channels, 40 technical analysis and, 294 Chartists (see Technical analysis) Chevron, 176i, 177 ChevronTexaco, 55 Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT): closure due to Chicago River leak, 253, 254i, 255 stock market crash of 1987 and, 273 Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), 264–265 Volatility Index of, 281–282, 282i Chicago Gas, 47 in DJIA, 39i, 48 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, stopping of trading on, 276 Index Chicago Purchasing Managers, 244 China: global market share of, 178, 179i, 180, 180i sector allocation and, 177 China Construction Bank, 175 China Mobile, 177, 183 China National Petroleum Corporation, 182 Chrysler, 64 Chunghwa Telecom, 177 Cipsco (Central Illinois Public Service Co.), 48 Circuit breakers, 276–277 Cisco Systems, 38, 57n, 89, 104, 155, 157, 176i on Nasdaq, 44 Citigroup, 144, 175, 176i Clinton, Bill, 75, 227, 238 Clough, Charles, 86 CNBC, 48, 88 Coca-Cola Co., 59i, 61, 64 Cognitive dissonance, 328 Colby, Robert W., 295–296 Colgate-Palmolive, 59i Colombia Acorn Fund, 346 Comcast, 176 Common stock theory of investment, 82 Common Stocks as Long-Term Investments (Smith), 79, 83, 201 Communications technology, bull market and, 88 Compagnie Française des Pétroles (CFP), 184 Conference Board, 244 Conoco (Continental Oil Co.), 57 ConocoPhillips, 176i, 177, 183 Consensus estimate, 239 Consumer choice, rational theory of, 322 Consumer discretionary sector: in GICS, 53 global shares in, 175i, 176 Consumer Price Index (CPI), 245 369 Consumer staples sector: in GICS, 53 global shares in, 175i, 177 Consumer Value Store, 61 Contrarian investing, 333–334 Core earnings, 107–108 Core inflation, 245–246 Corn Products International, 47 Corn Products Refining, 47 Corporate earnings taxes, failure of stocks as long-term inflation hedge and, 202–203 Correlation coefficient, 168 Corvis Corporation, 156–157 Costs: agency, 100 effects on returns, 350 employment, 246 interest, inflationary biases in, failure of stocks as longterm inflation hedge and, 203–204 pension, controversies in accounting for, 105–107 Cowles, Alfred, 42, 83 Cowles Commission for Economic Research, 42, 83 CPC International, 47 Crane, Richard, 61 Crane Co., 59i, 60i, 61 Cream of Wheat, 62 Creation units, 252 Crowther, Samuel, 3 Cubes (ETFs), 252 Currency hedging, 173 Current yield of bonds, 111 Cutler, David M., 224n CVS Corporation, 61 Cyclical stocks, 144 DaimlerChrysler, 176 Daniel, Kent, 326n Dart Industries, 62 Dash, Srikant, 353n Data mining, 326–327 David, Joseph, 21 DAX index, 238 Day-of-the-week effects, 316–318, 317i Day trading, futures contracts and, 261 Dean Witter, 286 De Bondt, Werner, 302–303, 335 Defined benefit plans, 106–107 Defined contribution plans, 105–106 Delaware and Hudson Canal, 22 Deleveraging, 120 Del Monte Foods, 62 Department of Commerce, 203 Depreciation, failure of stocks as long-term inflation hedge and, 203 Deutsch, Morton, 324n Deutsche Post, 177 Deutsche Telekom, 177 Dexter Corp., 21n Diamonds (ETFs), 252 Dilution of earnings, 104 Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) Small Company fund, 142n Dimson, Elroy, 18, 19n, 20 Discounts, futures contracts and, 258 Distiller’s Securities Corp., 48 Distilling and Cattle Feeding, 47 in DJIA, 39i, 48 Diversifiable risk, 140 Diversification in world markets, 168–178 currency hedging and, 173 efficient portfolios and, 168–172, 169i–171i private and public capital and, 177–178 sector diversification and, 173–177, 174i The Dividend Investor (Knowles and Petty), 147 Dividend payout ratio, 101 Dividend policy, value of stock as related to, 100–102 370 Dividend yields, 145–149, 146i–149i interest rate on government bonds above, 95–97 ratio of market value to, 120, 120i Dodd, David, 77q, 83, 95q, 139q, 141, 145n, 150, 152, 289q, 304n, 334n Dogs of the Dow strategy, 147–149, 148i, 149i, 336 Dollar cost averaging, 84 Domino Foods, Inc., 47 Dorfman, John R., 147n Double witching, 260–261 Douvogiannis, Martha, 113n Dow, Charles, 38, 290–291 Dow Chemical, 58 Dow Jones & Co., 38 Dow Jones averages, computation of, 39–40 Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), 37, 47 breaks 2000, 85 breaks 3000, 85 breaks 8000, 87 crash of 1929 and, 4 creation of, 38 fall in 1998, 88 firms in, 38–39, 39i following Iraq’s defeat in Gulf War, 85 long-term trends in, 40–41, 41i Nasdaq stocks in, 38 during 1922–1932, 269, 270i during 1980–1990, 269, 270i original firms in, 47–49 original members of, 22 predicting future returns using trend lines and, 41–42 as price-weighted index, 40 Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Index, 45 Dow 10 strategy, 147–149, 148i, 149i, 336 Dow Theory (Rhea), 290 Index Dow 36,000 (Hassett), 88 Downes, John, 147 Dr.

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?
by Raj Raghunathan
Published 25 Apr 2016

Webster, “Motivated Closing of the Mind: ‘Seizing’ and ‘Freezing,’” Psychological Review 103(2) (1996): 263. (4) Decision avoidance: C. J. Anderson, “The Psychology of Doing Nothing: Forms of Decision Avoidance Result from Reason and Emotion,” Psychological Bulletin 129(1) (2003): 139. (5) Cognitive dissonance: L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, vol. 2 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962). And (6) Predecisional distortion: J. E. Russo, M. G. Meloy, and V. H. Medvec, “Predecisional Distortion of Product Information,” Journal of Marketing Research (1998): 438–52. clarity on the reasons for our decisions: A.

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behavior affects attitude: This theoretical basis for this phenomenon is something called self-perception theory. The idea is that we infer our characteristics (attitudes, opinions, etc.) based on how we see ourselves behaving; see D. J. Bem, “Self-perception: An Alternative Interpretation of Cognitive Dissonance Phenomena,” Psychological Review 74(3) (1967): 183. See also a discussion of a related concept, the insufficient justification paradigm, discussed in R. E. Nisbett, and T. D. Wilson, “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84(3) (1977): 231.

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies
by Jeremy Siegel
Published 7 Jan 2014

The propensity to shut out bad news was even more pronounced among analysts in the Internet sector. Many were so convinced that these stocks were the wave of the future that, despite the flood of ghastly news, many downgraded these stocks only after they had fallen 80 or 90 percent! Confronting news that does not correspond to one’s worldview creates what is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we encounter when we address evidence that conflicts with our view or suggests that our abilities or actions are not as a good as we thought. We all display a natural tendency to minimize this discomfort, which makes it difficult for us to recognize our overconfidence.

…

Thaler, “Mental Accounting Matters,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, vol. 12 (1999), pp. 183-206. 21. Hersh Shefrin and Meir Statman, “The Disposition to Sell Winners Too Early and Ride Losers Too Long: Theory and Evidence,” Journal of Finance, vol. 40, no. 3 (1985), pp. 777-792. 22. See Tom Chang, David Solomon, and Mark Westerfield, “Looking for Someone to Blame: Delegation, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Disposition Effect,” May 2013. 23. Leroy Gross, The Art of Selling Intangibles, New York: New York Institute of Finance, 1982. 24. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science, vol. 185 (1974), pp. 1124-1131. 25. Terrance Odean, “Are Investors Reluctant to Realize Their Losses?”

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
by Barbara Oakley Phd
Published 20 Oct 2008

‘The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,’” Westen says.17 Westen's remarkable study showed that neural information processing related to what he terms “motivated reasoning”—that is, political bias (in this case, at least)—appears to be qualitatively different from reasoning when a person has no strong emotional stake in the conclusions to be reached. The study is thus the first to describe the neural processes that underlie political judgment and decision making, as well as to describe processes involving emote control, psychological defense, confirmatory bias, and some forms of cognitive dissonance. The significance of these findings ranges beyond the study of politics: “Everyone from executives and judges to scientists and politicians may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret ‘the facts,’” according to Westen.18 But is emote control really that common—particularly in such areas as public policy, which cry out for reasoned and rational discourse?

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See identity disturbance, chameleon-like behavior charisma as advantage for Machiavellians, 282, 297 Carolyn's, 128 of Enron's CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, 296 powerful men attracted to charisma of troubled, sometimes deeply sinister women, 277 of Princess Diana, 277, 391n54 role of memory in charm and, 312–13 of Texas Southern University's corrupt president, Priscilla Slade, 280 “cheaters” caudate activated (and we feel satisfaction) when we punish, 260 does the percentage of “cheaters” influence culture, 270–71 have led to evolutionary arms race, 258 as Machiavellians, 255–56 Cheng, Nien, suffering during Cultural Revolution, 215–16 Chhang, Youk, haunted by memories of heckling couple being buried alive, 303n “chicken,” game of, exemplifies benefit of seemingly irrational emotional strategies, 260–61 child abuse interference with development of executive control can cause subclinical to descend into clinical borderline, 202 in Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Abraham Lincoln, 219, 219n MAO-A alleles and, 54, 81–82 psychosocial versus neurobiological “push,” 95 Chinese speakers versus English speakers, neurological differences of, 175–76 Chirot, Daniel, competition for power rarely won by faint of heart, 314 Chomsky, Noam, 174–75 Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai, premier of China), 239 Christie, Richard, 40–48, 132, 133, 231, 268, 303n chromosomes explanation and illustration of human, 60, 61 illustration of illnesses associated with chromosome seventeen, 64 Churchill, Randolph, talentless, egotistical son of Winston, 293n Churchill, Winston alcoholism and depression, 307 benefits of his impassioned “emote control,” 188, 293 “I am so conceited…” [the point being, he really was], 293, 293n intelligence, 293 mental flexibility, 301, 314 remarkable memory, 313 Stalin's ability to fool, 29–30 cingulate cortex illustration, 73 MAO-A alleles and decreased reaction in, 80–81 serotonin transporters’ influence on signal to amygdala, 74–75 cingulate gyrus, MAO-A alleles can produce smaller, 80 Cixi, Empress, 27 Clark, Wesley, General, NATO commander, 171 clinically significant inherent flaw in DSM-IV use of concept, 375–76n32 in relation to borderline personality disorder, 162–63 Clinton, Bill excellent memory, 313 gullibility regarding Saddam Hussein, 316–17 temper, 300 clock gene, 233 Cluster A, B, and C personality disorders general description, 133–34 MAO-A and Cluster B personality disorders, 80 Cochran, Gregory argues against historical theory that only social forces matter, 267 Ashkenazi genetic mutations and intelligence, 87 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 cognitive dysfunction anorexia and, 142n borderline personality disorder anterior cingulate cortex dysfunction and inability to focus on something undesirable, 182 as dimensional trait of, 164 as heritable trait in, 85 irrationality under effect of strong emotions, 204 overview related to neuroscience results, 205–206 paranoid thinking (a form of cognitive dysfunction) as trait to define personality disorder used by DSM-IV, 164 delusional thinking outright, 165, 302–307 in schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder, 135, 227 effect of stress on, 202 “end justifies the means” behavior, 204 irrationality provides successful strategy for manipulation and control, 260–61 in Machiavellians, 209 in Machiavellians as part of precise definition used in this book, 281 neuroscience behind anterior cingulate cortex role in focus and attention, 182 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and, 181–82, 203 lack of common sense in those with damage to dorsolateral and ventromedial areas, 203 prefrontal cortex dysfunction and, 180 role in irrationally inflexible behavior, 204 ventromedial cortex and, 182, 203 paranoia (a form of cognitive dysfunction) provides for success in dangerous social structures, 250 seen in individuals with subclinical symptoms of borderline personality disorder, 201 in people Diana, Princess, 277 general discussion of good and bad effects, with different examples, 300–307, 306n–307n, 314–15 Lay, Ken, Chairman of Enron, 296–98 Mao.

…

See identity disturbance, chameleon-like behavior charisma as advantage for Machiavellians, 282, 297 Carolyn's, 128 of Enron's CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, 296 powerful men attracted to charisma of troubled, sometimes deeply sinister women, 277 of Princess Diana, 277, 391n54 role of memory in charm and, 312–13 of Texas Southern University's corrupt president, Priscilla Slade, 280 “cheaters” caudate activated (and we feel satisfaction) when we punish, 260 does the percentage of “cheaters” influence culture, 270–71 have led to evolutionary arms race, 258 as Machiavellians, 255–56 Cheng, Nien, suffering during Cultural Revolution, 215–16 Chhang, Youk, haunted by memories of heckling couple being buried alive, 303n “chicken,” game of, exemplifies benefit of seemingly irrational emotional strategies, 260–61 child abuse interference with development of executive control can cause subclinical to descend into clinical borderline, 202 in Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Abraham Lincoln, 219, 219n MAO-A alleles and, 54, 81–82 psychosocial versus neurobiological “push,” 95 Chinese speakers versus English speakers, neurological differences of, 175–76 Chirot, Daniel, competition for power rarely won by faint of heart, 314 Chomsky, Noam, 174–75 Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai, premier of China), 239 Christie, Richard, 40–48, 132, 133, 231, 268, 303n chromosomes explanation and illustration of human, 60, 61 illustration of illnesses associated with chromosome seventeen, 64 Churchill, Randolph, talentless, egotistical son of Winston, 293n Churchill, Winston alcoholism and depression, 307 benefits of his impassioned “emote control,” 188, 293 “I am so conceited…” [the point being, he really was], 293, 293n intelligence, 293 mental flexibility, 301, 314 remarkable memory, 313 Stalin's ability to fool, 29–30 cingulate cortex illustration, 73 MAO-A alleles and decreased reaction in, 80–81 serotonin transporters’ influence on signal to amygdala, 74–75 cingulate gyrus, MAO-A alleles can produce smaller, 80 Cixi, Empress, 27 Clark, Wesley, General, NATO commander, 171 clinically significant inherent flaw in DSM-IV use of concept, 375–76n32 in relation to borderline personality disorder, 162–63 Clinton, Bill excellent memory, 313 gullibility regarding Saddam Hussein, 316–17 temper, 300 clock gene, 233 Cluster A, B, and C personality disorders general description, 133–34 MAO-A and Cluster B personality disorders, 80 Cochran, Gregory argues against historical theory that only social forces matter, 267 Ashkenazi genetic mutations and intelligence, 87 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 cognitive dysfunction anorexia and, 142n borderline personality disorder anterior cingulate cortex dysfunction and inability to focus on something undesirable, 182 as dimensional trait of, 164 as heritable trait in, 85 irrationality under effect of strong emotions, 204 overview related to neuroscience results, 205–206 paranoid thinking (a form of cognitive dysfunction) as trait to define personality disorder used by DSM-IV, 164 delusional thinking outright, 165, 302–307 in schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder, 135, 227 effect of stress on, 202 “end justifies the means” behavior, 204 irrationality provides successful strategy for manipulation and control, 260–61 in Machiavellians, 209 in Machiavellians as part of precise definition used in this book, 281 neuroscience behind anterior cingulate cortex role in focus and attention, 182 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and, 181–82, 203 lack of common sense in those with damage to dorsolateral and ventromedial areas, 203 prefrontal cortex dysfunction and, 180 role in irrationally inflexible behavior, 204 ventromedial cortex and, 182, 203 paranoia (a form of cognitive dysfunction) provides for success in dangerous social structures, 250 seen in individuals with subclinical symptoms of borderline personality disorder, 201 in people Diana, Princess, 277 general discussion of good and bad effects, with different examples, 300–307, 306n–307n, 314–15 Lay, Ken, Chairman of Enron, 296–98 Mao.

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series)
by James Bloodworth
Published 18 May 2016

One in twenty households could not afford to feed their children properly.120 Last year, almost two-fifths of teachers said they had seen children who had not had enough to eat turning up for lessons.121 Another recent poll found that nearly half of teachers had taken food in to school to feed ravenous pupils.122 Against this backdrop, all talk of meritocracy brings to mind Richard Tawney’s characterisation of those who preach equality of opportunity while ‘[resisting] most strenuously attempts to apply it’.123 Here is located the fissure on the left between those who genuinely seek to create a socially mobile society and those who pay lip service to it while pursuing policies antithetical to a meritocratic order. Because New Labour’s verbal commitment to social mobility lacked a corresponding drive to reduce inequality, its rhetoric gave off a strong whiff of cognitive dissonance. Thus, after thirteen years of Labour governments, Britain remained a society dominated by the privileged and, invariably, the children of the privileged. If social mobility was not notably worse in 2010 than it was in 1997, it was not demonstrably better either. The acceptance by New Labour of large inequalities of wealth, buttressed by the radical-sounding mantra of equality of opportunity, produced a society in which the odds remained firmly stacked against those from poorer homes.

The Sellout: A Novel
by Paul Beatty
Published 2 Mar 2016

It’s a guilt that has obligated me to mutter “My bad” for every misplaced bounce pass, politician under federal investigation, every bug-eyed and Rastus-voiced comedian, and every black film made since 1968. But I don’t feel responsible anymore. I understand now that the only time black people don’t feel guilty is when we’ve actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief. In the way that cooning is a relief, voting Republican is a relief, marrying white is a relief—albeit a temporary one. Uncomfortable with being so comfortable, I make one last attempt to be at one with my people.

…

‘Now what did you learn?’ The boy starts rubbing his cheek and says, ‘I learned that I’ve been white for only ten minutes and I hate you niggers already!’” The kids couldn’t tell whether he was joking or just ranting, but they laughed anyway, each finding something funny in his expressions, his inflections, the cognitive dissonance in hearing the word “nigger” coming from the mouth of a man as old as the slur itself. Most of them had never seen his work. They just knew he was a star. That’s the beauty of minstrelsy—its timelessness. The soothing foreverness in the languid bojangle of his limbs, the rhythm of his juba, the sublime profundity of his jive as he ushered the kids into the farm, retelling his joke in Spanish to an uncaptive audience running past him, cups and thermoses in hand, scattering the damn chickens.

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance)
by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
Published 28 Sep 2015

One suggestion is that lower temperatures during the ‘Little Ice Age’ of the late seventeenth century led to slower tree growth, producing denser wood with superior acoustic properties. Others believe Stradivarius added a secret ingredient to his varnish or used magically endowed wood from ancient churches. The human tendency to experience expensive things as ‘better’ is driven by the psychological phenomenon known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We become uncomfortable if reality doesn’t live up to our expectations, so we adjust reality accordingly. And it works. If people pay a higher price for an energy drink, like Red Bull, they are able to solve more brain-teasers afterwards than those who paid a lower price for the same drink.

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K. 1 chickens 1, 2 childbirth 1 Chile 1, 2 chimpanzees 1 China, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 Chinchorro 1 chlorine 1 chlorofluorocarbons 1 chocolate 1 Cholula pyramid 1 Chopin, Frédéric 1 chopines 1 chromosomes 1 Christianity 1, 2, 3, 4 Christmas 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Churchill, Winston S. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ciabatta 1 Cielo, César 1 cinnamon 1, 2 Cistercians 1 citrus fruit 1, 2 clams 1 Clare of Assisi, St 1 Clarke, Jeremiah 1 CLARKSON, JEREMY 1, 2, 3 claws 1 Clement X, Pope 1 Cleopatra 1 Clinton, Bill 1 cloacal kiss 1 cloning 1 Club 1 2 coal-fired power stations 1 cobras 1 coca leaves 1 cocaine 1 Cochabamba 1 Cochran, Josephine Garis 1 Cockerell, Christopher 1 cockroaches 1 coffee, 1 cognitive dissonance 1 Cold War 1 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1 COLES, RICHARD 1 Colosseum 1 colour 1, 2, 3 Columbus, Christopher 1, 2 comb jellies 1 Commonwealth 1 compost 1 Conan Doyle, Arthur 1, 2, 3 conception 1 conditioned response 1 conscription 1 conservation 1 Conservatives 1 contract law 1 Cook, Thomas 1 Cool Running (film) 1 COREN-MITCHELL, VICTORIA 1 Cornelius, Robert 1 Cornwall 1, 2, 3 corrugated iron 1 corsets 1 Corvan, Ned 1 Coryat, Thomas 1 Coutts, Thomas 1 Coventry 1 cowbirds 1 cowboys 1, 2 cows 1, 2 crabs 1, 2, 3, 4 Creighton, James George Aylwin 1 Crick, Francis 1 cricket 1, 2 crickets 1 crime rates 1 Croatia 1 crocodiles 1 Croton 1 Crown Court 1 crows 1, 2 crude oil 1 Cruikshank, John 1 Cruise, Tom 1 crusades 1 crushing 1 cryogenics 1 cryonics 1 Cuba 1, 2 cuckoos 1 Cup-a-Soup 1 Currey, Donald 1 Cyprus 1 Dakar Rally 1 damnatio ad bestias 1 dams 1 dangerous sports 1 Darius the Great 1 Darwin, Charles 1, 2, 3, 4 Darwin, Emma 1 Darwin, George 1 Darwin, William Erasmus 1 dating 1 dating systems 1 Dauger, Eustache 1 David, Jacques-Louis 1 DAVIES, ALAN 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 Dead Sea 1 deductive reasoning 1 DEE, JACK 1 Denmark 1, 2, 3, 4 Dennis the Small 1 deserts 1 diabetes 1, 2 diamonds 1 diarrhoea 1, 2 DiCaprio, Leonardo 1 dictionaries 1 Dienekes 1 Dietrich, Marlene 1 Digby, Everard 1 dinosaurs 1, 2, 3 Dionysus Exiguus 1 dishwashers 1 Disney, Walt 1 DNA 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Doctor Who 1 Dodge City 1 dogs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Dolbear, Amos 1 dolphins 1, 2 Don, Monty 1 Don Juan Pond 1 doves 1 dragonflies 1 Drake, Sir Francis 1, 2 drawings 1 driving tests 1 drowning 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 drunkenness 1 dugongs 1 Dumas, Alexandre 1 dumb laws 1 Duncan, King of Scotland 1 dunce 1 Dunlop, John Boyd 1 Duns Scotus 1 Dürer, Albrecht 1 Dutch language 1 dyeing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 E. coli 1 Ea 1 Earth 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 atmosphere 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 magnetic field 1, 2, 3 orbit 1, 2, 3 population 1, 2 earthquakes 1 earthshine 1 earthworms 1, 2, 3 Easter 1, 2 eating for two 1 Eaton, Cyrus 1 Ebola 1 echolocation 1 Edinburgh 1 Edward VII, King 1 Edward VIII, King 1 Edward the Confessor 1 eggs 1, 2 Egypt 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Einstein, Albert 1, 2 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 1 elasticity 1 Eleanor of Aquitaine 1 elections 1 electricity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 electrolytes 1 elephants 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Elizabeth I, Queen 1, 2 Elizabeth II, Queen 1, 2, 3, 4 Ellis, Eric 1 emissions standards 1 Empire State Building 1, 2 energy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 energy drinks 1 England 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 England, Bank of 1 English Civil War 1 English language 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 eons 1 Ephialtes 1 epigenetics 1 epochs 1 eras 1 ergs 1 Eriksson, Leif 1 Escoffier, Auguste 1 Ethiopia 1, 2 ethylene 1 EU 1 eucalyptus trees 1 Eugenie, Princess 1 euphemisms 1 Europe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 European Convention on Human Rights 1 Eurytus 1 Evening Birds 1 Everest (Churchill’s nanny) 1 Everest (mountain) 1 Eves, Stuart 1 exosphere 1 extracellular matrix 1 eyelids 1 Fair Isle 1 Famous Five 1 Farrow, Mia 1 fascism 1 fashion 1 Faunce, Thomas 1 feathers 1 Federal Reserve 1 feeding of the 5,000 1 female franchise 1 Ferrero Rocher 1 Ferris, George Washington Gale 1 ferris wheels 1, 2 FIELDING, NOEL 1 Fiennes, Sir Ranulph 1 film-making 1 finches 1, 2 fingers 1 Finkelstein, Nat 1 Finland 1 Fiorelli, Giuseppe 1 fire extinguishers 1 First World War 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Fisher, John Arbuthnot 1 Fitzgerald, F.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

When your main scapegoats are Jews and Muslims, and you consider Blacks and Arabs biologically inferior, it can be a little discomfiting to find out you are a quarter Jewish and an eighth Moroccan. New technologies tend to reinforce radicalisation dynamics, but genetic tests show that they can also have the opposite effect. The cognitive dissonance that arises when mono-ethnic ideals of the future meet the multiracial realities of the past can set in motion profound attitude and behaviour changes. Aaron Panofsky of UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Joan Donovan of the Data and Society Research Institute analysed discussions around genetic ancestry on the white supremacist forums of Stormfront.

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Apocalyptic fantasies can be appealing, as they offer a bridge between fictional tales and real life.10 As the British historian Norman Cohn showed in his famous book The Pursuit of the Millennium, millenarian expectations of profound societal transformation often went hand in hand with social unrest in the Middle Ages.11 The term ‘apocalypse’ comes from the Greek word apokalypsis, which means ‘uncovering, disclosure, revelation’.12 But it’s hard to deny that the predicted disclosure has been delayed multiple times by now.13 ‘Lol, 5453 threads, and still no storm’, one commentator wrote mockingly on the image-board website 8chan, which is used widely among far-right and conspiracy-theory adherents. ‘The entire country is laughing at you Q losers.’ As the predicted disclosure is constantly postponed, the clash between imagination and reality can create cognitive dissonance, a feeling of mental discomfort. The incentive to reinterpret facts and reframe experiences tends to grow the more time and money one invests in the failed apocalypse.14 Just take the Doomsday preppers who spend $6,000 on freeze-dried and dehydrated food cans worth around 50,000 servings in order to survive ‘the inevitable zombie apocalypse’, which televangelists like Jim Bakker, host of the American Survival Food show, predict and postpone on a weekly basis.15 (Next to these zombie apocalypse kits the fifteen-kilo Brexit emergency boxes of chicken tikka and beef and potato stew look fairly reasonable.)16 Conspiracy theories, however absurd and counterfactual, can inspire dangerous real-life action.

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 20 Feb 2018

We saw the effect with the Vietnam War. Most people (sort of) believed that certain courses of action were absurd, but it was easier to continue than to stop—particularly since one can always spin a story explaining why continuing is better than stopping (the backfitting story of sour grapes now known as cognitive dissonance). We have been witnessing the same problem in the U.S. attitude toward Saudi Arabia. It is clear since the attack on the World Trade Center (in which most of the attackers were Saudi citizens) that someone in that nonpartying kingdom had a hand—somehow—in the matter. But no bureaucrat, fearful of oil disruptions, made the right decision—instead, the absurd invasion of Iraq was endorsed because it appeared to be simpler.

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A BRIEF TOUR OF YOUR GRANDPARENTS’ WISDOM Let us now close by sampling a few ideas that exist in both ancient lore and are sort of reconfirmed by modern psychology. These are sampled organically, meaning they are not the result of research but of what spontaneously comes to mind (remember this book is called Skin in the Game), then verified in the texts. Cognitive dissonance (a psychological theory by Leon Festinger about sour grapes, by which people, in order to avoid inconsistent beliefs, rationalize that, say, the grapes they can’t reach got to be sour). It is seen first in Aesop, of course, repackaged by La Fontaine. But its roots look even more ancient, with the Assyrian Ahiqar of Nineveh.

Infinite Detail
by Tim Maughan
Published 1 Apr 2019

* * * He tries to summon moisture to his dry mouth, takes a breath, puts on his best British accent. That’s meant to be worth something here, right? “Excuse me, I was just wondering—do you know how much longer it will be?” She looks up at him from across an expanse of IKEA farmed pine, his skin color and accent triggering a wave of cognitive dissonance to flicker across her face. Her skin pale against the beige. She stares into mid-space, focusing on text he can’t see. “Rushdi Manaan?” “Yes.” “You shouldn’t be too long. They’re just running some background checks. You’ll be out within a couple of hours.” “Okay.” He tries to hide his shock at a couple of hours.

…

At least half sit on the floor, wrapping themselves in blankets, huddled together. Here and there some tend to the injured and fallen. Others stand, grouped together in suspicious circles, whispering to one another and glancing around. Faces are stunned, tired, resigned, and sobbing eyes are bleached red by gas and tears. Anika is struck by a sudden, disturbed cognitive dissonance: all-too-familiar news footage of foreign war zones or distant refugee camps suddenly playing out on her doorstep, and all to a relentless soundtrack of grime-tinged techno. Industrial drums and distorted analog chord stabs. Refugee crisis or music festival? Terrorist attack aftermath or warehouse rave morning-after?

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

Of course, I have to get along with those associates on a very regular basis, whereas big business remains at a distance, emotionally, physically, and otherwise. So I tend to mentally blur over the fact that my close associates lie to me so that I may continue to cooperate with them and to enjoy those interactions. Cognitive dissonance rules, but I neglect this reality most of the time, unless of course those lies prevent me from getting what I want, in which case the lies will meet with some partial but still largely nonconfrontational pushback. In contrast, it is easy enough to curse Shell but every now and then pull into one of their stations and fill my car with gas.

…

Bernstein, Elizabeth best sellers See also publishing Bezos, Jeff See also Amazon Big Brother See privacy Big Data Big Pharma Big Tech disappearance of competition impact on intelligence innovation and loss of privacy and overview Bing Bird, Larry Bitcoin Black, Leon BlackBerry Blackstone blockchain Bloxham, Eleanor Blue Cross/Blue Shield brand loyalty Brexit Brin, David Brooks, Nathan bubbles, financial sector Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Graeber) Burger King cable TV cable companies cable news Capital One capitalism “creative destruction” and Friedman on logic of market churn and media and public’s view of short-termism venture capitalists workers and young people and See also crony capitalism Capitalism for the People, A (Zingales) Carr, Nicholas Carrier CEOs deaths of increases in salary overview pay for creating value short-termism and skill set China American manufacturing and Apple and facial recognition technology financial innovations financial institutions multinational corporations and productivity retail and tech companies and See also Alibaba Cialdini, Robert Cisco Citibank Citizens United decision See also Supreme Court Civil War Clark, Andrew E. class Clinton, Hillary Coase, Ronald cognition cognitive dissonance cognitive efficiency cognitive strengths Collison, Patrick and John compensating differential conspiracy theories control firms co-ops copyright corporations attempts to sway public opinion downside of personalization public dislike of Countrywide “creative destruction” credit cards credit card information credit card system privacy and crony capitalism business influence on government class and multinational corporations overview privilege and state monopoly status quo bias See also capitalism cryptocurrencies See also Bitcoin Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Curry, Stephen CVS cybersecurity “daily effective experiences” See also Kahneman, Daniel; Krueger, Alan Daley, William Damaske, Sarah Damore, James daycare defense spending DejaNews Democratic Party Desan, Mathieu Deutsche Bank discrimination Dollar General Dow Scrubbing Bubbles Dream of the Red Chamber DuckDuckGo Dying for a Paycheck (Pfeffer) eBay education email employment/unemployment European Union ex post Exxon eyeglass companies Facebook advertising and AI and “anti-diversity memo” censorship and China and competition and complaints about employees “filter bubble” income inequality and information and innovation and monopoly and News Feed politics and privacy and Russian-manipulated content venture capital and See also Zuckerberg, Mark facial recognition technology “fake news” See also media Fama, Eugene fast-food Fehr, Ernst Ferguson, Niall financial crisis financial sector America as tax and banking haven American stock performance banks “too big” global importance of US growth information technology and intermediation overview venture capital and American innovation Financial Times fintech flow Ford Motor Company Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Foroohar, Rana fraud, businesses and CEOs in laboratory games comparative perspective cross-cultural game theory nonprofits vs. for-profits overview research on corporate behavior spread of information and tax gap trust and free trade French, Kenneth Friedman, Milton Friendster Fritzon, Katarina fundraising Gabaix, Xavier Gates, Bill GDP General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade General Electric General Motors Gilens, Martin Glass-Steagall Act Gmail Goetzmann, William N.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

This created much confusion (which continues to this day) because the original monetary language began to clash with a language of investment: thus, a rise in the price of the collectibles was called ‘deflation’ by some, and ‘dollar gains’ by others (for context, imagine holding rare art that rises in price, and then referring to that as ‘deflation’). Others ignored the cognitive dissonance by using both types of language simultaneously, but it was obvious that the tokens were being absorbed as goods to be traded within the standard monetary system. The idea that Bitcoin was ‘digital cash’ nevertheless clung to the collectibles, a label that began to cause problems for my real-world campaigning around physical cash.

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This is extremely disruptive to the lives of any vulnerable people attempting to use them. There also continues to be a conflict between the reality of Bitcoin and the marketing rhetoric put out by the growing industry that surrounds it. The latter markets the crypto-tokens as a competing monetary system, while simultaneously fixating upon its dollar price. To resolve this cognitive dissonance, industry cheerleaders claim that the rising price will culminate in a future inflection point where the entire monetary system will invert, leaving everything priced in Bitcoin. This is a category error. Nobody believes that the rising price of land, Amazon shares, rare postage stamps or even gold will lead to those being used to price things.

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age
by Manuel Castells
Published 19 Aug 2012

Among the causes for this extraordinary reversal of public opinion were the austerity policies implemented responsibly by the social democratic government in order to restore the economy; the pro-European Union stand of the governing coalition, in contrast to the nationalistic, xenophobic attitude of traditional Icelandic parties; and the resentment of the majority of the population against their deep indebtedness as a result of the mortgage crisis and the inefficiency of the government in resolving the debt crisis. But perhaps the main source of discontent was the cognitive dissonance between the hopes of the social movement and the grim reality of institutional politics, a recurrent theme in the history of social movements. As a result, the new parliament tabled the project of constitutional reform and one of the most daring experiments in constitutional democracy became yet another faded dream.

…

Confirming the pre-eminence of AKP in Turkish politics, the first presidential election held in 2014 after a constitutional change to establish a more presidential regime was easily won by Erdogan, the leader of AKP and the most direct adversary of the Gezi movement. A number of reasons have been advanced to explain this cognitive dissonance between the popularity of the Gezi movement in June 2013 and the undisputed electoral success of AKP and Erdogan in 2014. Beyond specific circumstances that would require a complex analytical journey through the intricacies of Turkish politics, the most convincing explanation is the persistence of fundamental cleavages in the Turkish society that are fixed in rigid political alignments.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 10 Feb 2010

They thought it was a half-finished skeletal blight on their fair city, and they responded with a frenzy of protest. But as time went by, public opinion evolved from hatred to acceptance to adoration. The mere exposure principle assures us that a change effort that initially feels unwelcome and foreign will gradually be perceived more favorably as people grow accustomed to it. Also, cognitive dissonance works in your favor. People don’t like to act in one way and think in another. So once a small step has been taken, and people have begun to act in a new way, it will be increasingly difficult for them to dislike the way they’re acting. Similarly, as people begin to act differently, they’ll start to think of themselves differently, and as their identity evolves, it will reinforce the new way of doing things.

…

See Kazdin (2008), The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child: With No Pills, No Therapy, No Contest of Wills, New York: Houghton Mifflin. The quotations are from p. 34. Change isn’t an event; it’s a process. Chip Heath thanks Bo Brockman for teaching this idea. Steven Kelman. On pp. 22–24, Kelman explains why mere exposure and cognitive dissonance may cause people to resist change. Then, in an insightful analysis on pp. 123–127, he shows how the same factors make change hard to stop once they get going. See Kelman (2005), Unleashing Change: A Study of Organizational Renewal in Government, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis
by Dr Dominic Pimenta
Published 2 Sep 2020

It strikes me as such a strange thing to say, but such an honest one. Perhaps it’s what we should all be saying. The concept of cognitive dissonance, believing two contradictory things simultaneously, is simply a part of being human. We spend far too much time trying to justify our thinking, to make it logical like the ordered world we try to create, but we aren’t consistent or rational beings, and our brains are not simply mushy circuit boards. This cognitive dissonance, of understanding the huge potential scale of coronavirus and yet simply not translating that into true concern, seems nearly universal.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement
by Rich Karlgaard
Published 15 Apr 2019

The sunk-cost fallacy is a major impediment to making positive changes and subsequently living a better life. There are additional psychological factors, however, that hold us back from quitting things in order to be happier or more successful. According Dan Ariely, author of the bestselling 2008 book Predictably Irrational, we’re hindered in quitting by a mental state called “cognitive dissonance.” Ariely says that if we’ve acted in a certain way, over time, we’ll overly justify our behavior. If we’ve put ten years into a job—even though we despise that job on a daily basis—we’ll convince ourselves that we love it. In addition, Ariely suggests that we actually like suffering for things we love.

…

JoNell Strough et al., “Are Older Adults Less Subject to the Sunk-Cost Fallacy Than Younger Adults?,” Psychological Science 19, no. 7 (2008): 650–52. “Assume that you have spent”: Hal R. Arkes and Peter Ayton, “The Sunk Cost and Concorde Effects: Are Humans Less Rational Than Lower Animals?,” Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 5 (1999): 591. “cognitive dissonance”: Dan Ariely in Stephen J. Dubner, “The Upside of Quitting,” Freakonomics (podcast), http://bit.ly/​2x8fxoY. See also Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). “smart quitters”: Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) (New York: Penguin, 2007).

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

They overestimate their contribution to a joint effort, chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and always feel that the other side has gotten the better deal in a compromise.81 People keep up these self-serving illusions even when they are wired to what they think is an accurate lie-detector. This shows that they are not lying to the experimenter but lying to themselves. For decades every psychology student has learned about “cognitive disson Sance reduction,” in which people change whatever opinion it takes to maintain a positive self-image.82 The cartoonist Scott Adams illustrates it well: Dilbert reprinted by permission of United Feature Syndicate, Inc. If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophony of spoinks.

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Among them I would include the following: The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent appeal of nepotism and inheritance.20 The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, the more common ethos of reciprocity, and the resulting phenomena of social loafing and the collapse of contributions to public goods when reciprocity cannot be implemented.21 The universality of dominance and violence across human societies (including supposedly peaceable hunter-gatherers) and the existence of genetic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it.22 The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused in people within our own society.23 The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent tradeoff between equality and freedom.24 The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themselves about their autonomy, wisdom, and integrity.25 The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty.26 It is not just conventional scientific data that tell us the mind is not infinitely malleable.

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Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. 2000. Fairness and retaliation: The economics of reciprocity. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14, 159–181. Fernández-Jalvo, Y., Diez, J. C., Bermúdez de Castro, J. M., Carbonell, E., & Arsuaga, J. L. 1996. Evidence of early cannibalism. Science, 271, 277–278. Festinger, L. 1957. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Finch, C. E., & Kirkwood, T. B. L. 2000. Chance, development, and aging. New York: Oxford University Press. Fischoff, S. 1999. Psychology’s quixotic quest for the media-violence connection. Journal of Media Psychology, 4. Fisher, S. E., Vargha-Khadem, F., Watkins, K.

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel
by Max Blumenthal
Published 27 Nov 2012

They planted the idea in our heads that the system would only improve and become progressive through internal, collective criticism. So the notion that things could go very wrong, with war crimes and abuses of power or rape and sexual harassment on the base—that was out of the question. We developed a sense of cognitive dissonance that allowed us to push away all the bad thoughts.” In one of the most glaring instances of Israel’s disregard for civilian life during the Second Intifada, then–Air Force commander Dan Halutz and Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter authorized the assassination of a top-ranking Hamas military commander, Salah Shehadeh, while he slept with his family in a crowded apartment bloc in downtown Gaza City.

…

These photos were documents of a colonial culture in which Jewish Israeli youth became conditioned to act as sadistic overlords toward their Palestinian neighbors, and of a perpetual conquest that demanded indoctrination begin at an early age and continue perpetually throughout their lives. The young soldiers provided a perfect example of cognitive dissonance, in which chants of “Am Yisrael Chai!” (“The People of Israel Live!”) alternated easily with “Death to Arabs!” In March 2011, months after her photos drew international attention and widespread condemnation, Abergil began uploading other soldiers’ trophy shots to her Facebook page. She captioned one upload with the increasingly common refrain: “DDDEATHHH to ARABSSSSSS.”

…

Among the tower’s most famous residents was Marty Peretz, the former New Republic magazine owner who had abandoned his East Coast intellectual environs. “I’ve made Tel Aviv my locale now because in Jerusalem you wake up in the morning with the Jewish problem, and you go to sleep with the Palestinian problem,” Peretz told a reporter, invoking the cliché of the Tel Aviv bubble. I turned to Jesse to complain about the sense of cognitive dissonance, of hanging out at a hipster bar that could have been anywhere in the West, in Berlin or Brooklyn, with the residue of teargas still on my shirt. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s always incredibly jarring to be in these rural Palestinian villages and experience army raids and repression at demos, and then you get back into this bright urban metropolis where you’re living in the cultural equivalent of Brooklyn, except it’s completely segregated.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere
by Christian Wolmar
Published 18 Jan 2018

The article argues that the autonomous-car industry must learn from mistakes made in aviation that have led to disasters, such as those mentioned above, which, the author says, partly result from the fact that the technology has made pilots’ tasks more difficult and complex, not easier: The airline industry trend towards higher levels of autonomy created new opportunities for confusion and mistakes – a situation called an ‘automation surprise’. In another irony of automation, this cognitive dissonance often occurred in exactly the kind of unusual situation 42 The triple revolution where advanced technology could have proven most valuable to their human operator. Yet, instead, they were doubly-burdened to sort through a confusing, dangerous and potentially escalating situation.23 Harford sums it up succinctly: ‘Automation will routinely tidy up ordinary messes but occasionally cause an extraordinary mess.’ 24 Paul Jennings, Professor of Energy and Electrical Systems at WMG, University of Warwick, who is heading a team developing a simulator for driverless cars, is a great advocate of the technology, but he is particularly concerned about the implications of Level 3: I don’t like Level 3.

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
by Richard Yonck
Published 7 Mar 2017

Why might this be happening and how is it likely to impact a field such as affective computing? Some cognitive scientists have suggested the uncanny valley may be caused by a disconnect between different parts of our brain that we use to categorize and make sense of the world. They suggest this cognitive dissonance arises when our expectations based on an object’s appearance aren’t met by some other feature or aspect of its behavior. Movement is a commonly used example when describing this disconnect because the way a human being or other animal moves is quite distinctive. The graph in Figure 1 above highlights the importance of movement, indicating that the effect can become even more pronounced when faced with something that isn’t static or stationary.

…

That said, a good soldier is certainly not an emotionless weapon. Just the opposite. In the field, emotional intelligence is continually called upon in assessing risks, in dealing with civilians on both sides of the conflict, and in maintaining the close-knit connections between comrades. The trauma and cognitive dissonance that arises from all of these conflicting demands on a soldier’s emotions can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and other psychological problems. These conditions can cause difficulties both while in the military and after returning to civilian life. Domestic violence, breakdowns, and suicides are just a few of the outcomes from the emotional discord that can be brought on by the experience of war.2 The global policy think tank RAND reports that at least 20 percent of veterans from the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars suffer from PTSD and depression.

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement
by Amy Lang and Daniel Lang/levitsky
Published 11 Jun 2012

And it longed for that plaza to be clean and picturesque in the way a good plaza should be: empty of people. But hey, did you see what I did there? I was talking about rats, and then suddenly I was talking about human beings. Did you notice it when you were reading it? Did you feel any cognitive dissonance? What kind of cognitive dissonance did you feel? If you didn’t, it’s probably because ‘rats’ and ‘vermin’ is a common way of talking and thinking about this country’s underclass, the human beings who, because they sell drugs or don’t have a stable home, don’t quite seem like the sort of people we have to care about.

Time Paradox
by Philip G. Zimbardo and John Boyd
Published 1 Jan 2008

Mathewson, “The Effects of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group: A Replication,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 2: 278–87 (1966). 23. P. G. Zimbardo, “Control of Pain Motivation by Cognitive Dissonance,” Science 151: 217–19 (1966). 24. See also E. Aronson and J. Mills, “The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59: 177–81 (1958); J. L. Freedman, “Long-Term Behavioral Effects of Cognitive Dissonance,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 1: 145–55 (1965); D. R. Shaffer and C. Hendrick, “Effects of Actual Effort and Anticipated Effort on Task Enhancement,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 7: 435–47 (1971); H.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy
by David Sawyer
Published 17 Aug 2018

Before the pursuit of fame and fortune and the culture of personality became a defining force from the 1920s onwards, we lived in the age of character where morals, manners, honour and good deeds done without expectation of anything in return, were prized above all else. That I think this is a shame is immaterial. What is important is you do the soul-searching to know what your values are (tip: pick three and stick to them), then let them define your vision and your purpose. This is the key to living a life with meaning: no cognitive dissonance (saying or thinking one thing and doing another). As Darren Hardy writes, values “define both who you are and what you stand for.” He adds: “Your core values are your internal compass, your guiding beacon, your personal GPS…nothing creates more stress than when our actions and behaviors aren’t congruent with our values[89].”

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Be-fore we begin, let me give you an insight into our home life a few years ago, that of a married-with-two-children, early-forties couple living in an upmarket suburb of Glasgow: Two hours’ non-work-related social media use a day, while limiting the kids’ screen time. An inability to either do meaningful work or be present in the moment through digital-distractedness. This led to cognitive dissonance: a dad who extolled the virtues of reading to his kids – and himself – but rarely read a book. A fairly tidy house but with ever-growing piles. Exhibit A: kids’ art corner. Exhibit B: two of those 12-hole IKEA units housing rattan cubes, in which lurked a multitude of plastic. We could never find anything we didn’t use every day, leading to stress and precious hours wasted.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

In our research, we saw that white fragility prevented people from confronting their latent prejudices. This cognitive dissonance also meant that subjects would often amplify their responses expressing positive statements toward minorities in an effort to satiate their self-concept of “not being racist.” For example, when presented with a series of hypothetical biographies with photos, some respondents who scored higher in prior implicit racial bias testing would rate minority biographies higher than identical white biographies. See? I scored the black person higher, because I am not racist. This cognitive dissonance created an opening: Many respondents were reacting to their own racism not out of concern about how they may be contributing to structural oppression, but rather to protect their own social status.

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure
by Shawn Micallef
Published 10 Jun 2014

And though that bubble burst in the early 2000s, the aesthetic it spawned – which disguises work as play – remains popular. Does it make it easier to give up our leisure time when a meeting room is called a granny flat and designed in floral prints with easy chairs? What happens when work is going badly and a workspace that looks leisurely is suddenly a place of great stress? There is a cognitive dissonance in form and function here, perhaps the reason an event like brunch becomes such an overt act of leisure, even if in practice it isn’t leisurely. Many other people don’t have anything resembling a workspace at all. Work happens everywhere now. Many of us work from home, or from actual cafés, freelance vagabonds who move from one rickety table to the next, renting the space with our coffee purchases, getting more wired as the day goes on.

The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market
by Tobias E. Carlisle
Published 13 Oct 2017

Now he plans to use it to stir up some trouble for Stiritz. He will put Stiritz’s plan under a spotlight. Chapman had written his letter in high English like he’d swallowed a dictionary. He filled it with phrases like “tacitly dissuade,” “egregious inefficiencies,” “proffering,” “efficacious means,” “nepotistic practices,” and “cognitive dissonance.” A shareholder needed a degree in English literature to know what he meant. That won’t be a problem for Loeb. He’s part of the new breed of investors trolling Internet message boards, posting rumors and flaming (insulting) one another. Loeb’s screen name is “Mr. Pink,” who is also one of the main characters in Quentin Tarantino’s bloody heist-gone-wrong film Reservoir Dogs.

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World
by Erwann Michel-Kerjan and Paul Slovic
Published 5 Jan 2010

A survey of law school students published in 2003 by economists Kip Viscusi and Richard Zeckhauser in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, however, found that around 40 percent of respondents believed their personal risk assessment was higher before the attacks than currently.2 In another study of professional-school students and undergraduate business students in 2005, they showed that over two-thirds of respondents exhibited the same phenomenon.3 These respondents experienced a recollection bias, whereby after the occurrence of a low-probability event, one thinks that one’s prior risk assessment was much higher than it actually was. This could be due to an attempt to reduce cognitive dissonance, for self-justification, or simply to misremembering. It may also be a variant of hindsight bias, in which knowing the outcome alters an individual’s assessment of how likely it was to have occurred. For example, in a 1975 study by psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, who is also a contributor to this book, subjects were given passages to read about the Gurkha raids on the British in the early 1800s.

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From the perspective of an ardent free-marketer, environmental problems are a threat: They require government intervention in the economy. It’s hard to believe both that we need to solve environmental problems and that the government is the problem and not the solution! Believing both leads to cognitive dissonance. Many conservatives ignore environmental problems, pretending that they don’t exist. Roosevelt and Nixon did not have this conflict: In their day, conservatism was consistent with a role for the government. Compounding this ideological change is an empirical one: the rise of climate change as an issue.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 15 Nov 2016

I relied more the on the judgment of The Times than of the King. On behalf of those friends whose assets I was managing, I converted bank deposits and securities into gold and invested in Switzerland and Norway. A few days later the war broke out. Today, the king’s mistaken views would be described by behavioral psychologists as cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias. Somary did not use those terms, yet understood that elites live in bubbles beside other elites. They are often the last to know a crisis is imminent. Somary’s memoir was published in German in 1960; the English-language translation only appeared in 1986. Both editions are long out of print; only a few copies are available from specialty booksellers.

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Empire of Debt The elite worldview rests on the intellectual pillars of equilibrium models, monetarism, Keynesianism, floating exchange rates, free trade, globalization, and fiat money. Meanwhile, the real world is best understood through the lens of complexity theory, conditional probability, behavioral psychology, currency wars, neomercantilism, and gold. Cognitive dissonance between the elite worldview and real-world economics is taking its toll on elite self-confidence and control. The elites now divide into two types: those who are confused by lost credibility, and those who are quietly panicked because they understand their intellectual failure and its consequences.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

Two-thirds of all drivers ‘rate themselves almost perfect in excellence as a driver (9 or 10 on a 10-point scale), while the rest consider themselves above average (6 to 8)’. In their own minds, they can’t put a wheel wrong when they’re on the road. As a consequence, while ‘70 per cent of drivers report being a victim of an aggressive driver’, only ‘30 per cent admit to being aggressive drivers’. Such mismatches between perception and reality suggest that cognitive dissonance rules the highways. Drivers operate in a parallel universe where they are perfect and everyone else is bad and dangerous. The territoriality, belligerence, vindictiveness and, above all, double standards that typify road-rage sufferers have been investigated in depth. It’s now treated as a problem in its own right that claims hundreds of casualties each year, and is in urgent need of solution.

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Denmark, which tops its chart, wins partly because average commutes in that country are very short, and 34 per cent of Danish workers travel to their offices by bike. This combination boosts its scores on three counts – health (bicycle commuters have a 28 per cent lower mortality rate than the population average), environment and ‘work/life balance’. So are commuters all suffering from cognitive dissonance and, like smokers, addicted to a habit that will inevitably make them sick and possibly kill them? Some experts think so, and describe such blindness as a ‘weighting mistake’. We humans mess up our priorities: we invest our passions in trivia, and overlook important matters – we splash out on a new pair of shoes, and forget to pay our taxes.

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
Published 14 Sep 2021

But the rate of change itself is so rapid now that our brains, bodies, and social systems are perpetually out of sync. For millions of years we lived among friends and extended family, but today many people don’t even know their neighbors’ names. Some of the most fundamental truths—like the fact of two sexes—are increasingly dismissed as lies. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society that is changing faster than we can accommodate is turning us into people who cannot fend for ourselves. Simply put, it’s killing us. In part, this book is about generalizing this message to all aspects of our lives: when it rains in the mountains, stay out of the river

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See fourth frontier geographic frontiers, 224–25, 226 growth and, 224–27 technological frontiers, 224, 225–26 transfer of resource frontiers, 224, 225, 226 Hobbes, Thomas, 33 hobbits of Flores island, 35 Homo/Homo sapiens, xiv–xv, 32–38 homosexuality, 136 honey, 79–80 horses, 138 how (proximate) questions, 68 Huaorani, 225 Huichol people, 220 human niche, 1–19 adaptive evolution and, 11–14 campfire and, 4, 6–9 consciousness and, 7–9 exchange of ideas and, 4, 6–7 generalists versus specialists and, 5–6, 7, 11 human nature, understanding, 5–6 innovation and, 4 lineage and, 12–13 niche switching as, 10–11, 35–36, 138, 211 Omega principle and, 14–17 oscillation between culture and consciousness and, 9–11 populating New World, 2–4 human paradox, 5–6 humor, 202–3 hunger, 52 hunter-gatherers, xv, 35–36, 80, 113–14 hyenas, 150 hygiene hypothesis, 47 hyper-novelty, xii adulthood and, 189–90 cognitive dissonance spawned by, xii and COVID-19 pandemic, 249 diet and, 77, 79 intuitive sense of fitness value of behaviors and, 204 medicine and, 61, 67, 71–72 olfactory perception and, 57 parenting and, 136–39 sleep disruption and, 98–101 visual perception and, 40 Inca Empire, 225 Indian Deccan Traps, 29 individual consciousness, 8 indri, 60 infanticide, 13 innovation, 4, 5, 171, 209–222 insects, 22, 25, 109, 110, 238 intellectual self-reliance, 178–79 intellectual tools, 177 Inuit, 9–10, 78, 148 jacanas, 111, 112, 126 jackdaws, 131 jaws, 23 jays, 147 jealousy, 116–17, 120, 130 Jefferson, Thomas, 239 justice/freedom trade-off, 232–33 Kenyan children, 151, 152 killer whales, 142, 147 Komodo dragons, 109 !

Why Buddhism is True
by Robert Wright

In 1980, the psychologist Robert Zajonc, expressing what was then a somewhat eccentric view, wrote, “There are probably very few perceptions and cognitions in everyday life that do not have a significant affective component, that aren’t hot, or in the very least tepid. And perhaps all perceptions contain some affect. We do not just see ‘a house’: we see ‘a handsome house,’ ‘an ugly house,’ or ‘a pretentious house.’ We do not just read an article on attitude change, on cognitive dissonance, or on herbicides. We read an ‘exciting’ article on attitude change, an ‘important’ article on cognitive dissonance, or a ‘trivial’ article on herbicides.” Note, by the way, that Zajonc implicitly equates having feelings about things with making judgments about them. This equation is true to the Darwinian view (laid out in chapter 3) that, functionally speaking, feelings are judgments.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Published 11 Mar 2015

The Unarian cult, still going strong today, survived the nonappearance of an intergalactic spacefleet on September 27, 1975. Why would a group belief become stronger after encountering crushing counterevidence? The conventional interpretation of this phenomenon is based on cognitive dissonance. When people have taken “irrevocable” actions in the service of a belief—given away all their property in anticipation of the saucers landing—they cannot possibly admit they were mistaken. The challenge to their belief presents an immense cognitive dissonance; they must find reinforcing thoughts to counter the shock, and so become more fanatical. In this interpretation, the increased group fanaticism is the result of increased individual fanaticism.

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You may also think that making things illegal just makes them more expensive, that regulators will abuse their power, or that her individual freedom trumps your desire to meddle with her life. But, as a matter of simple fact, she’s still going to die. We live in an unfair universe. Like all primates, humans have strong negative reactions to perceived unfairness; thus we find this fact stressful. There are two popular methods of dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance. First, one may change one’s view of the facts—deny that the unfair events took place, or edit the history to make it appear fair. (This is mediated by the affect heuristic and the just-world fallacy.) Second, one may change one’s morality—deny that the events are unfair. Some libertarians might say that if you go into a “banned products shop,” passing clear warning labels that say THINGS IN THIS STORE MAY KILL YOU, and buy something that kills you, then it’s your own fault and you deserve it.

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If the theory is true, supporting evidence will come in shortly, and the probability will climb again. If the theory is false, you don’t really want it anyway. The problem with using black-and-white, binary, qualitative reasoning is that any single observation either destroys the theory or it does not. When not even a single contrary observation is allowed, it creates cognitive dissonance and has to be argued away. And this rules out incremental progress; it rules out correct integration of all the evidence. Reasoning probabilistically, we realize that on average, a correct theory will generate a greater weight of support than countersupport. And so you can, without fear, say to yourself: “This is gently contrary evidence, I will shift my belief downward.”

The Diet Myth: Why America's Obsessions With Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health
by Paul Campos
Published 4 May 2005

“Most of the obesity research community has deemed such data [on the risks of weight loss] compelling—but not enough to state that weight-loss attempts by obese 46 Fat Science people are dangerous . . . Nowadays it is not uncommon to hear ‘Diets don’t work.’ In fact, diets do work. It is prescriptions to diet that fail, because patients usually do not follow them.” A better illustration of rampaging cognitive dissonance, as well as of the classic “the operation was a success but the patient died” line of argument, would be difficult to find. As we have seen, such conclusions can be explained by the economic structure of obesity research. As a practical matter, obesity research must be funded either by the weight loss industry or by government grants.

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But then it all goes wrong: “A sexy woman is a woman who likes her body so of course she takes care of it which makes her lose weight which makes her like her body even more which makes her even sexier which makes her exercise more which makes her lose more weight . . .” A more precise description of the theoretical pretzel logic behind the practice of anorexia and bulimia would be difficult to formulate. Even within the context of the doublethink so characteristic of the diet culture, the level of cognitive dissonance at the center of Estrich’s arguments is breathtaking. Again, at the same time that she recognizes such truths as that there isn’t “a single woman alive who doesn’t do better, personally and professionally, when she feels great about herself,” and that the key to a fulfilling life is to choose “to be your best, to be happy with yourself, to be fit and strong and self-confident for however long you are blessed to be here” she steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the empirically undeniable fact that, for almost all people— indeed, for Susan Estrich herself, until a couple of years before she wrote 212 Fat Politics this book—feeling great about themselves and being fit and strong and self-confident precludes the whole idea of dieting, which at its core is all about weakness and self-loathing and endless dissatisfaction.

Reactive Messaging Patterns With the Actor Model: Applications and Integration in Scala and Akka
by Vaughn Vernon
Published 16 Aug 2015

If the application process is more complex, you can introduce a Process Manager (292) or other kind of Message Router (140) between the BookOrderController, BookOrder, and OrderFulfillment. See also Figure 1.5. Figure 1.8 Allow the Actor model to rid your mind of the layers of implicit cognitive dissonance. Go ahead, be explicit. Rid your mind of the layers of implicit cognitive dissonance. It’s just you and your software model and perhaps a user interface. Go ahead, be explicit. The rest of the book helps you see how you can put much of the other conventional software layers behind you as a thing of the distant past. You are now in the fast lane with the Actor model and its concurrency and parallelism.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

The few who bother to think about such matters only do so as a result of being prompted by an anthropologist, and they have wildly divergent representations of the process.” The ancient Egyptians, however, attempted to turn their mythic patterns into a comprehensive system and, in so doing, uncovered what Assmann has called the “cognitive dissonance” that results from an attempt to resolve the relationship between unity and diversity.22 In a traditional polytheistic cosmology, there's no need for a worldview to be systematic. Each god may have unique powers that are not necessarily consistent with those of another god. However, once we conceive of a sole creative power in the universe, the gods that previously represented natural forces and creatures are no longer the source of divinity.

…

Trying to reconcile a universe composed of “the one” and “the many” was a massive conceptual challenge, one that has been described as a “meltdown” in polytheistic mythology.23 One solution to this meltdown was that promulgated by Akhenaten: the imposition of a systematic monotheism forcefully excluding any other form of worship. In Assmann's words, it “resolved the cognitive dissonance…of the relationship between unity and diversity by abolishing diversity.”24 Monotheism is one solution. But it's not the only one. Assmann describes how, in the post-Akhenaten era, known as the Ramesside period, a new pantheistic cosmology arose that explained the various deities as different aspects and forms of a single transcendent creator god, thus making it possible “to conceive of the diversity of deities as the colorful reflection of a hidden unity.”25 This new pantheistic god didn't just create the universe—he was the universe, in all its variegated forms.

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Another hymn from this period hails “the One who makes himself into millions,” and, in another text, he's actually referred to as “million of millions.”26 These two choices for a coherent cosmological system held significance beyond ancient Egypt. As we'll see, centuries after Akhenaten's revolution, the civilizations of ancient Greece and India came across the same cognitive dissonance and chose different paths: Greece laying the framework for monotheism and India choosing a form of transcendent pantheism. In later Chinese thought, philosophers grappled with similar questions about the one and the many, leading to a sophisticated new understanding of the universe. In the struggles of ancient Egypt, we glimpse the first attempts to arrive at systematic cosmological solutions that have come to structure the thought patterns of much of the human race today.

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle
by Jeff Flake
Published 31 Jul 2017

If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place? Meanwhile, the strange specter of an American president’s seeming affection for strongmen and authoritarians created such a cognitive dissonance among my generation of conservatives—who had come of age under existential threat from the Soviet Union—that it was almost impossible to believe. Even as our own government was documenting a concerted attack against our democratic processes by an enemy foreign power, our own White House was rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax.

A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About
by Kevin Meagher
Published 15 Nov 2016

Despite the extensive commemorations for the Easter Rising, it is often overlooked that the original events of that week 100 years ago were not immediately greeted with a popular surge of public support. Tales abound of how apprehended Volunteers were marched through the streets of Dublin to the jeers and scorn of passers-by. Yet, in the general election of 1918, Sinn Féin won three-quarters of the parliamentary seats in Ireland. Evidence, perhaps, that the Irish suffer from cognitive dissonance – holding two, mutually exclusive, opinions – in relation to how their freedom from Britain came about. A case of public respectability and private radicalism? Many – indeed most – Irish people would like to see the country reunified, but blanch at the methods that have, hitherto, been employed to bring it about.

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
by Marc Weingarten
Published 12 Dec 2006

“I knew that if I stayed here he would drift in over me that night, grinning and dripping, all rot and green-black bloat.” Herr now viewed Vietnam as a bifurcated war: “There are two Vietnams, the one that I’m up to my ass in here and the one perceived in the States by people who’ve never been here. They are mutually exclusive.” Herr was appalled at the cognitive dissonance that existed between the cushy major press outlets in Saigon, with their lavish budgets and extensive R&R excursions, their “$3,000 a month digs at the Continental or the Caravelle,” and the horrors that were taking place within the city and nearly every other major city in the South. “I have colleagues in the press corps here, some of them incredible fakes, fantastic hacks, who live so well on their expense accounts that they may never be able to adjust to peace.”

…

The Mojave Desert, the West’s last untouched frontier, had been colonized by the greed-mongers, and nobody at the keno tables seemed bothered by the rising body count in Vietnam. For Sal Paradise/Kerouac, the characters on his cross-country trip are an affirmation of the beatitude and bedrock virtue of the underclass; the freak parade of humanity that Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo encounters is merely bestial and overfed on excess. Raoul Duke/Thompson’s cognitive dissonance in Vegas is most acute when he and Dr. Gonzo attend the National District Attorneys’ Association conference on narcotics and dangerous drugs in the ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Thompson, who was registered as an accredited journalist for the event, ducked out to score mescaline from a Vegas contact, only to return to a ballroom of fifteen hundred vehemently antidrug cops loudly deriding the use of controlled substances: Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S.

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 4 Oct 2011

The vast majority of Americans (70 percent) either believe the answer to the latter question is no or they don’t know.14 Part of that belief comes from the same sort of confidence I’ve just described—we’ve had cell phone technology for almost fifty years; certainly someone must have determined whether the radiation does any damage. Part of that belief could also come from reports of actual studies—hundreds of studies of cell phone radiation have concluded that cell phones cause no increased risk of biological harm.15 And, finally, part of that belief comes from a familiar psychological phenomenon: cognitive dissonance—it would be too hard to believe to the contrary. Like smokers who disbelieved reports about the link between smoking and lung cancer, we cell phone users would find it too hard to accept that this essential technology of modern life was in fact (yet) another ticking cancer time bomb. Yet, once again, the research raises some questions.

…

That’s because, for many Republicans, the idea of special-interest influence is the corrupting force in government today. Everything they complain about is tied to that idea. Beltway Republicans are different of course. The party of Tom DeLay had to make some pretty awful deals with the devil in order to raise the money they needed to win. They’ve developed a fairly complicated, cognitively dissonant account that justifies selling government to the highest bidder. Outside the Beltway, citizen Republicans aren’t similarly burdened. Citizen Republicans care about the ideals of the party. And those ideals resonate well with the objective of removing the influence of cash in political campaigns.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business
by Charles Duhigg
Published 8 Mar 2016

Brehm, “Postdecision Changes in the Desirability of Alternatives,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 52, no. 3 (1956): 384; Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, vol. 2 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962); Daryl J. Bem, “An Experimental Analysis of Self-Persuasion,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 1, no. 3 (1965): 199–218; Louisa C. Egan, Laurie R. Santos, and Paul Bloom, “The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance: Evidence from Children and Monkeys,” Psychological Science 18, no. 11 (2007): 978–83. longer than their peers E. J. Langer and J. Rodin, “The Effects of Choice and Enhanced Personal Responsibility for the Aged: A Field Experiment in an Institutional Setting,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34, no. 2 (1976): 191–98.

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing
Published 6 May 2008

Majorities gain confidence in their opinions, which grow more extreme over time. As a result, misunderstanding between Republicans and Democrats grows as they seclude themselves. Americans' political lives are baffling. Reconciling the narrowness of recent national elections with the lopsidedness of local results produces mass cognitive dissonance. The facts we see on television—a nearly fifty-fifty Congress, a teetering Electoral College, and presidential elections decided by teaspoons of votes—simply don't square with the overwhelming majorities we experience in our neighborhoods. In focus groups held in Omaha, University of Nebraska political scientist Elizabeth Theiss-Morse revealed how confused people are by the consensus they see in their neighborhoods versus the conflict they see at large in the nation.

…

Two geographers studying the 2004 U.S. presidential election said that they were "motivated by the striking similarity between U.S. electoral polarization and [O'Loughlin's] finding of significant geographic variations of local populations' effects on the outcome of the critical Nazi vote " Ian Sue Wing and Joan Walker, "The 2004 Presidential Election from a Spatial Perspective" (unpublished paper, 2005) [back] *** *Another example of this is a 1951 experiment in which students at Princeton and Dartmouth watched a film of a football game between the two schools. The students were asked to take note of foul play. "Dartmouth students saw mostly Princeton's offenses; Princeton students saw mostly Dartmouth's," reported the Wall Street journal (Cynthia Crossen, '"Cognitive Dissonance' Became a Milestone in 1950s Psychology," Wall Street Journal, December 4, 2006, p. B1) [back] *** *In early 2007, when the Pew Research Center charted views of "traditional values" championed by the Republican Party, the polls showed an increasing number of Americans holding more liberal views on abortion and sexual orientation, for example.

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 5 Mar 2020

Generations of Irish artists in England did this – and Morrissey used to be one of them. ‘The Queen Is Dead’ is a provocation in the great tradition of Wilde and Shaw. But dual identity can also lead to cognitive dissonance, the unbearable state of having attitudes and beliefs fundamentally incompatible with each other. If you can’t hack both/and – if, in this case, the Irish blood is not flowing easily through the English heart – you go for either/or. You overcome the cognitive dissonance by adopting an exaggerated version of one or other identity. There’s a very powerful strain of this in modern Irish history. Without figures with dual British/Irish identities (from Patrick Pearse to Maud Gonne to James Connolly to Erskine Childers) deciding to be hyper-Irish, that history would probably look very different.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
by David Graeber
Published 14 May 2018

All this was barely tolerable, but once Greg actually saw the abovementioned studies, which also revealed that even if the surfer did see them, she wouldn’t click on the banner anyway, he began to experience symptoms of clinical anxiety. Greg: That job taught me that pointlessness compounds stress. When I started working on those banners, I had patience for the process. Once I realized that the task was more or less meaningless, all that patience evaporated. It takes effort to overcome cognitive dissonance—to actually care about the process while pretending to care about the result. Eventually the stress became too much for him, and he quit to take another job. • • • Stress was another theme that popped up regularly. When, as with Greg, one’s bullshit job involves not just sitting around pretending to work but actually working on something everyone knows—but can’t say—is pointless, the level of ambient tension increases and often causes people to lash out in arbitrary ways.

…

The useful work he performs consists mainly of duct taping: solving problems caused by various unnecessarily convoluted bureaucratic processes within the company. Plus, the company itself is fairly pointless. Finn: Still, sitting down to write this, there’s part of my brain that wants to defend my bullshit job. Mostly because the job provides for me and my family. I think that’s where the cognitive dissonance comes in. From an emotional standpoint, it’s not like I’m invested in my job or the company in any way. If I showed up on Monday and the building had disappeared, not only would society not care, I wouldn’t, either. If there’s any satisfaction that comes from my job, it’s being an expert in navigating the waters of our disorganized organization and being able to get things done.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

The disjunction in rates of change between institutions and the external environment then accounts for political decay or deinstitutionalization. Legacy investments in existing institutions lead to failures not simply in changing outmoded institutions but also in the very ability to perceive that a failure has taken place. This phenomenon is described by social psychologists as “cognitive dissonance,” of which history is littered with examples. 18 If one society is getting more powerful militarily, or wealthier, as a result of superior institutions, members of a less competitive society have to correctly attribute those advantages to the underlying institutions if they are to have any hope of surviving.

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The ministry has its own vision of how to manage the Japanese economy and at times has manipulated its political bosses rather than being subordinated by them. It is therefore often seen as a paradigmatic case of an autonomous institution. See Peter B. Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 18 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962). See also Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (New York: Mariner Books, 2008). 19 This is the argument made about twentieth-century Britain in Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

…

Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1951. Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1981. A History of Anthropological Thought. New York: Basic Books. Feldman, Noah. 2008. The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Festinger, Leon. 1962. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Finer, S. E. 1997. The History of Government, Vol. 1: Ancient Monarchies and Empires. New York: Oxford University Press. Fiorina, Morris P., et al., eds. 2010. Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. 3rd ed. Boston: Longman. Flannery, Kent V. 1972.

Distrust That Particular Flavor
by William Gibson
Published 3 Jan 2012

I found the material of the actual twenty-first century richer, stranger, more multiplex, than any imaginary twenty-first century could ever have been. And it could be unpacked with the toolkit of science fiction. I don’t really see how it can be unpacked otherwise, as so much of it is so utterly akin to science fiction, complete with a workaday level of cognitive dissonance we now take utterly for granted. Zero History, my ninth novel, will be published this September, rounding out that third set of three books. It’s set in London and Paris, last year, in the wake of global financial collapse. I wish that I could tell you what it’s about, but I haven’t yet discovered my best likely story, about that.

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy
by Richard Shotton
Published 12 Feb 2018

SSRN ID: 979648 Conclusion ‘Debunking the myth of Kitty Genovese’, New York Post, 16 February 2014 Further reading The Social Animal [Elliot Aronson, 1972] First, make sure you buy the right book – confusingly there are two psychology books called The Social Animal, one by David Brooks the other by Elliot Aronson. Aronson’s book is out of print and currently second-hand copies cost £40 on Amazon. However, if you’re patient you should be able to get your hands on one for £20. Aronson’s own research covered cognitive dissonance and the pratfall effect but this book covers a far broader range of biases. Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy [Phil Barden, 2013] Most books on behavioural science talk about the subject in general terms, relying on the reader to figure out how they’ll apply it to marketing. Decoded was one of the first books to address that gap.

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell
Published 29 Jul 2019

When Bernie rails against crony capitalism, or rails against permanent war, or rails against the surveillance state, or the criminal justice system that has packed our prisons, Ron Paul could be giving the same speech. And it’s not until the end of the story, when Bernie says: “That’s why we need to grow the size of government and give bureaucrats more power,” that people hear a difference. That’s Bernie’s cognitive dissonance: railing against the evils created by too much government power, and then pushing for more government power to solve the problem. Powell: You’re finding a similarity between radical socialists and radical libertarians in identifying problems that young people see. Is it that the young people don’t understand the solutions and just identify with the politicians that point out the problems?

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Jan 2011

Consistency is the playground of dull minds. If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. It’s such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture. If, say, a Christian really wants to understand the Muslims who attend that mosque down the street, he shouldn’t look for a pristine set of values that every Muslim holds dear.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
by Richard H. Thaler
Published 10 May 2015

Eric is a persuasive guy, and as a result of his charm and arm-twisting, the collection of psychologists who showed up at our initial meeting was truly astonishing. We had not just Amos and Danny, but also Walter Mischel, of the Oreo and marshmallow experiment fame, Leon Festinger, who formulated the idea of cognitive dissonance, and Stanley Schachter, one of the pioneers of the study of emotions. Together they were the psychology version of the dream team. Some of the friendly economists who agreed to participate were also an all-star cast: George Akerlof, William Baumol, Tom Schelling, and Richard Zeckhauser. The hard-core group was Colin, George, Bob, and me.

…

(Lamont and Thaler), 250 capital asset pricing model (CAPM), 226–29, 348 “CAPM is Wanted, Dead or Alive, The” (Fama and French), 228 Car Talk, 32 Case, Chip, 235 Case-Shiller Home Price Index, 235 cashews, 21, 24, 42, 85–86, 92, 100, 102–3, 107n casinos, 49n cautious paternalism, 323 Census Bureau, 47 Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP), 208, 221 charity, 66, 129 cheap stocks, 219–21 Checklist Manifesto, The (Gawande), 356 Chen, Nai-fu, 243 Chetty, Raj, 320, 357–58 Chicago, University of, 255–56 behavioral economics conference at, 159–64, 167–68, 169, 170, 205 conference on 1987 crash at, 237 debate on behavioral economics at, 159–63, 167–68, 169, 170, 205 finance studied at, 208 offices at, 270–76, 278 Chicago Bulls, 19 Chicago police department, 260 chicken (game of), 183 choice: number of, 21, 85, 99–103 preferences revealed by, 86 choice architecture, 276, 326–27, 357 Choices, Values, and Frames, xiv Chrysler, 121, 123, 363 Cialdini, Robert, 180, 335, 336 Clegg, Nick, 333 Clinton, Hillary, 22 closed-end funds, 238–39, 239, 240 puzzles of, 240–43, 244, 250 coaches, 292–93 Coase, Ronald, 261 Coase theorem, 261–62, 264–65, 264, 267–68 Cobb, David, 115 Cobb, Michael, 115, 116, 117, 118n, 119, 120, 123 Coca-Cola, 134–35 cognitive dissonance, 178 commitment strategies, 100, 102–3, 106–7 compliance (medical), 189–90 COMPUSTAT, 221 computing power, 208 concert tickets, 18–19, 66 conditional cooperators, 146, 182, 335n “Conference Handbook, The” (Stigler), 162–63 confirmation bias, 171–72 Conservative Party, U.K., 330–33 constrained optimization, 5–6, 8, 27, 43, 161, 207, 365 “Consumer Choice: A Theory of Economists’ Behavior” (Thaler), 35 consumers, optimization problem faced by, 5–6, 8, 27, 43, 161, 207, 365 consumer sovereignty, 268–69 consumer surplus, 59 consumption function, 94–98, 106, 309 “Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation, and Risk” (Lakonishok, Shleifer and Vishny), 228 cooperation, 143–47 conditional, 146, 182, 335n Prisoner’s Dilemma and, 143–44, 145, 301–5, 302 Copernican revolution, 169 Cornell University, 42, 43, 115, 140–43, 153–55, 157 Costco, 63, 71–72 Council of Economic Advisors, 352 coupons, 62, 63, 67–68, 120 credit cards, 18, 74, 76–77 late fees for, 360 crime, 265 Daily Mail, 135 Daily Show, The, 352 Dallas Cowboys, 281 data: financial, 208 collection and recording of, 355–56 Dawes, Robyn, 146 Deal or No Deal, 296–301, 297, 303 path dependence on, 298–300 deals, 61–62 De Bondt, Werner, 216–18, 221, 222–24, 226n, 233, 278 debt, 78 default investment portfolio, 316 default option, 313–16, 327 default saving rate, 312, 316, 319, 357 delayed gratification, 100–102 De Long, Brad, 240 Demos, 330 Denmark, 320, 357–58 descriptive, 25, 30, 45, 89 Design of Everyday Things, The (Norman), 326 Diamond, Doug, 273, 276 Diamond, Peter, 323 Dictator Game, 140–41, 142, 160, 182, 301 diets, 342 diminishing marginal utility, 106 of wealth, 28, 30 diminishing sensitivity, 30–34 discount, surcharge vs., 18 discounts, returns and, 242–43 discounted utility model, 89–94, 99, 110, 362 discretion, 106 Ditka, Mike, 279, 280 dividends, 164–67, 365 present value of, 231–33, 231, 237 Dodd, David, 219 doers, planners vs., 104–9 Donoghue, John, 265n “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?”

A Man for All Markets
by Edward O. Thorp
Published 15 Nov 2016

Moreover, a mutual acquaintance told me that Ned, who had made hundreds of millions advising clients, was still directing investors to Madoff the same week that the latter confessed. Having once known Ned well, I thought back to get more insight into why he believed in Madoff. In my opinion Ned was not a crook. Instead, I think he suffered from so-called cognitive dissonance. That’s where you want to believe something enough that you simply reject any information to the contrary. Nicotine addicts will often deny that smoking endangers their health. Members of political parties react mildly to lies, crimes, and other immorality by their own but are out for blood when the same is done by politicians in the other party.

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To get back to $100, $70 has to increase by $30 or 42.6 percent. CHAPTER 26 beat the market This sounds nonsensical at first. What it means is that no one has any information whatsoever that has predictive value. to the contrary They display the well-known characteristic known as cognitive dissonance. and hundreds of books An excellent history of these meanderings is Justin Fox’s book The Myth of the Rational Market. all the future earnings Interpreted as net value paid out or accumulated for the benefit of a sole owner. on inside information As chronicled by James Stewart in Den of Thieves, Connie Bruck in The Predators’ Ball, and others.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

Rather remarkably, they insisted that tending to financial markets was a more legitimate social mission than openly acknowledging the highly functional, indeed essential role they played in backstopping the government budget at a time of crisis. Even in its heyday, Keynesianism had been an incomplete revolution at best.67 In 2020, the scale of the crisis-fighting raised the intensity of the cognitive dissonance to a new level. In the heat of the moment, the difference of interpretation mattered little in practical terms. It became consequential only if one looked to the future, when the economy did begin to recover, prices nudged up, and yields rose along with them. How would the divergent expectations of the markets and the central bank play out then? 

…

The best way to respond may be simply to ignore the histrionics. That was the path chosen by the Biden transition team, ignoring the increasingly manic attempts by Trump and his entourage to deny their defeat. The result in the final months of 2020 was that the U.S. political system was thrown into an acute state of cognitive dissonance. President-elect Biden and his team went ahead with the transition. They prepared coronavirus responses, climate policies, and plans for a stimulus. Meanwhile, a substantial caucus within the GOP continued to pander to the defeated incumbent and thus to validate his alternate reality. The grotesquerie reached its height on January 6 with the mob invasion of the Capitol incited by the president, his entourage, and several Republican members of Congress.

Norco '80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History
by Peter Houlahan
Published 10 Jun 2019

“I think his dreams are just too big for what he can really do.” By Christmas 1979, George Smith was without a job, without a car, and without a family. It was a demoralizing condition for a young man who had always thought of himself as destined for great things. George struggled with a painful cognitive dissonance between who he thought he was and what he had really become. He had a solid support system of family and friends, but to fall back on it was utterly unimaginable to him. George was the one who always saved other people, whether it be with a few extra bucks, a solution to a problem, or the salvation of their very souls.

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Rudolph Holguin, who oversaw the evaluation of George Smith: “TM’s showed bilateral perforations and dry blood in the ear canal secondary to concussion syndrome of the gun firing.” In other words, George had fired the Heckler so many times that the concussion waves from .308 rounds going off next to his head had punched holes in the temporal membranes of both ears. Walter was locked in a cognitive dissonance between the George he thought he knew and the one who had just tried to rob a bank. Why would you do that, George? Walter wanted to know. Because of what I have been telling you for years, George said. The end of the world is upon us. The signs are everywhere you look, the fulfillment of the prophecies is at hand.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

Being open to other points of view and learning from other perspectives – whether from friends, foes, cryptogamists or even (horror) colleagues – is integral to intellectual progress. Our confirmation bias always traps us in a very limited view of the world, but free speech, peer review and cognitive dissonance set us free. The birth of science The philosopher Karl Popper wrote that ‘science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths’.3 Mankind has always had myths. We have always developed stories about gods to explain the origin of the universe, disasters and thunder and lightning.

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INDEX Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), 6, 136–7, 138, 169, 353 abortion, 113 absolutist monarchies, 154, 155, 170, 182, 185 Academy Awards, 82 Accenture, 375 accountants, 41 Acemoglu, Daron, 185, 187, 200 Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), 86–7, 88, 249 Acton, Lord, see Dalberg-Acton, John Adams, Douglas, 295 Adobe, 310 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 306 Aeschylus, 132 affirmative action, 244 Afghanistan, 70, 345 Age of Discovery, 177 agriculture, 39–40, 42, 74, 171, 263 Akbar I, Mughal Emperor, 98 Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BC), 42 Alaska, 76 Albania, 54 Albertus Magnus, Saint, 145 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond, 154 Alexander III ‘the Great’, Basileus of Macedon, 87–9 Alexandria, Egypt, 134 algae, 332 algebra, 137 Alibaba, 311 Allport, Gordon, 244–5 Almohad Caliphate (1121–1269), 137–8 alpha males, 227–8, 229 Alphaville, 245 altruism, 216 Amalric, Arnaud, 94 Amazon, 275, 311 America First, 19, 272 American Civil War (1861–5), 109 American Declaration of Independence (1776), 103, 201, 202 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 102–3, 200–201 American Society of Human Genetics, 76–7 Americanization, 19 Amherst, William, 1st Earl Amherst, 176–7 amphorae, 48 Amsterdam, Holland, 150, 152, 153 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63), 352 anaesthesia, 279, 296 anagrams, 83 Anatolia, 42, 74 Anaximander, 127 Anaximenes, 127 al-Andalus (711–1492), 97, 137–9, 140 Andromeda, 88 Anglo–French Treaty (1860), 53–4 Anhui, China, 315 anti-Semitism, 11, 94–7, 109, 220, 233, 251, 254, 255 anti-Semitism, 254–5, 356 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 Antoninus Pius, Roman Emperor, 91 Apama, 88 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 5 Apple, 82, 195, 304, 311, 319 Apuleius, 89 Arab Spring (2011), 10, 342 Arabic numerals, 70, 137, 156 Arabic, 136, 137, 140 archaeology, 21–2, 31, 32, 38, 43, 50, 51 Archer Daniels Midland, 329 Aristides, Aelius, 48 Aristophanes, 129, 131, 132 Aristotle, 130–31, 132, 137, 141–6, 161 Armenians, 136, 220 ARPAnet, 306 Art Nouveau, 198 art, 198 Artaxerxes III, Persian Emperor, 87 Ashkenazi Jews, 99 Ashoka, Mauryan Emperor, 53 Assyria (2500–609 BC), 248–9 Assyrian Empire (2500–609 BC), 41, 43, 86 astronomy, 80, 145–6, 150 Atari, 304 Athens, 47, 53, 89, 90, 131, 134 Atlas Copco, 65 Augustine of Hippo, 133, 139 Australia, 50–53, 76, 262 Australopithecus afarensis, 24–5 Austria, 1, 150, 151, 190 Austria-Hungary (1867–1918), 179, 254 Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Habsburg monarchy (1282–1918), 151, 179, 190, 237 migration crisis (2015–), 342 Mongol invasion (1241), 95 Nazi period (1938–45), 105 Ötzi, 1–2, 8–9, 73, 74 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 150 Authoritarian Dynamic, The (Stenner), 343 authoritarianism, 4, 14, 220, 343–61, 363, 379 democracy and, 357 economics and, 346–51 exposure to difference and, 242 innovation and, 318 insecurity and, 338, 342, 378 media and, 346–9 nostalgia and 351–4 predisposition, 220, 343–6 populism and, 325, 350–51 scapegoats and, 355–6 science and, 161–3 automatic looms, 179 automation, 63, 312–13 Averroes, 137–8, 143, 144, 145 Aztec Empire (1428–1521), 55 Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, 75 baby-boom generation (1946–64), 294, 340 Babylon, 39, 86–7 Babylonia (1895–539 BC), 39, 42, 43, 86–7, 128, 131, 249, 267 Bacon, Francis, 147, 156, 165–6, 201 bad news, 322 Baghdad, 70, 136, 353 Bahrain, 42 Bailey, Ron, 11 Bailyn, Bernard, 201 balance of trade, 59–60 Banda Islands, 100 Bangladesh, 270 Bannon, Steve, 14, 108 Barcelona, Catalonia, 320 Basel, Switzerland, 152 Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Bayezid II, Ottoman Sultan, 98 Bayle, Pierre, 158 Beginning of Infinity, The (Deutsch), 332 Behavioural Immune System, 222 Beirut, Lebanon, 236 benefit–cost ratio, 60, 61, 62 Berges, Aida, 80 Bering land bridge, 76 Berkeley, see University of California, Berkeley Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 10, 340, 341, 363, 364 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 307–8 Bernstein, William, 42 Berossus, 267 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 243 Beveridge, William, 59 Béziers, France, 94 Bezos, Jeffrey, 274, 275–6, 277 Bi Sheng, 171 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50, 296 bicycles, 297 de Biencourt, Charles, 189 Big Five personality traits, 7 Black Death (1346–53), 77, 139, 208, 356, 352, 356 Blade Runner, 334 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 124–6 Blue Ghosts, 236 Bohr, Niels, 105 Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), 307 bonobos, 226–7 Book of Jonah, 248–50 Borjas, George, 116 Boston, Massachusetts, 122, 223 Boudreaux, Donald, 62, 270 Boulton, Matthew, 194 Bowles, Samuel, 216 Boym, Svetlana, 288 Brandt, Willy, 364 Brewer, Marilynn, 247 Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 Brezhnev, Leonid, 315 Britain, 169, 181–99 Acts of Union (1707), 101, 194 Afghanistan War (2001–14), 345 Amherst Mission (1816), 176–7 anti-Semitism in, 254 arts, 198 Bletchley Park, 124–6 Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 Cheddar Man, 74 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty (1860), 53–4 coffee houses, 166 colonies, 84, 191, 194, 200 Corn Laws repeal (1846), 53, 191 creative destruction in, 179 crime in, 119, 120 Dutch War (1672–4), 101 English Civil War (1642–1651), 148, 183, 184, 201 Glorious Revolution (1688), 101, 185–8, 190, 193 hair powder tax (1795), 72 immigration in, 113, 115, 118, 119, 120, 193–4 Industrial Revolution, 188–99, 202 innovation in, 53, 189–90 Internet, development of, 307–8 Iraq War (2003–11), 345 Levellers, 183–4, 186 literacy in, 188, 198 literature, 188–9 London Bridge stabbings (2019), 120 London 7/7 bombings (2005), 341 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Magna Carta (1215), 5 monopolies, 182 MPs’ expenses scandal (2009), 345 Muslim community, 113 Navigation Acts, 192 nostalgia in, 294 open society, 169, 181–2, 195–9 patent system, 189–90, 203, 314 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 208 political tribalism in, 238, 240–41 poverty in, 256 railways in, 297 Royal Society, 156, 157, 158, 196, 296 ruin follies, 286–7 slavery, abolition of (1807), 182, 205 smuggling in, 192 Statute of Labourers (1351), 208 United States, migration to, 104 West Africa Squadron, 205 Whig Party, 185, 201 World War II (1939–45), 124–6 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 135 Bronze Age (c. 3300–600 BC) Late Bronze-Age Collapse (1200–1150 BC), 44, 49, 54 migration to Europe, 74–5 Phoenician civilization, 43–6, 49, 70 Sumerian civilization, 42–3 Brotherton, Rob, 322 Brown, Donald, 219, 283 Bruges, Flanders, 208 Bruno, Giordano, 150 Bryn Mawr College, 201 Buddhism, 96, 149, 352 Bulgaria, 73, 342 Bureau of Labor Statistics, US, 65 Burke, Edmund, 152, 292 Bush, George Walker, 328 ByteDance, 318 Byzantine Empire (395–1453), 94, 134, 135, 155, 224 California Gold Rush (1848–1855), 104 Calvin, John, 149 Calvinism, 6, 99, 153, 356 Canada, 235, 258 Caplan, Bryan, 258 Caracalla, Roman Emperor, 91 Carbon Engineering, 332 Cardwell, Donald, 10 Cardwell’s Law, 10 Carlson, Tucker, 82, 302 Carlyle, Thomas, 206 Carthage (814–146 BC), 45 Caspian Sea, 75 Cathars, 94, 142 Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 154 Catholicism, 208 in Britain, 101, 185–6, 191 Crusades, 94, 138 in Dutch Republic, 99 exiles and, 153 in France, 154 Jews, persecution of, 97–8, 100, 106, 140, 233 Inquisition, 94, 97, 98, 100, 143, 150 in Italy, 6, 169 Muslims, persecution of, 97, 106, 233 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178, 237 in Rwanda, 230–31 in United States, 102, 104, 108, 254 values and, 114 Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), 201 Celts, 89, 289 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 313 Ceres, 89 Cerf, Vinton, 307 CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire), 306, 307 chariot racing, 224 Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 148, 179, 183 Chávez, Hugo, 354 Chechen War, Second (1999–2009), 354 Cheddar Man, 74 cheongsam dresses, 73 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 286, 300 Chicago principles, 164–5 Chicago, Illinois, 202 child mortality, 168–9 Child, Josiah, 184 children, 26 chimpanzees, 24, 25, 32, 36, 226–7, 228 China, 4, 5, 6, 13, 84, 270, 314–18 Amherst Mission (1816), 176–7 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63), 352 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 authoritarianism, 4, 162–3, 175, 318, 325, 343 budget deficits, 60 cheongsam dresses, 73 Confucianism, 129, 149, 169, 176 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 4, 11–12, 162–3 Cultural Revolution (1966–76), 355 dictatorships, support for, 367 dynamism in, 315–18 ethnic groups in, 84 Great Wall, 178 industrialization 169, 172–3, 207 intellectual property in, 58 kimonos, 73 literacy in, 148 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 54, 148, 175, 177–8, 179, 215 national stereotypes, 235, 236 overcapacity in, 317 paper, invention of, 136 private farming initiative (1978), 315–16 productivity in, 317 poverty in, 273, 316 Qing dynasty (1644–1912), 148, 149, 151, 153, 175–7, 179, 353 Reform and Opening-up (1979–), 4, 53, 56, 315–16 SARS outbreak (2002), 162 science in, 4, 13, 70, 153, 156, 162–3, 169–73, 269 Silk Road, 171, 174, 352 Song dynasty (960–1279), 53, 169–75 state capitalism in, 316–17 Tang dynasty (618–907), 84, 170, 177, 352 Taoism, 129, 149 trade barriers, 59 United States, migration to, 104, 109, 254 United States, trade with, 19, 57, 58–9, 62–3, 64 WTO accession (2001), 63 Yuan Empire (1271–1368), 174–5 Zheng He’s voyages (1405–33), 177–8 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 254 Christensen, Clayton, 305 Christianity, 46, 70, 96, 129 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50, 296 in Britain, 101 Calvinism, 6, 99, 149, 153, 356 Cathars, 94, 142 clash of civilizations narrative, 237 Crusades, 94, 138 Catholicism, see Catholicism Dominican order, 356 in Dutch Republic, 99 economic hardship and, 359 fundamentalism, 133–5, 149 Great Awakening (1730–55), 102 Great Vanishing, 134–5 Inquisition, 97, 98, 100 Jews, persecution of, 95, 96, 97 Lutheranism, 99, 356 in Mongol Empire, 96 Old Testament, 46, 72 orthodox backlash, 149–50 Orthodox Church, 155 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178, 233 Protestantism, 99, 104, 148, 149, 153, 169, 178 Puritanism, 99, 102 Rastafari and, 72 Reformation, 148, 155 in Roman Empire, 90, 93–4 science and, 133–5, 141–6, 149–50 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 97 tribalism and, 230–31, 246 zero-sum relationships and, 248–50 Chua, Amy, 84 Cicero, 141 Cilician, Gates, 42 cities, 40, 79, 140 division of labour in, 40 immigration and, 114, 250 innovation and, 40, 53, 79, 140, 145, 172, 287 liberalism and, 339 Mesopotamia, 37–43 open-mindedness and, 35 productivity and, 40, 98 tradition and, 287, 291 turtle theory and, 121–2 civic nationalism, 377–8 civil society, 6, 199, 253, 358, 363 clash of civilizations narrative, 237, 362–3, 365–6 ‘Clash of Civilizations?’ (Huntington), 362–3, 365–6 classical liberalism, 185, 205, 214 Claudius, Roman Emperor, 90, 92 climate change, 75, 323, 325, 326–34 Clinton, Hillary, 238 Clouds, The (Aristophanes), 129 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty (1860), 53–4 coffee houses, 166 cognitive dissonance, 127 Cohen, Floris, 150 Colombia, 120 colonialism, 214, 232, 256 Britain, 84, 191, 194, 200 Dutch Republic, 100 Portugal, 100, 146–7, 178 Spain, 147, 178, 182 Columbia University, 223 Columbus, Christopher, 77, 177, 178, 305 Comenius, John, 152 command economies, 43, 315 communism, 54, 56, 215, 302–5, 314–18 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 33 compensatory control, 322–3 competition, 60 benefit–cost ratio and, 62 creative destruction and, 57, 190 Great Depression and, 54 guilds and, 190 immigration and, 117 Rust Belt and, 64, 65–6 competitive advantage, 28–9 computers, 302–14 automation, 63, 312–13 Internet, 57, 275, 278, 306–11, 312 confirmation bias, 127, 160, 161 Confucianism, 129, 149, 169, 176 Congo, 365 conquistadores, 77 conservatism, 334–40 authoritarianism and, 345 disgust and, 335, 336 dynamism and, 286, 300–302, 312, 326 economic, 185, 336 security and, 334–40, 378 superpowers study, 338–9 conspiracy theories, 322–3, 324 Constantine, Roman Emperor, 133–4 Constantinople, 92, 94, 224 contact hypothesis, 244–5 Conway, Kellyanne, 108 Coontz, Stephanie, 199 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, 185 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 146, 150, 332 copper, 42 Cordoba, Spain, 137–9 Corn Laws, 53, 191 corn-based ethanol, 328, 329 coronavirus, 3, 4, 10–11, 162–3, 293, 312 corruption, 317, 345, 381 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 3, 4, 10–12, 162–3, 312 cowboys, 73 Cowen, Tyler, 257 Coxe, Tench, 103 creative destruction, 57, 179, 182, 190, 270, 339 automation, 63, 312–13 nostalgia and, 296–9, 313 Schumpeterian profits, 273–4 Crete, 89 crime, 110, 119–20, 346, 377 Crisis and Leviathan (Higgs), 337 Criswell King, Jeron, 255–6 Croats, 72 Cromwell, Oliver, 183 Crone, Patricia, 207 crony capitalism, 279–80 Crusades, 94, 138 cults, 244 culture appropriation, 71–2 borrowing, 70–73 evolution, 26–30 immigration and, 69–73, 116, 119, 120–23 ‘purity’ of, 69, 70, 71, 352 Cyrus II ‘the Great’, King of Persia, 86–7, 249 Daily Mail, 119 Dalberg-Acton, John, 1st Baron Acton, 140, 180 Dalton, John, 196 Danube (Magris), 219 Danube river, 93 Darfur, 365 Darius I ‘the Great’, Persian Emperor, 86 Dark Ages, 5, 50, 140, 215 Darkening Age, The (Nixey), 134 Darwin, Charles, 24, 28, 162, 227 Davies, Stephen, 170 death penalty, 349 Defense Science Board, US, 313 Defoe, Daniel, 195 deindustrialization, 62 demagogues, 15, 217, 353–4, 360 dementia, 289 democracy, 205, 321, 357, 363, 378–82 authoritarianism and, 357 deliberative, 378–9 environment and, 327 in Greece, 5 Muslims and, 112, 113 populism and, 325 representative, 378 in United States, 200 Democratic Party, 164, 224–5, 238, 302, 349 Deng Xiaoping, 316, 317 Denisovans, 75 Department of Defense, US, 306, 313 Depeche Mode, 245, 295 Descartes, René, 100, 149, 153 Désert de Retz, France, 287 Deutsch, David, 261, 332 Diamond, Jared, 41 Diana, 89 Dickens, Charles, 197, 206 dictator game, 35 Diderot, Denis, 154 Dilmun, 42 disasters, 338 disease, 77–9, 128, 213, 293 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 Behavioural Immune System, 222 Black Death (1346–53), 77, 139, 356 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 3, 4, 10–12, 162–3, 312 Plague of Justinian (541–750), 77 Spanish flu (1918–19), 77 disgust, 222, 336–7, 371 ‘dismal science’, 206 Disraeli, Benjamin, 254 diversity, 83–4, 121–2 empires and, 84–106 problem solving and, 83 turtle theory, 121–2 division of labour, 28, 31–2, 40, 57, 117, 168 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 8, 73–4, 75, 76 Doctor Who, 135 Doggerland, 74 Dollond, John, 158–9 Dominicans, 144 dreadlocks, 72 dung beetles, 284–5 Dunn, Kris, 357 Dutch East India Company, 100 Dutch Republic (1581–1795), 6, 53, 84, 99–101, 147, 184, 208 Calvinism, 149 colonies, 100 exiles in, 99, 152, 153, 158, 185, 186 Glorious Revolution (1688), 101, 185–8, 190, 193 Jewish community, 100, 150 multi-shuttle ribbon frame in, 180 Dutch Revolt (1568–1648), 98–9, 101, 208 dynamism, 301–2, 312, 318, 330 Eagles and Rattlers, 218–19, 236, 243, 252 East River Rift Valley, 24 Eastern Europe, 114, 115 Eastern Roman Empire (395–1453), see Byzantine Empire Ebola virus, 293 economies of scale, 42 Economist, The, 118, 279, 318 economy and nativism, 349–51 efflorescences, 5, 6, 10 Egypt, ancient, 43, 45, 70, 87, 88, 89, 128 Ehrlich, Paul, 160 Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, The (Robbins), 201 Eighty Years War (1566–1648), 101 Einstein, Albert, 105 electricity, 297 Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland, 179, 237, 277 Eller, Martin, 306 Elusians, 89 Elvin, Mark, 173 empathy, 219, 224 Encyclopédie, 154 ‘End of History?’

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)
by Douglas R. Dechow
Published 2 Jul 2015

Depending on what someone builds into a ZigZag data space, you could wander along many multisensory paths, taking unexpected turns down the dimensions of color then branching off into textures or shapes, or from a sound to a flavor… Maybe multivoice music-like counterpoint could also be explored in the paths through ZigZag’s spaces, with cognitive dissonance resolving to cognitive harmony—or whatever. I could see my Music Mouse software running around inside a ZigZag space. Transpublishing and the way linking would have been done were Ted to have designed the Web, these deserve much more thought than they’re getting. One of the great deficits of the existing public web, with its one way links is that there is no way to trace anything back to its origin, no provenance.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

Facebook is a private corporation; the social graph that Zuckerberg celebrates is a proprietary technology, an asset owned by the shareholders of Facebook itself. And as far as corporations go, Facebook is astonishingly top-heavy: the S-1 revealed that Zuckerberg personally controls 57 percent of Facebook’s voting stock, giving him control over the company’s destiny that far exceeds anything Bill Gates or Steve Jobs ever had. The cognitive dissonance could drown out a Sonic Youth concert: Facebook believes in peer-to-peer networks for the world, but within its own walls, the company prefers top-down control centralized in a charismatic leader. If Facebook is any indication, it would seem that top-down control is a habit that will be hard to shake.

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments
by Michael Batnick
Published 21 May 2018

The world is always changing, but our views usually don't evolve alongside it. Even when we're presented with evidence that disconfirms our previous views, straying far from our original feelings is too painful for most to bear. This is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of our DNA that there is a name for this natural mental malfunction; it's called cognitive dissonance. For example, ask anybody if they have the ability to predict the future. They might look at you funny, and say, “Are you asking me if I have a crystal ball? No, I do not.” Okay then, do you select individual stocks. And do you regularly buy and sell them, in anticipation that their future price will be higher or lower?

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

When the flying saucers and ensuing apocalypse failed to appear on the appointed date, the cult’s believers did not lose faith. On the contrary, the experience bolstered their beliefs, annealing them into an intimate confederacy of false belief. Vestiges of the cult persist even to this day. This study would lay the groundwork for Festinger’s theory of “cognitive dissonance”: the mental stress people suffer when presented with realities contrary to their deeply held beliefs. The key takeaway is that humans naturally avoid this discomfort, skirting situations that aggravate it, or ignoring data that make their mental contradiction more apparent. Note: The purpose of the following exposition is not a neener-neener troll of Facebook, reveling in an embarrassing fiasco for the sadistic glee of it.

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See also Internet advertising; marketing brand, 39–40 budgets, 461 business model, 191, 325 direct-mail, 381, 385–86, 391 direct-response, 362–63 display, 154 fuzzy world, 388 immature markets, 318 as inducement, 450 investors, 83 Jobs and, 485 mathematics for, 28 as name-calling, 380–81 newspaper, 36–37 ROAS, 81 truth in, 54 Zuckerberg knowledge, 393–94 AdWords, 106, 186, 222, 286, 300, 364 Airbnb for cars, 241 founders, 78 Internet advertising, 25 logo, 124 success, 50 taking off, 198 as visionary, 164 alpha products, 44 Altman, Sam, 160–62, 178 Amazon Amazon Web Services, 103, 155, 233 meeting with A9 team, 429–30 mobile commerce, 484 scheming, 382 shopping cart, 328 AmEx, 301 Amit, Alon, 217 analytics software, 448 Andreessen, Marc, 25, 47 Andretti, Mario, 94 Android phones, 198, 282 angel investors, 110–13, 115, 117, 154, 206 Animal House, 399 antibiotics, 293 Apple Apple OS X, 47 joining, 346 platform control, 485 product launches, 365 scheming, 382 application programming interface (API), 186 aQuantive, 454 Arjay Miller Scholar, 110 Association for Computing Machinery, 368 Atari, 124, 149 Atlas, 383, 453–55 AT&T, 315, 324 Audience Network (AN), 486 August Capital, 154, 156, 159 Ayala, 496 Badros, Greg, 3, 410, 454, 457 Bain, Adam, 184, 188–90, 203, 478–79, 494 Baker Scholar, 110 Bakshy, Eytan, 368 bar-code reading, 51 batch, 105 Battles, Matt, 430 Beacon, 335 bedroom communities, 338 beer and diapers, 363 Beltway Boomers, 385 Belushi, John, 399 Best Buy, 328 best effort, 418 beta products, 44 Bezos, Jeff, 428 Big Brother, 384, 402 Bin Laden, Osama, 384 birth, 59–60 black-hat hackers, 314 Blackwell, Trevor, 60 Bluebeard (Vonnegut), 43 BMW, 31, 39, 130, 218, 265, 372 Boland, Brian, 382, 398 digital marketing and, 389 first meeting, 3–4 in great debate, 459–61 on integration, 443 middle manager, 463–64 reporting to, 277 seducing, 408 slides, 7–8 Sponsored Stories and, 371 stripping of duties, 452 Bolshevism, 356 Bond, Jon, 173 boot camp, 269 Bosworth, Andrew (“Boz”), 2, 444–46, 457–60, 473–74 Boyd, John, 436, 437 The Boy Kings (Losse), 445 brand advertising, 39–40 Brazil, 377–78 Brazil, Alan, 22–23 British Trader babies, 58–59, 170, 304–5 child support to, 306–7 family, 84 meeting, 54–56 relationship, 165, 168, 245 separating, 169–70, 303 Brogramming, 400 Bronson, Po, 308 Brown, Bonnie, 357 bugs, 269 Bulfinch, Thomas, 447 bumping phones, 218 Burberry, 39, 362, 372 Burke, Galyn, 349 Bushnell, Nolan, 149–50 business development, 429–30, 464, 494 Business Insider, 101 Campbell, Joseph, 259 Candy Crush, 383, 384 cap, 114–17 capitalism beef with, 411–12 extremes, 355–56 marching onward, 22 Silicon Valley, 74 spectacle, 181 speed of, 25 victorious, 124 wheels of, 36 work of, 23 Car and Driver, 261 Carrey, Jim, 424 Carthago delenda est, 288–90, 428, 492–93 Casablanca, 418 Castro, Fidel, 65, 354, 456 Cato the Elder, 289 Century 21, 21 channeling, 360 chaos monkey, 103 character development, 190 Charles River Ventures, 126–27 China, 374–75 Choe, David, 333 Chrome, 484 Chrysler, 349 Church of Latter Day Saints, 356 Churchill, Winston, 167, 411 Citibank, 57 CityVille, 228 class-action lawsuits, 81 Clavier, Jean-François (“Jeff”), 160 Clickable, 83 clickbait-y publishing, 81, 101 clickthrough rates, 309, 368, 450–51, 487 clown car, 428–29 Clune, David, 312 Coca-Cola, 311 Coelius, Zach, 396–99 cognitive dissonance, 361 Cole, Rodger, 132–34, 138 Comcast Ventures, 105 common investors, 397 communism, 355–56 company culture, 74 company-wide Q&A, 348–49 conference names, 311 connected world, 285 consultancy firms, 70 consumption patterns, 385, 412 conversion data, 318 turning data into cash, 274 tracking software, 222 Conway, Ron, 98 cookies data, 392 dropping, 387 pool, 484 reading, 6, 387 retargeting, 381–82 corporate culture, 88, 262, 332, 335, 464 corporate development, 97, 180, 209, 254, 256, 494 corporate mergers, 341 cost per mille (CPM), 275, 348, 386, 424, 486 countdown clock, 347 Country Casuals, 385 Coupa Cafe, 84 Cox, Chris, 278, 356 leadership, 410 at on-boarding, 260–64 Craigslist, 52, 54, 99 The Creamery, 229 credit derivatives, 20, 26–27 credit-default swap (CDS), 19–20 Crowe, Russell, 202 CrunchBase, 43 Crusades, 356 Cuba, 227–28, 354–55 culture company, 74 corporate, 88, 262, 332, 335, 464 cultural fit, 220 engineering, 285 Facebook, 268–69, 334–35, 345 hacker, 284 Silicon Valley engineering-first, 262, 283 tech companies’ cultural fit, 220 Cureton, Aileen, 331 Custom Audiences (CA) data matching, 452, 465 expanded version, 440 FBX versus, 439, 459–62 impact, 482 introduction, 388 losing as product, 452 open plan and, 442–43 as vulture, 401–2 working of, 394–95 customer acquisition cost (CAC), 486–87 customer relations management (CRM), 384–85 cyclists, 338 cynicism, 264 DabbleDB, 236–37 Dalal, Yogen, 154, 162–63 Daniel, Rob, 391 data conversion, 318 cookies, 392 turning data into cash, 274 data-per-pixel, 274 Facebook buying, 328 geographic, 301 Irish Data Privacy Audit, 278, 320–23 joining, 465 matching, 452, 465 mobile, 382, 477, 484, 486 on-boarding, 386–87 real-time synchronization, 38 sprawl, 321 targeting, 318, 485 third-party, 390, 423, 440, 484 velocity, 319 data protection agency (DPA), 320 Datalogix, 386, 388 Debord, Guy, 32, 353 defection, 255 Deloitte, 70 demand-side platform (DSP), 396, 423–24 democracy digital, 326–27 form of government, 411 Dempster, Mark, 122–23 derivatives, 19–20, 24 Derman, Emanuel, 16 desengaño, 239 Deutsche Bank, 57 development AdGrok, 234 business, 429–30, 464, 494 character, 190 corporate, 97, 180, 209, 254, 256, 494 costs, 487 defined, 95 dev team, 234–35 environment, 270 mobile, 79 product, 47, 94, 191, 220, 334, 370, 389 software, 455 technical, 156 technology, 294 tools, 336 Dhawan, Rohit, 217 DiggBar, 85 digital advertising, 448 digital democracy, 326–27 digital marketing, 388–89 digital monetization, 184 Direct Marketing News, 173 direct response (DR), 39 direct-mail advertising, 381, 385–86, 391 direct-response advertising, 362–63 Disk Operating System (DOS), 149 Dixon, Chris, 101–2 Docker, 119 dogfooding, 43 dominoes, 227 Dorsey, Jack, 177, 464, 490 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 190, 291 DotCloud, 119 Dove, 496 Dr.

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune
by Alexander Stille
Published 19 Jun 2023

It was the first time he became aware of a part of his brain that was filtering out things coming from the group’s leaders that were exaggerated, wrong, or flat-out crazy. “So even though I stayed in the group, I kept this little space in the back of my head, thinking I’ve got to live with these fallacies.” Meshnick began to experience what is known in psychology as “cognitive dissonance,” when your thoughts and actions are out of alignment, or your idea of yourself is at odds with certain facts in your life. He had to reconcile the seeming contradiction between being a rigorous scientist and obeying the dictates of people whose views he had begun to doubt. But many members had learned to distrust authority because of the Vietnam War, during which the government frequently misled the public.

…

And I wanted the best for them, and that’s really what I thought I was doing.” Jody said that she tries—and somehow manages—to live with a set of deep contradictions, to face honestly the harm she did to her children without tormenting herself while continuing to live her life. “I have to live with both of those things in me … In terms of cognitive dissonance, you’re not supposed to be able to tolerate that, but I can. I’ve forgiven myself, and I understand why it happened. But there’s nothing I can do about it other than to live my life now. Maybe I compartmentalize and refuse to think about things at times, but I’m not unhappy.” When I first spoke with Jody C. on the phone, I was searching for a word with which to characterize her therapy.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

It’s true that people can cling to beliefs in defiance of all evidence, like Lucy in Peanuts who insisted that snow comes out of the ground and rises into the sky even as she was being slowly buried in a snowfall. But there are limits as to how high the snow can pile up. When people are first confronted with information that contradicts a staked-out position, they become even more committed to it, as we’d expect from the theories of identity-protective cognition, motivated reasoning, and cognitive dissonance reduction. Feeling their identity threatened, belief holders double down and muster more ammunition to fend off the challenge. But since another part of the human mind keeps a person in touch with reality, as the counterevidence piles up the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the affective tipping point.80 The tipping point depends on the balance between how badly the opinion holder’s reputation would be damaged by relinquishing the opinion and whether the counterevidence is so blatant and public as to be common knowledge: a naked emperor, an elephant in the room.81 As we saw in chapter 10, that is starting to happen with public opinion on climate change.

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See Enlightenment, the Clemenceau, Georges, 341 climate change, 136–54 carbon capture and storage, 150–51 carbon taxes, 139, 145–6, 149 climate justice movement, 138–9, 141–2 cognitive impediments to understanding, 140 decarbonization, 142–6, 143–4, 150–52 denial of, 137, 138, 139, 357 depoliticizing the discourse of, 382 geoengineering solutions, 150–51, 152–4, 382–3 nuclear power and, 144–5, 146–50, 465n76 Paris agreement, 134, 152, 335, 449 religious Cornwall Declaration on, 287 scientific literacy on, 356–7 spokespeople for, 382 Trump and, 335 Clinton, Bill, 67, 294, 449 Clinton, Hillary, presidential campaign of analysis of voting patterns, 339, 438 conspiracy theories and, 358, 449 loss of, 214, 215 media and, 343, 449 popular vote won by, 214, 334, 338 theoconservatives and, 449 Clockwork Orange, A (film), 175 clothing affordable, 80, 94, 117, 118 globalization and, 118, 462n63 coal carbon-to-hydrogen ratio of, 143, 144, 465n67 cooking with, 183 gasification conversion to liquid fuel, 151 as replacing nuclear power plants, 147 See also climate change; energy; petroleum Coal Miner’s Daughter (film), 113 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire (1942), 183 cognition combinatorial/recursive power of, 27 evolution of, not adapted to modernity, 25 language and, 27 See also abstract thinking; cognitive biases; Flynn effect; identity-protective cognition; intelligence cognitive behavioral therapy, 175, 282 cognitive biases, 25–6, 353, 354–5, 403–4 adulthood mistaken for harsher world, 48 autobiographical memory and, 48, 281 bias bias of researchers, 361–3, 374 biased evaluation, 359 cognitive dissonance reduction, 377 confirmation biases, 369, 378 critical thinking courses, 377–8 debiasing programs, 378–9 decline in self mistaken for decline in times, 48 historical lag in recognizing, 383 Illusion of Explanatory Depth, 379–80 information sought to reinforce identity, 360 intuition outperformed by formulas, 403–4 motivated reasoning, 359, 377 My-Side bias, 359 Negativity bias, 47–8, 293 Optimism Gap, 40, 115, 225–6, 268 Rationality Community avoiding, 381 science as helping to overcome, 403 thinking in scale and in orders of change, 140 See also Availability heuristic; identity-protective cognition cognitive psychology and human irrationality, 351, 353 and literary scholarship, 407 Cohen, Leonard, 183 Cohen, Roger, 420 cohort (generational) effects depression, 280–81, 282, 283, 476n74 emancipative values, 225–8, 226, 227 happiness, 273–4 liberalism, 216–17 populist support, 341–2, 342 religious belief, 437–8 social support, 275 suicide, 279–80 voting patterns, 342 See also age (life cycle) effects; Baby Boomers; Generation X; GI Generation; Millennials; period (zeitgeist) effects; Silent Generation Cold War autocratic governments propped up during, 91 civil wars during, 91, 158–60, 164 Colombian peace agreement and end of, 158 end of, and alleviation of poverty, 91 famine and, 78 New Peace following, 43 terrorism declining in period following, 195 See also nuclear war Collier, Paul, 91 Colombia, 71, 71, 158, 172 colonial governments and conquest, 163–4 famine exacerbated by, 78, 459n35 See also imperialism; postcolonial governments commerce, 12–13 bourgeois virtue, development of, 84–5 cronyism, 83 institutions facilitating, 83–4 open economies, 83–4, 90–91 sectarian hatreds ameliorated by, 84 See also trade —GENTLE COMMERCE, 13, 84, 162, 198–9, 228 American founders and, 13 and violent crime, historical reduction of, 168–9 communality, as scientific virtue, xvii–xviii communism collapse of, and escape from poverty, 90–91 democratic second wave pushed back by, 200 as failing to promote human flourishing, 364 famine exacerbated by, 78, 459n36 opposition to religion, 430, 436, 438 “primitive,” 102–3 quality of life and, 247, 248 romantic heroism and, 31, 165, 445 “scientific racism” and, 398 See also Marxism; Marxist guerrillas and terrorists Compstat program, 380 computation and consciousness, 426 and knowledge, 21 computers, delayed productivity growth from, 330.

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See food and food security; poverty hunter-gatherer peoples child mortality in, 55 diet of, 23 and egalitarianism vs. inequality, 102–3 life expectancy of, 53–4, 58, 457n4 persistence hunting, 353–4 reason and, 353–4 scientific skepticism among, 354 violence among, 199, 470n1 See also Hadza people; San people Huntington, Samuel, 200 Hussein, Leyla, 442–3 Hussein, Saddam, 199, 291, 366, 447 Hutu people, 161 Huxley, Aldous, 418 Ibsen, Henrik, 284 Iceland, 171, 475n30 ideas democracy as, 206 as historical forces, 347, 349–50, 405, 443, 448 and infectious disease improvement, 67 language and communication of, 27 as patterns in matter, 22 identity politics, 31, 342, 375 identity-protective cognition blue lies and, 358–9 cognitive dissonance and, 377 institutions of reason as mitigating, 27–8, 376–7 media and intellectuals and, 366–7 and politics as predicting scientific belief, 356–8 rationalization vs. reason and, 359 scientific literacy as no cure for, 403 and Tragedy of the Belief Commons, 358 unappreciated, 379, 383 See also cognitive biases Illusion of Explanatory Depth, 379–80 immigrants and immigration cuisines introduced by, 259–60 literature written by, 284 social spending and, 110 Trump and, 335, 336 immortality, 60–61 imperialism blamed on science, 34, 388, 399 Muslim countries and, 439 See also colonial governments income, 85–7, 86, 95–6 and class distribution, 114–15 disposable (after taxes and transfers) vs. market, 115–16, 116, 118, 254–5, 254 global distribution of, 111 after Great Recession, 115 happiness as increasing with, 268–71, 269 universal basic income, 119 India agriculture in, 76 Axial Age and, 23 calories available per person in, 70, 70 carbon emissions of, 143, 143–4 civil wars in, 160 colonial government of, 78 democratization and, 200, 203 education in, 238 equal rights, moderate support for, 222 escape from poverty of, 85, 86, 90 famine in, 69, 72, 78 GDP of, 85 globalization and, 111 industrialization and women in the workforce, 94 liberalization of economy, 90 liberal Muslim rule of 16th century, 442 nuclear power and, 150 nuclear weapons and, 307–8, 317, 318 partition of, 49, 160 per capita income of, 86 as permit bureaucracy (“license raj”), 90 population-control program of, 74 poverty in, 89 refugees and displaced persons, 160 secularization and, 436 social spending in, 109 and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 419 women’s rights and, 222 indigenous peoples, 123, 199.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

‘The spot-the-difference politicians. Desperate to fight the middle ground, but can’t even find it. Focus groupies. The triangulators. The dog whistlers. The politicians who daren’t say what they really mean.’30 Britain’s London-centric elites got into the habit of compartmentalising signs of a backlash. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. Long before the 2016 referendum, there were plenty of signs that Britain’s malaise went far deeper than the antics of fringe activists. In the 2001 general election, British voter turnout fell to an historic low of just 59 per cent. This ought to have sounded alarms. Much of the drop was due to rising apathy among working-class voters, who felt Labour put more energy into promoting multiculturalism than to addressing their concerns.

Team Geek
by Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman
Published 6 Jul 2012

That is my career strategy. I discovered where I got this rebel streak from only very recently. I realized I inherited it from my dad, which was very strange to me because when I was growing up, I perceived my dad as an establishment figure, part of the very establishment I was rebelling against, so it was a severe cognitive dissonance for me to think of my dad as a rebel. But rebel he was. My dad started his career as a child laborer (yes, one of those millions of faceless children in developing countries you read about occasionally in National Geographic), but by mid-career, he rose up the ranks to become one of the most senior military officers in all of Singapore.

On Palestine
by Noam Chomsky , Ilan Pappé and Frank Barat
Published 18 Mar 2015

You thought that these were closed societies who would not know what is going on, so I hope this is going to change, but for us, we were like in a bubble, we did not know that there was a different existence; it was very difficult to get out of it. FB: I guess the older generation, your generation and Nurit’s, the amount of cognitive dissonance as well when you’ve believed in something so strongly all your life, even though the facts show after a while that you are wrong, it is so hard to accept that you were wrong for, let’s say, thirty or forty years of your life. You see that all the time, at events when you always see the same people coming to every single Palestinian event, I always think, they know as much as I do about Palestine and they know the facts.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery
by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore
Published 18 Jun 2018

Worse, they insist on teams being able to deliver many pages of fiction about how certain they are about the assumptions they make for their project’s success. The truth is that many finance ministries or heads of finance would prefer to see a complete lie about the lifetime cost of a project than a relatively certain estimate of how much the next three months will cost – that is what their spreadsheet demands. This is cognitive dissonance operating on a grand scale. Unpicking all of this will take a long time. In the UK, it took more than a year to put in place a business case process more suited to agile projects than the Treasury’s waterfall-friendly Green Book guidance. As a digital team, your focus – beyond challenging and adapting default processes to stop them from breaking agile projects before they begin – is to help make sure that the people making investment decisions in your finance ministry or elsewhere are properly qualified to opine about technology.

The Gone Fishin' Portfolio: Get Wise, Get Wealthy...and Get on With Your Life
by Alexander Green
Published 15 Sep 2008

Shermer correctly points out, “Rationally, we should just compute the odds of succeeding from this point forward.” Yet investors who have sunk a lot into a stock—including a fair amount of ego—have trouble doing this. Mental accounting and the sunk-cost fallacy are just the tip of the iceberg. Shermer shows that consumers and investors also fall prey to cognitive dissonance, hindsight bias, self-justification, inattentional blindness, confirmation bias, the introspection illusion, the availability fallacy, self-serving bias, the representative fallacy, the law of small numbers, attribution bias, the low aversion effect, framing effects, the anchoring fallacy, the endowment effect, and blind spot bias.

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
by Richard Kluger
Published 1 Jan 1996

For youth or adult alike, the habit may serve to compensate for profound feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, or an abiding bitterness that stems from degraded social status, low occupational achievement, certifiable injustice, or paranoid delusion. Such victims of social pathology are suspected of smoking not in spite of the hazards associated with it but because of them. Even better-adjusted smokers, though, are susceptible to the perverse condition that behavioral specialists call “cognitive dissonance,” acting in direct and self-destructive contradiction of known truths or indisputable fact. And all smokers are gifted at rationalizing their habit. Many smokers, for example, readily acknowledge, even insist, that they are hopelessly hooked. But as addictions go, they may argue, it is pretty benign.

…

Their fears of withdrawal symptoms are surpassed in many cases, furthermore, by the dread of assault from life’s countless vicissitudes, which they have convinced themselves they could not cope with if denied a cigarette at the next stressful moment. Smokers are thus classic rationalizers and hiders from fact when unwelcome word arrives about the perils of the one thing they think lets them cope with life. They are the very model of the type described by Leon Festinger in his 1957 treatise, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance—people who act in ways that deny knowledge of the consequences of hurtful or self-destructive acts. Yet for all the conflict they endure over their dependency, most smokers deeply resent the ever more widely held suspicion by smoke-free society that they suffer from flawed characters or emotional instability because they persist in what they shouldn’t.

…

The antismoking commercials ordered by the FCC soon followed, and Tony often pointed them out to her. She remembered one that went, “Smoking—it’s a matter of life and breath,” and got lectured by her granddaughter, who told her, “Grandma, smoking kills.” Yet she kept on. Rose Cipollone, in short, had a textbook case of what academics termed “cognitive dissonance”. A pair of social psychologists, Harold Kasarjian and Joel Cohen, both of whom would testify in the Cipollone trial, had suggested in the autumn 1965 issue of California Management Review how smokers dwelled in a constant state of disequilibrium because their dependency conflicted with the human impulse to survive and continued “in the face of undeniable and overwhelming evidence that cancer is directly attributable” to smoking.

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

Anne Preston, “The Nonprofit Worker in a For-Profit World,” Journal of Labor Economics 7, no. 4 (1989): 438–463. Chapter 3: The IKEA Effect: Why We Overvalue What We Make Based on Gary Becker, Morris H. DeGroot, and Jacob Marschak, “An Experimental Study of Some Stochastic Models for Wagers,” Behavioral Science 8, no. 3 (1963): 199–201. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957). Nikolaus Franke, Martin Schreier, and Ulrike Kaiser, “The ‘I Designed It Myself’ Effect in Mass Customization,” Management Science 56, no. 1 (2009): 125–140. Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love,” manuscript, Harvard University, 2010.

…

They found that after giving a short lecture about the benefits of a certain drug, the speaker would begin to believe his own words and soon prescribe accordingly. Psychological studies show that we quickly and easily start believing whatever comes out of our own mouths, even when the original reason for expressing the opinion is no longer relevant (in the doctors’ case, that they were paid to say it). This is cognitive dissonance at play; doctors reason that if they are telling others about a drug, it must be good—and so their own beliefs change to correspond to their speech, and they start prescribing accordingly. The reps told us that they employed other tricks too, turning into chameleons—switching various accents, personalities, and political affiliations on and off.

…

Abagnale, Frank, 173 academia: conflicts of interest in, 82, 84–85 financial services industry’s influence in, 84–85 group-based projects in, 217–18 pharmaceutical companies’ influence in, 82 academic credentials, misrepresentation of, 135–36, 153, 154 accounting firms: collaborative dishonesty in, 218–21 “in good faith” notion and, 219–20 Adam and Eve, 98 Adams, Mike, 107 advertising agencies, link between creativity and dishonesty in, 186–87 aesthetic preferences, impact of favors on, 75–77 Afghanistan War, 152 altruistic cheating, 222–23, 225–26, 232 supervisory effect and, 227–28 American Medical Association, 79 Amir, On, 15, 18, 31–32, 39, 262 Apple, 184 atheists, swearing on bible and, 40, 41, 42 Atlantic, 214–15 Austen, Jane, 154–55 Avnaim-Pesso, Liora, 102 Ayal, Shahar, 197, 225, 263 bacterial infections, 192–93 Balleisen, Ed, 188 bankers, cheating among politicians vs., 243 banks: small misbehaviors of, 240 see also financial services industry Barkan, Racheli, 21, 23, 262 Barlow, John Perry, 1, 2 baseball, steroids in, 156 Bateson, Melissa, 224 Baumeister, Roy, 100, 104, 262–63 Baylor College of Medicine, 75–77 Bazerman, Max, 45, 260 Becker, Gary, 3–4, 14, 26 Be’er Sheva, Israel, farmer’s market in, 23–24 being caught, probability of, 4–5, 13, 14, 27 varying, in matrix task, 20–22 benevolent behavior, 23–24 Bible, as moral reminder, 40, 41, 42 billable hours, overstating of, 35–37 blind customers, benevolent behavior toward, 23–26 brain: higher connectivity in, 170 left-right split in, 164–65 of pathological liars, 169–70 Broken Windows Theory, 214–15, 249 businesspeople, self-monitoring of, 56–57 business schools, 248 group-based projects in, 217–18 cab drivers, benevolent behavior of, toward blind customer, 25–26 CAD/CAM equipment, in dentistry, 67–71 Cain, Daylian, 89 Canada, cheating in, 242 care for customers, in illegal businesses, 138–39 car mechanics, 93 Carnegie Mellon University, 197–207 car recommendation software, “fixing” answers in, 166–67 Cary, Apoth E., 246 cashless society, implications for dishonesty in, 34 Catch Me If You Can (Abagnale), 173 certificates for (false) achievements, 153–54 Chance, Zoë, 145, 264 charitable behavior, 23–24 cheating: aggressive cheaters and, 239 altruistic, 222–23, 225–26, 227–28, 232 being made blatantly aware of, 156–57 being watched and, 223–25, 227 collaborative, see collaborative cheating desire to benefit from, 12–14, 27, 29, 237 ego depletion, 104–6, 111–12 fake products’ impact on, 125–31 in golf, 55–65 honor codes and, 41–45 increasing creativity to increase level of, 184–87 as infection, 191–216; see also infectious nature of cheating infidelity and, 244–45 on IQ-like tests, self-deception and, 145–49, 151, 153–54, 156–57 reducing amount of, 39–51, 248–54 removing oneself from tempting situation and, 108–11 signing forms at top and, 46–51 Ten Commandments and, 39–40, 41, 44 what-the-hell effect and, 127–31, 136 see also dishonesty China, cheating in, 241–42 Chloé accessories, studies with, 123–34 Civil War veterans, 152 classes, infectious nature of cheating in, 195–97 Coca-Cola, stealing money vs., 32–33 cognitive dissonance, 81 cognitive load: ability to resist temptation and, 99–100 judges’ parole rulings and, 102–3 Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), 173–74 coin logic, 167–68 collaborative cheating, 217–35 altruism and, 222–23, 225–26, 227–28, 232 being watched or monitored and, 223–25, 227–28, 234–35 emphasis on working as group or team and, 217–18 infectious nature of cheating in relation to, 221–22 social utility and, 222–23 companies: being one step removed from money and, 34–37 irrationality of, 51 see also corporate dishonesty compliments, insincere, 159 conflicts of interest, 67–95, 238, 248 in academia, 82, 84–85 in dentistry, 67–71, 93, 94, 230 disclosure and, 88–92 dots task and, 129 eradication of, 92–95 exclusion of experimental data and, 86–88 expert witnesses and, 85–86 in financial services industry, 83–85, 93, 94 governmental lobbyists and, 77–78, 94 honesty threshold and, 130–31 inherent inclination to return favors and, 74–75 medical procedures and, 71–74, 92–94, 229 pharmaceutical companies’ influence in academia and, 82 pharma reps and, 78–82 what-the-hell effect and, 129–31 congressional staffers, cheating among, 243 Congress members, PAC money misused by, 208–10 contractors, 93 Conway, Alan, 150–51 Cooper, Cynthia, 215 Cornell University, 250–51 corpora callosa, 164–65 corporate dishonesty: cheating a little bit and, 239–40 Enron collapse and, 1–3, 192, 207, 215, 234 recent spread of, 192, 207–8 cost-benefit analysis, 4–5, 26–27, 237, 239 infectious nature of cheating and, 201–3, 205 see also Simple Model of Rational Crime counterfeits, see fake products creativity, 88, 163–89, 238 brain structure and, 164–65 dark side of, 187–89 fooling oneself and, 165–67 increasing, to increase level of cheating, 184–87 infidelity and, 244 intelligence vs., as predictor of dishonesty, 172–77 link between dishonesty and, 170–72, 186–89 logical-sounding rationales for choices and, 163–64 measures of, 171 moral flexibility and, 186–87 pathological liars and, 168–70 revenge and, 177–84 credit card companies, 239–40 crime, reducing, 52 cultural differences, 240–43 Danziger, Shai, 102 decision making: creating efficient process for, 167–68 effectiveness of group work in, 217–18 rationalization process and, 163–67 Denfield, George, 75 dentists: continuity of care and, 228–31 treating patients using equipment that they own, 67–68, 93–94 unnecessary work and, 67–71 depletion, see ego depletion dieting, 98, 109, 112–13, 114–15 what-the-hell effect and, 127, 130 “dine-and-dash,” 79 diplomas, lying about, 135–36, 153, 154 disabled person, author’s adoption of role of, 143–44 disclosure, 88–92, 248 study on impact of, 89–92 discounting, fixed vs. probabilistic, 194 dishonesty: causes of, 3–4, 5 collaborative, see collaborative cheating cultural differences and, 240–43 discouraging small and ubiquitous forms of, 239–40 importance of first act of, 137 infectious nature of, 191–216; see also infectious nature of cheating intelligence vs. creativity as predictor of, 172–77 link between creativity and, 170–72, 186–89 opportunities for, passed up by vast majority, 238 of others, fake products and assessing of, 131–34 rational and irrational forces in, 254 reducing amount of, 39–51, 248–54 society’s means for dealing with, 4–5 summary of forces that shape (figure), 245 when traveling, 183n see also cheating dissertation proposals and defenses, 101 distance factors, 238 in golf, 58–59 stealing Coca-Cola vs. money and, 32–33 token experiment and, 33–34 doctors: consulting for or investing in drug companies, 82, 93 continuity of care and, 228–29 lecturing about drugs, 81 pharma reps and, 78–82 treating or testing patients with equipment that they own, 92–94 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 234 dots task: conflict of interest and, 129 description of, 127–29 link between creativity and dishonesty and, 171–72, 185–86 what-the-hell effect and, 129–31 downloads, illegal, 137–39 dressing above one’s station, 120–21 Ebbers, Bernie, 13 ego depletion, 100–116, 238, 249 basic idea behind, 101 cheating and, 104–6 in everyday life, 112–16 removing oneself from tempting situations and, 108–11, 115–16 of Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones, 103 sometimes succumbing to temptation and, 114–15 sudden deaths among students’ grandmothers at exam time and, 106–8 ego motivation, 27 England, cheating in, 242 Enron, 1–3, 192, 207, 215, 234 essay mills, 210–13 exams, sudden deaths among students’ grandmothers and, 106–8 exhaustion, 249 consumption of junk food and, 97–98 judges’ parole rulings and, 102–3 see also ego depletion experimental data, exclusion of, 86–88 expert witnesses, 85–86 explanations, logical-sounding, creation of, 163–65 external signaling, 120–22 dressing above one’s station and, 120–21 fake products and, 121–22 failures, tendency to turn blind eye to, 151 “fair,” determination of what is, 57 fake products, 119, 121–40, 238 illegal downloads and, 137–39 misrepresentation of academic credentials and, 135–36 rationalizations and, 134–35 self-signaling and, 123–26, 135 signaling value of authentic version diluted by, 121–22 suspiciousness of others and, 131–34 what-the-hell effect and, 127–31, 135 farmer’s market, benevolent behavior toward blind customer in, 23–24 fashion, 117–26 counterfeit goods and, 119, 121–22, 121–40, 123–26; see also fake products dressing above one’s station and, 120–21 external signaling and, 120–22 self-signaling and, 122–26 Fastow, Andrew, 2 favors, 74–82 aesthetic preferences and, 75–77 governmental lobbyists and, 77–78 inherent inclination to return, 74–75 pharma reps and, 78–82 see also conflicts of interest Fawal-Farah, Freeda, 117, 118 FBI, 215 Fedorikhin, Sasha, 99–100 Feynman, Richard, 165 financial crisis of 2008, 83–85, 192, 207, 234, 246–47 financial favors, aesthetic preferences and, 77 financial services industry: anonymous monitoring and, 234–35 cheating among politicians vs., 243 conflicts of interest in, 83–85, 93, 94 government regulation of, 234 fishing, lying about, 28 Frederick, Shane, 173 friends, invited to join in questionable behavior, 195 fudge factor theory, 27–29, 237 acceptable rate of lying and, 28–29, 91 distance between actions and money and, 34–37 getting people to cheat less and, 39–51 infidelity and, 244 rationalization of selfish desires and, 53 stealing Coca-Cola vs. money and, 32–33 Gazzaniga, Michael, 164–65 Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), 219–20 generous behavior, 23–24 Get Rich Cheating (Kreisler), 14 Gilovich, Tom, 250, 263–64 Gino, Francesca, 45, 104, 123, 127, 131, 145, 170, 184, 197, 225, 234–35, 242, 258–59 Glass, Ira, 6 Gneezy, Ayelet, 177, 257–58 golf, 55–65 cheating by “average golfer” vs. study participants and, 63–64 mistallying score in, 61–64 moving location of ball in, 58–59, 63 mulligans in, 60–61, 63–64 self-monitoring in, 56–57 survey on cheating in, 57–64 government regulations, 234 grandmothers, sudden deaths of, at exam time, 106–8 gray matter, 169–70 Green, Jennifer Wideman, 117 grocery shopping, ego depletion and, 109, 112–13 group or team work, 220–23 performance unaffected by, 233 possible benefits of, 223 predominance of, in professional lives, 217–18, 235 social utility and, 222–23 see also collaborative cheating Grüneisen, Aline, 210–11, 257 guilt, self-inflicted pain and, 250–52 Harford, Tim, 3–4 Harper’s Bazaar, 117–18 Harvard Medical School, 82 Harvey, Ann, 75 Henn, Steve, 209 heretics, external signaling of, 120 Hinduism, 25 honesty threshold, 130–31 honor codes, 41–45, 204 ideological organizations, 232n “I knew it all along” feeling, 149 illegal businesses, loyalty and care for customers in, 138–39 impulsive (or emotional) vs. rational (or deliberative) parts of ourselves, 97–106 cognitive load and, 99–100 ego depletion and, 100–106 exhaustion and, 97–98 Inbar, Yoel, 250, 264 infectious nature of cheating, 191–216, 249 bacterial infections compared to, 192–93 in class, 195–97 collaborative cheating in relation to, 221–22 Congress members’ misuse of PAC money and, 208–10 corporate dishonesty and, 192, 207–8 cost-benefit analysis and, 201–3, 205 essay mills and, 210–13 matrix task and, 197–204 positive side of moral contagion and, 215–16 regaining ethical health and, 214–15 slow and subtle process of accretion in, 193–94, 214–15 social norms and, 195, 201–3, 205–7, 209 social outsiders and, 205–7 vending machine experiment and, 194–95 infidelity, 244–45 “in good faith” notion, 219–20 Inside Job, 84–85 insurance claims, 49–51 intelligence: creativity vs., as predictor of dishonesty, 172–77 measures of, 173–75 IQ-like tests, cheating and self-deception on, 145–49 certificates emphasizing (false) achievement and, 153–54 increasing awareness of cheating and, 156–57 individuals’ tendency to turn a blind eye to their own failures and, 151 IRS, 47–49 Islam, 249 Israel, cheating in, 241 Italy, cheating in, 242 Jerome, Jerome K., 28 Jobs, Steve, 184 Jones, Bobby, 56 Jones, Marilee, 136 Judaism, 45, 249 judges, exhausted, parole decisions and, 102–3 junk food, exhaustion and consumption of, 97–98 Keiser, Kenneth, 135 Kelling, George, 214–15 John F.

In defense of food: an eater's manifesto
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Dec 2008

It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of our time as food scientists rush to microencapsulate fish and algae oil and blast it into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and pasta, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, spout fishy new health claims. (I hope you remember the relevant rule.) By now you’re probably feeling the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science-section reader as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few words of this book. Words I’m still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing, and will. But before I do, it’s important to understand how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
by Adam Lashinsky
Published 31 Mar 2017

Indeed, though Kalanick blanches at acknowledging any influences, obsessing over the “kerning” of a logo is exactly what Steve Jobs did at Apple. And he was revered for it. Kalanick never met Jobs, but everyone in Silicon Valley can recite the lines from the hymnal of how Jobs wouldn’t rest until every font, typeface, and finely beveled edge had reached perfection. The Apple CEO was a master at instilling cognitive dissonance, persuading customers to overlook (usually fixable) defects in his products as well as the troubling working conditions of the contractors who made them. Similarly, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gets away with jerking around just about everyone—suppliers, employees, shippers, other merchants—so long as he delivers the lowest prices to customers.

Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss
by Frances Stroh
Published 2 May 2016

Our family was like one of those hand-painted road signs that point in a multitude of directions at once: laziness and bad genes were the problem, according to my mother; according to my father and Whitney, Charlie himself was the problem; Charlie would have it that our father alone was the problem; while, according to Bobby and me, an unfortunate alchemy of both Charlie’s and our father’s problems was to blame. The cognitive dissonance between my parents’ versions of the story and ours simply could not be reconciled. I had written a paper to be presented on a panel at the gallery discussing my piece in purely conceptual terms, yet now I was unearthing a truth that could not be bound by any intellectual discussion. Looking at the piece as an outsider, I liked the tension of the raw emotional material pressing up against the cool, minimalist look I’d chosen—those six rectangular screens displaying enormous talking mouths—but these had nothing to do with me, with what went on inside of me when I myself watched the tapes: the horror, the shock of recognition.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
by Dave Rubin
Published 27 Apr 2020

In other words: when it’s convenient she’s black, female, and Muslim—all things that score big in the Oppression Olympics—yet, when the mask slips and her ideas require scrutiny, she’s immediately protected via the victimhood status that comes with those labels. It’s quite a brilliant strategy, actually. Play the victim card to attain power, then, once you have it, use it to shield yourself from legitimate criticism. This cognitive dissonance stems from one key truth about modern leftism: progressives see racism, sexism, and discrimination everywhere, except where it actually exists. That’s not to say America doesn’t have issues with prejudice and discrimination. Do white supremacists exist? Yes. Do black, Jew, and Hispanic haters exist?

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

There are understandable reasons for this. Value can be more precise than values. Value is easier to compare across contexts. There are many technological tools for measuring value (singular) and few for values (plural). The measured surpassed the not-measured. But when our only concept of value is financial, there’s cognitive dissonance between how people want to live and how our metrics want us to live. This is a dangerous misalignment. Remember, our main value metric (GDP) counts something as valuable only if money is spent on it. According to this logic, the only value that Google and Twitter add to the world are the ad units they sell.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

This, in turn, fires the mirror neurons in our brains, stimulating a positive feedback loop and releasing oxytocin—the bonding hormone—straight into our bloodstreams. On a Zoom call, much less a text message or Twitter comment, we can’t feel these subconsciously detected cues. Someone may say they agree with us, but we can’t confirm this assertion with our bodies. The mirror neurons don’t fire, the oxytocin doesn’t flow, and we’re left in a state of cognitive dissonance: they said they agree with me, but it doesn’t feel like it. Our bodies don’t know to blame this on the media environment. Instead, we blame it on the other person. They are not to be trusted. This sense of distrust and alienation then feeds back into the way we write our business plans and build our technologies.

The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Dec 2006

We add only the thinnest veneer of culture to these raw leaves, dressing them in oil and vinegar. Much virtue attaches to this kind of eating, for what do we regard as more wholesome than tucking into a pile of green leaves? The contrast of the simplicity of this sort of eating, with all its pastoral overtones, and the complexity of the industrial process behind it produced a certain cognitive dissonance in my refrigerated mind. I began to feel that I no longer understood what this word I'd been following across the country and the decades really meant—I mean, of course, the word "organic." It is an unavoidable and in some ways impolite question, and very possibly besides the point if you look at the world the way Gene Kahn or Drew and Myra Goodman do, but in precisely what sense can that box of salad on sale in a Whole Foods three thousand miles and five days away from this place truly be said to be organic?

…

Such has been the genius of capitalism, to re-create something akin to a state of nature in the modern supermarket or fast-food outlet, throwing us back on a perplexing, nutritionally perilous landscape deeply shadowed again by the omnivore 's dilemma. • 303 SEVENTEEN THE ETHICS OF EATING ANIMALS 1. THE STEAKHOUSE DIALOGUES The first time I opened Peter Singer's Animal Liberation I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare. If that sounds like a recipe for cognitive dissonance, if not indigestion, well, that was sort of the idea. It had been a long time since this particular omnivore had felt any dilemma about eating meat, but then I had never before involved myself so directly in the processes of turning animals into food: owning a steak-bound steer, working the killing cones in Joel Salatin's processing shed, and now preparing to hunt a wild animal.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)
by Tom Vanderbilt
Published 28 Jul 2008

Rather than the simple greed of the local municipality, it is also that the road through the village so often feels the same as the road outside the village—the same width, the same shoulders. The speed limit has suddenly been cut in half, but the driver feels as if he or she is still driving the same road. That speeding ticket is cognitive dissonance. In the mid-1980s, Monderman had an epiphany that is still reverberating throughout the world. He was called in to rework the main street of a village called Oudehaske. Villagers, as they do the world over, were complaining about cars speeding through the village, on a wide asphalt road with steady traffic volumes.

…

“they’ll behave like that”: Monderman’s suspicion of traffic signs was not necessarily a radical stance. The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the bible of American traffic engineers, itself has a warning about warning signs: “The use of warning signs,” it notes, “should be kept to a minimum as the unnecessary use of warning signs tends to breed disrespect for all signs.” is cognitive dissonance: Whether a driver actually gets the ticket may depend on several factors, as a study by Thomas Stratmann and Michael Makowsky argued. “The farther the residence of a driver from the municipality where the ticket could be contested,” they wrote, “the higher is the likelihood of a speeding fine, and the larger the amount of the fine.

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition
by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber
Published 9 Aug 2011

Nonetheless the banks and the firms hung on, waiting for the exhibition to open, because they thought or at least hoped that the increase in sales would save the situation. When the exhibition opened and the increase in sales was disappointing, the market collapsed in early May.54 As an illustration of repression of contradictory evidence – the cognitive dissonance case – consider J.W. Beyen’s analysis of the German failure to restrict short-term borrowing from abroad at the end of the 1920s. He suggested that the dangers were not faced, even by Schacht, the German finance minister, and added: ‘It would not have been the first nor the last time that consciousness was being “repressed”.’55 These examples suggest that despite the general usefulness of the assumption of rationality, markets have on occasions – infrequent occasions – acted in ways that were irrational even when each participant in the market believed he or she was acting rationally.

…

More and more economic theorists are moving away from unswerving reliance on the assumption that market participants are uniformly intelligent, informed, and independent in thought, introducing such concepts as asymmetric information (different knowledge available to different participants), cognitive dissonance (unconscious suppression of information that fails to fit a priori views), herd behavior, procrastination that results in failure to act in timely fashion, and so on. Those interested should consult the work especially of George Akerlof and Richard Thaler. For relevant studies, see Frederic S.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
by Greta Thunberg
Published 14 Feb 2023

Psychological Distancing means that the human brain tends to see climate change as something abstract, invisible, slow-moving, and far away in terms of both space and time. This minimizes our sense of the risk we face. Doom refers to the way we frame climate change as a looming disaster that threatens great loss and sacrifice. This framing induces fear and guilt which, after a while, leads to habituation and avoidance of the issue. Meanwhile, cognitive Dissonance between what we do (drive cars, eat beef, fly) and what we know (that carbon emissions wreak havoc on Earth’s climate) tempts us to justify ourselves rather than actually change our behaviours. Then, there’s Denial, which isn’t just about rejecting climate science: it’s to do with the way we suppress our daily awareness of it, so we can go on living as if we hadn’t heard the inconvenient facts.

…

See also individual organisation name Climeworks Orca, 216 Clinton, Bill, 26 clouds, 24, 51, 57, 58, 60–61, 74, 99, 172 coal, 7, 14, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 49, 56, 57, 58, 92, 93, 156, 163, 164, 181, 211, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227, 260, 297, 306, 358, 393, 411, 426 Coca-Cola, 295, 297, 326 coffee, 248 cognitive dissonance, 338 colonialism, 162, 174, 175, 311, 313, 316, 364, 387–9, 398, 399–400, 410–11, 417, 418, 436 Concerned Scientists United, 338 Conference of the Parties, 93; COP1 (Berlin, 1995), 302; COP25 (Madrid, 2019), 378; COP26 (Glasgow, 2021), 93, 136, 158, 204, 212, 278, 340, 356; COP27 (Egypt, 2022), 93, 206 consumerism, 202, 218, 280, 281–9, 299, 331–6, 369, 377, 425–6 consumption-based emissions accounting, 257–8, 257, 258 consumption, circle of, 425–6 Coope, Russell, 14 Copenhagen Accord (2009), 28 Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, 98, 218 coral reefs, 7, 15, 33, 38, 51, 80, 84–5, 334, 335, 345, 346, 350 corporate engagement, 30 Covid-19 pandemic 21, 132–3, 136, 139, 141, 145, 149, 157, 159, 192, 217, 274, 355, 378–83, 393, 436 crabs, 350 crops, 52, 96; advent of agriculture and, 107; biological control agents, 110; cropland expansion, 100, 244–6, 246; cropland reallocations, 341–2, 343; cropland relocations, 109; deforestation and, 236; drought and, 172; fertilizer, 13, 32, 35, 111, 245, 246, 251, 252–4, 340, 341, 342, 343, 346, 414; food systems and, 253–5; loss/failure of, 165, 168, 172; pollination, 108, 110; rotations, 251; soil and, 340–41; yield, 149–50, 183, 245–6, 251, 253, 254, 343, 402 cryosphere, 37, 73, 114 culture wars, 326, 433 cycling, 135, 273, 274 cyclones, 67, 69, 70–71, 79, 397 D Dálvvadis, 173–4 Dakota Access Pipeline, 164 dams, 35, 89, 388 Danish Meteorological Institute, 49 Darity, William, 412 Darwin, Charles, 12 DDT, 111 decarbonization, 205, 258, 261, 264, 271, 275, 311, 315, 317, 381–2, 405–9 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010) 198–9, 201 defections, powerbrokers, 3, 65 democracy, 5, 42, 161, 164, 180–81, 213, 279, 325–6, 355, 356, 358, 371, 391, 392, 393, 394, 412–13, 424 dengue, 133, 143, 144, 145, 146 denial, climate-change, 2, 29, 202, 204–9, 207, 337, 338, 370, 372–4, 373, 383 dictatorship, 42, 180, 362, 364, 366, 400 Dieffenbach’s rail, 13 diets: changing, 11, 150, 239, 244–55, 246, 249, 250, 251, 340–33, 343; meat, 107, 112, 236, 248, 249–50, 249, 250, 253, 254, 282, 285, 288, 302, 356, 434; plant-based, 135, 236, 244, 247, 248, 249, 251, 327, 329, 335, 338, 342, 433; vegan, 281, 328, 329, 339, 360, 434; vegetarian, 324, 329, 435 direct-air capture (DAC), 238 disinformation campaigns, 27, 29, 30, 31 divestment, 30, 222, 412, 431 dogs, 9–10 drawdown technologies, 235–9 drought, 26, 38, 39, 65, 68, 74–5, 88, 96–7, 98, 99–100, 116, 124, 134, 165–8, 187, 189, 233, 299, 300, 399, 415 Durán, Alejandro, 299, 300 E East Siberian Arctic Seas (ESAS), 118, 121 e-bikes, 209 echinoderm, 84–5 ecocide, 431 Ecological Threat Register, Institute for Economics and Peace, 187 economics, 8, 29; capitalism, 13, 30–31, 162, 202, 310, 361–2, 390, 399; degrowth, 310–12; divestment, 30, 222, 412, 431; economic institutions, creating new, 376; equity and, 308–9; extractive economy, 163, 391; financial crisis (2008) 393; financial crisis, climate-related, 192–3; financialization of nature, 204; financial rescue packages, Covid-19, 217; GDP and see GDP; growth, 133, 148, 156, 183, 209, 240, 280, 310–12; incomes see income; laissez-faire policies, 30; market economics, 30–31, 200, 202, 255, 258, 284, 309, 324, 366, 412; market failure, climate change as, 30–31; socio-economic cost of climate change, 191–3; socio-economic trends since 1750 35; wealth inequality see wealth education, self- 324–7, 433 efficiency gains 251, 258, 259, 261, 264, 272, 288, 306, 311, 392 Ehrlich, Paul, 112 electricity generation, 30, 56, 88, 217, 227, 228, 257, 259, 261, 266, 268, 281, 309, 388, 434 electrification, 209, 271, 273n; electric vehicles (EVs), 28, 209, 221, 222–3, 226, 227, 268, 271–5, 283, 324, 333, 386; industrial processes, 260–61 elephants, 349, 350, 400 El Niño 38, 64, 100, 189, 190 El Salvador, 165–6, 168 End-Permian mass extinction, 7 energy democracy, 392, 394, 413 ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) 38 Environmental Defense Fund, US, 25 Environmental Protection Agency, US, 163, 211–12 epidemiological surveillance, 145 Equinor, 262 equity, 154; cars/personal mobility and, 274–5; colonialism and, 315; consumption-based emissions accounting approach and, 257; desire to look away from issues of, 218; geoengineering and, 233–4; Indigenous peoples and, 177; intergenerational, 172; material consumption levels and, 269; meaning of, 396–401; nationally determined contributions (NDC) and, 308–9; net zero by 2050 target and, 21, 304; Paris Agreement and, 308–9; school strike movement and, 355; taboo subject, 208–9; taxes and, 409; water system and, 89; wealth and see wealth.

Fun Inc.
by Tom Chatfield
Published 13 Dec 2011

Indeed, as is often the way with modern video games, dissident voices have begun to be heard within the game itself, with a number of members of the public choosing to make ‘virtual protests’ against the actions of the US military by, among other things, registering accounts under the names of soldiers killed while on active duty in Iraq. Think too long or hard about the ethical intricacies of a simulated environment modelling a combat situation and you’re certain to experience a peculiarly modern kind of cognitive dissonance. It’s something described in detail in reporter Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, an account published in 2004 of the author’s experience of being ‘embedded’ with the First Recon unit of Marines on combat duty during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The young men he watched fighting represented, he writes, ‘more or less America’s first generation of disposable children.

The Techno-Human Condition
by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz
Published 15 Feb 2011

Given our enslavement to our own individual consciousnesses (at least until redesign), what lies between the Scylla of Level I narcissism and the Charybdis of Level III resignation and despair? What could it meant to engage authentically-fearlessly, openly, honestly-in a world that seems not only to render the individual meaningless but also to make comprehension impossible? It means that authenticity must build on a foundational cognitive dissonance. One must accept the validity of one's own experience, upbringing, culture, and other contributions to one's own grounding while simultaneously understanding that one is 186 Chapter 8 a partial and contingent reflection of the evolving and incomprehensible complexity that is out there.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed
by Jon Ronson
Published 9 Mar 2015

People really were very keen to imagine Jonah as shameless, as lacking in that quality, as if he were something not quite human that had adopted human form. I suppose it’s no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt - before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it’s known as cognitive dissonance. It’s the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we’re kind people and the idea that we’ve just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behaviour. It’s like when I used to smoke and I’d hope the tobacconist would hand me the pack that read ‘Smoking Causes Ageing Of The Skin’ instead of the pack that read ‘Smoking Kills’, because ageing of the skin?

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets
by Simon Singh
Published 29 Oct 2013

There are bonus points if either of these punch lines make you smile: Joke 7 “The share of the hypertense muse equals the sum of the shares of the other two brides.” 2 points Joke 8 “The squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.” 2 points TOTAL – 20 POINTS CHAPTER 5 Six Degrees of Separation While visiting Los Angeles in October 2012, I was lucky enough to attend a table-read of an upcoming episode of The Simpsons titled “Four Regrettings and a Funeral.” This involved the cast reading through the entire episode in order to iron out any problems before the script was finalized in preparation for animation. It was bizarre to see and hear a fully grown Yeardley Smith delivering lines with little Lisa’s voice. Similarly, I experienced extreme cognitive dissonance when I heard the voices of Homer, Marge, and Moe Szyslak, whose tones and diction are so familiar from years of watching The Simpsons, emerge from the all-too-human forms of Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Hank Azaria. Although there is much else to appreciate in “Four Regrettings and a Funeral,” it is sadly lacking in mathematical references.

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 20 Nov 2016

In a study of stress in call centres in particular, Kerry Lewig and Maureen Dollard have outlined the importance of ‘emotional dissonance’.22 This is the psychological experience of the differences between the actual feelings of the call-centre worker and the emotions that they are performing. Modelled on cognitive dissonance, in which two contradictory ideas are held simultaneously, this concept refers to emotions and explains the feelings of guilt and stress workers experience as they try to convince customers to buy insurance while maintaining a positive, enthusiastic demeanour on the phone. They warn that ‘emotional dissonance may ultimately lead to lowered self-esteem, depression, cynicism, and alienation from work’.

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food
by Chase Purdy
Published 15 Jun 2020

The scathing review continues: “We quit because Josh Tetrick is a lying, manipulative, thin-skinned, attention seeking, reactionary, incompetent, Steve Jobs wannabe who reminds me more and more of a certain ‘tweeting President’ each day, and we all reach a point where we can no longer manage the cognitive dissonance of trying to be a decent person while also enabling a con-man on a daily basis.” Disgruntled employee issues have also veered into the personal. In 2013, company drama went public when an employee named Javier Colón* was fired. According to a report by Bloomberg, the dispute between the two was over employment contracts and how Josh attempted to change the wording of them to give employees three weeks of severance instead of three months in the event they were let go.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.
Published 24 Sep 2019

That problem is sometimes referred to as an “outside context problem,” something so far beyond the experience of those dwelling in a certain time and place that they cannot make sense of available information. The collective mental static preventing comprehension is also sometimes referred to as “cognitive dissonance,” a term borrowed from developmental psychology. It helps explain why the American public has been sleepwalking into the future. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race.2 Modern Americans have a track record of explaining away the process of decline. The term white flight is an unnecessarily narrow description applied to the depopulation of core cities and the explosion of horizontal growth following World War II.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
by Cary McClelland
Published 8 Oct 2018

“Would you mind stepping over this homeless person before I show you the future of technology?” For the first few years you buy coffee, food for these people. Because you have sympathy. And you try to show your kids that you’ll be nice. But eventually you can’t deal with it anymore. I think my children sadly may just be observing me ignoring it and learning the cognitive dissonance that is required to live with it. But we need to see more courage. TIM DRAPER (CONT’D) Not content with venture capital alone, he also has political ambitions. In recent years, he launched the “Six Californias” Campaign to divide California into multiple states. He wears a tie emblazoned with the movement’s logo, a kind of primary-colors jigsaw of the state split six ways.

Critical: Science and Stories From the Brink of Human Life
by Matt Morgan
Published 29 May 2019

Every day, I see evidence of anchoring bias, where an incorrect diagnostic label is permanently attached to a patient after being applied earlier by another doctor. I am aware I often test patients for rare diagnoses in the days after I care for another patient with that very diagnosis. I know that I seek information to confirm my gut feelings, often disposing of inconvenient facts that would otherwise produce psychological conflict known as cognitive dissonance. Mentally preparing myself for these human bugs can stop them from becoming ends in themselves. Knowing about them makes me a better intensive care doctor. The final route of entry to the ICU – via the ‘theatre door’ – is for selected post-surgery patients. This can be in a planned manner or as the result of complications arising from the operation or anaesthesia.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
by Sarah Kessler
Published 11 Jun 2018

He didn’t like working in law—making an impact was too slow of a process that involved much too much paperwork—and, by extension, he’d put his goal of entering politics on the sideline. But he still was interested in social issues. Both Dan and Saman saw themselves as people who would make a positive social impact, and Managed by Q’s current business strategy didn’t necessarily fulfill that vision. The answer to both the company’s business problems and to its founders’ cognitive dissonance was clearly to hire frontline workers. Not just hire them (there are plenty of terrible employers, too), but train them well, and pay them better. The potential problem with this approach was funding. In August 2014, four months after launch, Managed by Q announced a $775,000 round of funding, which was enough to get by for some months before it would need to raise another round.

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America
by Dan Conway
Published 8 Sep 2019

For months, I’d tried to convince myself that the crashing ETH price was only a paper loss and that the flashing red numbers on my phone weren’t important, even though they represented the verdict on the biggest bet of my life. I had been telling myself that we were in the long game, even if that was only partially true. Now that momentum was turning in my favor, at least for the time being, cognitive dissonance made it hard to believe it was real. Deep down, I’d had the strongest conviction I’d ever had that ETH would pay off, but watching it rise like a phoenix before my eyes was like seeing Santa Claus in the flesh. The r/EthTrader boards were starting to pop. Every hour, it seemed, a hundred new people joined.

The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living
by Brock Bastian
Published 25 Jan 2018

However, this effect was evident only when the women were told that the shock was a necessary prerequisite to join the group discussion. When they were told it was unrelated to whether or not they could join the discussion, the severity of the shock no longer predicted their rating of the group. To understand the findings of this study, we need to draw on a well-known psychological principle called ‘cognitive dissonance’. This term refers to the feeling of discomfort that we experience when things don’t make sense or don’t fit together. A classic paradigm in which to demonstrate the effects of dissonance is to ask people to write an essay in support of something they personally disagree with. Imagine if you felt strongly that the death penalty should not exist, but had to write an essay in support of this type of punishment.

Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order
by Jason Sharman
Published 5 Feb 2019

Canadian Journal of Law and Society 26 (1): 25–50. Caverley, Jonathan D. 2014. Democratic Militarism: Voting, Wealth and War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chamberlain, M. E. 1974. The Scramble for Africa. Harlow: Pearson. Chang, Tom Y., David H. Solomon, and Mark Westerfield. 2016. “Looking for Someone to Blame: Delegation, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Disposition Effect.” Journal of Finance. 71 (1): 267–302. Charney, Michael W. 2004. Southeast Asian Warfare 1300–1900. Leiden: Brill. Chase, Kenneth. 2003. Firearms: A Global History to 1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chaudhuri, K. N. 1965. The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint Stock Company.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

But sitting in the audience, I couldn’t help but observe that something else was missing: the customers! There was no talk about how we are growing customers, which customers are most valuable to us, how our customers are using us, etc. The contrast was jarring. A bold vision for growth was followed by a bland presentation of decline. There was some serious cognitive dissonance in the room. What a shame. What a lost opportunity. Because if the Subscription Economy is about adopting new business models, then what better function to lead the company through that shift than the finance department? THE DAY I ALMOST GOT FIRED But I felt for the guy, because I once had a similar experience.

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything
by Becky Bond and Zack Exley
Published 9 Nov 2016

In some ways, they seemed to be suppressing their fear of missing out (FOMO) and then projecting it on to us (for example, calling us “Bernie Bros”). As Bernie became an undeniable cultural force for revolution, progressives supporting Clinton were feeling left out. They were on the winning team—at no point was Bernie the frontrunner—but they were acting like sore losers. Perhaps the cognitive dissonance simply got the best of them. Counterrevolutionaries are almost always devotees of small organizing, while revolutionaries practice big organizing. Take note of the counterrevolutionaries when they reveal themselves. They’re definitely not allies, and sometimes they even become enemies in a particular political fight.

Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction
by Judith Grisel
Published 15 Feb 2019

Sure, I met some of the criteria some of the time, but my ability to fool teachers, clinicians, and law enforcement stemmed from an ability to fool myself. It’s not unusual to rail against fate, especially when faced with a fatal diagnosis, but the thoughts and feelings that I experienced had the particular flavor of someone who’d co-authored her dilemma; cognitive dissonance is a big part of the denial engine. What this means is that when behavior and cognition don’t jibe, the expeditious solution is to change our mind: Why would I hurt myself? (Because that makes no sense) I must not be hurting myself. But eventually, when there was finally nothing left but to face the truth, I felt fury, shame, and betrayal.

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms
by Mark Spitznagel
Published 9 Aug 2021

But someone had to decide which qualities are essential and which are accidental. Which features counted, and why. The species problem becomes acute in the case of the Stooges because they are more different than they are alike. (There is the Biological Species Concept of interbreeding to define a species, but even then the thought of a Bernese pug is just cognitively dissonant.) Among investment strategies, the best example of this problem of classification is in value investing. Started by Benjamin Graham, it is about buying securities cheap compared to their intrinsic value—and good luck agreeing on the meaning of intrinsic value. In Graham's case, this mostly meant book value, or tangible value of a company's assets.

The Wondering Jew: Israel and the Search for Jewish Identity
by Micah Goodman
Published 10 Nov 2020

In Orthodox synagogues, for example, women are prohibited from leading the congregation in prayer—in fact, they cannot even take part in the minyan (prayer quorum), which is open only to men. Effectively, they are denied full membership in their own congregation. This gulf between their modern and religious worlds sets up a cognitive dissonance for many observant Jews. What are they supposed to do? Must they stifle their moral instincts in the name of their religious obligations? One further ideological clash that religious Jews have difficulty escaping concerns another form of exclusion. Many religious Jews believe that nobody should be excluded, insulted, or rejected because of his or her sexual orientation.

The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches From the Edge of Life
by The Reluctant Carer
Published 22 Jun 2022

It’s as if they have been physically transported to some unwanted and reviled dimension. I have enough time on my hands to image-search it and confirm that, indeed, this is information leaking in from the next county. Indignant frowns on already wrinkled brows thicken and multiply. The wrong news. Sure, we can do the cognitive dissonance on the national stuff and the refugees in the Mediterranean. As the world burns we know exactly when to sigh. But when it comes to people just up the motorway? Fuck them, their traffic, their sports achievements and June brides. Even the worst middle-distance tragedies yield only impatience.

Working Identity, Updated Edition, With a New Preface: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
by Herminia Ibarra
Published 17 Oct 2023

But don’t stay gone too long, or it will be hard to reel yourself back in. Only through interaction and active engagement in the real world do we discover ourselves. All these things lurked in the back of her mind, but Jane had not had the time or psychological distance to analyze all these elements in tandem. “I was in cognitive dissonance for six months, caught between the growing realization that I wasn’t happy and my belief in the vision of my firm.” During the ten hours in the car, however, she put together the pieces in a way that led to an obvious conclusion. After that, things happened very quickly. Two weeks later, at her five-year MBA reunion, she reconnected with two former classmates who had acquired a group of firms in the telecommunications industry.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

The history of every airport in the United States will tell you this will happen,” promised a developer who spent two years wrangling with the FAA for the right to build closer to the fence. “Are there really people who want to live close to an airport? Yeah, there are. That’s been proven around the country too. They travel a lot on business, or whatever it is they do, but they’re connected to the airport in some way, shape, or form. Somehow.” Clearly, cognitive dissonance is at work. We loudly decry the noise, pollution, and congestion of airports, and yet our fundamental quality-of-life decision—where and how to live—seems predicated on having one close at hand, even if we rarely fly. It helps that especially massive ones like DIA and DFW double as enormous publicly financed infrastructure investments galvanizing private developers—much like what I-70 and I-225 had done for Aurora in its 1970s and 1980s heyday.

…

From an efficiency standpoint, the best solution for halving transportation’s share of carbon emissions is to electrify cars from renewable sources, leaving whatever oil is left for aviation. Its share of emissions would look progressively worse while the total shrinks, but we’d get over the cognitive dissonance. “We are driven as humans to adapt to new technologies, and we’re blessed with the ability to transfer them quickly across societies,” Kasarda told me in Beijing. “But people don’t change their ideas and beliefs nearly as fast. In anthropology, it’s known as ‘cultural lag.’ And the lag in this case means we’re able to envision disaster but not the future.

Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals
by David Aronson
Published 1 Nov 2006

TA practitioners have a large emotional and financial investment in their favored method. This is especially true of practitioners whose professional lives are tied to a particular method. There is also a strong motive to maintain consistency within our system beliefs and attitudes. The theory of cognitive dissonance formulated by Festinger78 contends that people are motivated to reduce or avoid psychological inconsistencies.79 The discomfort provoked by evidence that contradicts what we believe makes it hard to digest such evidence. Biased Questions and Search The confirmation bias also slants the way questions are framed, thereby biasing the search for new evidence.

…

Abrams, “Effects of Alcohol on Social Anxiety and Psychological Arousal: Cognitive versus Pharmacological Processes,” Cognitive Research and Therapy 1 (1975), 195–210. Gilovich, How We Know, 50. M. Jones and R. Sugden, “Positive Confirmation Bias in the Acquisition of Information,” Theory and Decision 50 (2001), 59–99. L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957). S. Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 23. Practitioners who actually trade on their predictions do get clear feedback on results, but as pointed out in this chapter this feedback can be diluted by other cognitive distortions (e.g., self-attribution bias).

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
by Joel Mokyr
Published 8 Jan 2016

Some of them did so by sensing a latent demand: a dissatisfaction with some cultural beliefs or knowledge, or diffuse and incoherent earlier attempts to cope with a new reality. For cultural entrepreneurs to be successful, some disconnect must exist between the prevalent cultural elements and some new information that does not quite square with it. This is much like Thomas Kuhn’s cognitive dissonance or what he called “awareness of anomaly,” caused by the accumulation of evidence inconsistent with the current paradigm and thus leading to scientific revolutions. What was true for astronomy in the sixteenth century was equally true for anatomy and theology. Because such dissonances evolved independently, they elicited responses that tended at first to be diffuse and required coordination and standardization.

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E., 200 Birmingham Lunar Society, 222 Bíró, László, 257 Birse, Ronald M., 125 Bisin, Alberto, 13, 34, 36-38, 236 Black, Joseph, 83, 242, 269, 272, 274, 276 Black Death, 55 Blackmore, Richard, 91 Blackmore, Susan, 46 Blake, William, 78 blasphemy, 165 Blaut, James, 297 block printing, 294 Blom, Philip, 130 blood circulation, theory of, 158 Blue, Gregory, 321, 325 Boccalini, Trajano, 180 Bodde, Derk, 287, 299, 301, 310, 312, 316, 318, 322 on the Chinese language, 311 Bodin, Jean, 254 Boerhaave, Herman, 91, 102, 106 Bohemia, 175 Bol, Peter K., 300, 302, 305, 306, 308, 310, 324 Bologna, University of, 204 books, number of published, 293, 294 Borda, Jean-Charles de, 242, 272, 274 Borel, Pierre, 254 Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso, 156, 281 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 165, 207 botany, 91 Botticini, Maristella, 127 Boucher, François, 145 Bouhier, Jean, 181 Boulton, Matthew, 66, 283 Bourdelot, Pierre Michon, 204, 281 bourgeois virtues, 119 Bourguet, Louis, 132, 246 Bowles, Samuel, 10, 13, 14, 22, 44, 46 Boyd, Rob, 24, 26, 33, 36, 48, 65 definition of culture, 8 Boyle, Robert, 80, 81, 87, 90, 105, 155, 162, 192, 200, 203, 207, 209, 229-231, 228, 238, 242, 277, 330 Boyle lectures, 113 Brahe, Tycho, 148, 162, 202, 204, 206, 239 Brandt, Loren, 287, 291, 304, 315 Bray, Francesca, 326, 328, 333 breast wheel, 185 Breger, Herbert, 151 Bres, Guido de, 52 Breslau, 281 Britain, 7, 12, 17, 53, 69, 90, 99, 106, 109, 111-113, 125, 126, 131, 145, 164, 167, 173, 177, 202, 222, 223, 227-246, 257, 261, 264-266, 277 Enlightenment in, 264, 266 leading role in Industrial Revolution, 246 religious tolerance in, 233 British Museum, 265 British science, 240 compared to Continent, 241 Brock, William H., 102 Brockliss, L.W.B., 180, 186 Brokaw, Cynthia J., 330 Broman, Thomas, 218 Brook, Timothy, 323, 324 Broomé, Per, 55 Brouncker, Viscount William, 154 Browne, Thomas, 92, 93, 157, 158, 179, 201 Brozek, Jan, 188 Bruges, 176 Brunel, Isambard, 84 Bruno, Giordano, 151, 157, 174, 197, 210, 247, 260 Brunswick-Lüneburg, Duke of, 208 Bruto, Giovanni Michele, 188 Buckingham, Duke of, 185 Buffon, Comte, 109, 275 Buringh, Eltjo, 294 Burke, Peter, 334 Bury, J.B., 250, 258, 261, 262 Bushell, Thomas, 87 Bynum, W.F., 91 Cabala, see Kabbalah Cabinet des Frères Dupuy, 280 calculus, 112 see also infinitesimal mathematics calendar reform, 288 in China, 300 in Europe, 239 calicots, 145 California School of economic history, 288 Calvin, Jean, 52, 63, 68, 159, 174 Calvinism, 52 Cambrian Explosion, 163 Cambridge, 175 Campanella, Tommaso, 137, 171, 197, 201, 207 Cantoni, Davide, 127 Caraffa, Giovanni-Pietro, 171 see also Pope Paul IV Cardwell, Donald, 112 Cardwell’s Law, 260, 340 Carlos, Edward Stafford, 162 Caroline, Queen, 205 Carolinum University, 204 Carpenter, Nathanael, 153, 249 Cartesian science, 212 Cartesianism, 107 Cartesians, 75, 211, 232 and deductive method, 105 Casaubon, Isaac, 207, 210 Casaubon, Méric, 251 Cassini, Giovanni Domenico, 204, 206 Cassini, Jacques, 109 Castellano, Daniel J., 172, 212 Castellio, Sebastian, 132 cataloging, 275 Catherine the Great, Czarina, 205 Catholic Church, 143 Catholic Europe, decline of science in, 156 Caton, Hiram, 75, 95, 151 Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi L., 24, 39, 41, 60 Cavendish, Henry, 155, 239 Cavendish, Margaret Lucas, 243 Cavendish, William, 243 Cavendish circle, 243, 280 Cavendish family, 207 Cesi, Duke Federico, 219, 280 Chagnon, Napoleon, 23 Chambers, Douglas D., 154 Chan, Hok-lam, 299 Chandos, Duke of, 205 Chaney, Eric, 67, 131, 256 Chaptal, Jean-Antoine, 241 Chapter Coffee House, 222 Charles II, King, 232 Charles V, Emperor, 195 Châtelet, Emilie du, 110 chemical school in medicine, 252 chemistry, 220 Newton’s influence on, 102 Chen Chianzhang, 336 Chen Hongmou, 330, 331 Chen Menglei, 333 Chen Yuanlong, 334 Cheng Hao, 300, 303 Cheng Tingzuo, 335 Cheng Yi, 300, 303 Cheng-Zhu school,330 see also neo-Confucianism Chevreul, Eugène, 269 Cheyne, George, 102 Childrey, Joshua, 80 chiliasm, 266 China, 135, 147, 149, 158, 169, 274, 287-338 and the Enlightenment, 321 books in, 293 commercial integration in, 129 economy in the 18th century, 290 education in, 293 China, Qing, 291 China, Song, 248, 292 chinaware, 145, 163 Chinese language, 311 Chinese scholarship, agenda of, 338 Chinese science, 149 Chinese technology, adopted in the West, 298 Ching, Julia, 303, 311 chinoiserie, 145 Chitnis, Anand, 79 Chow, Kai-wing, 293, 294 Christianity, 132 and progress, 266 and resistance to innovation, 19 Christina, Queen, 204 Christina of Florence, Duchess, 152 Christopoulou, Rebekka, 35, 38 Cipolla, Carlo, 53, 132, 137, 160 cities, and the Republic of Letters, 174 civil service, Chinese, 308 Civil Service, ranks in the Chinese, 306 civil service examinations, Chinese, 165, 303, 304, 324, 332 civil society, 132 Clairaut, Alexis-Claude, 107, 211 Clark, Gregory, 7, 22, 36 Clark, Peter, 42, 222 Clarke, John, 255 Clarke, Samuel, 110, 114 classical canon, under attack, 151 classical culture, in education, 254 classical learning, declining respect for, 254 see also respect classics, 156, 181, 192, 217, 302 Chinese, 293, 303, 319, 324, 330 in the Enlightenment, 253 respect for, 258 veneration of, 254 classifying, 275 Clavius, Christopher, 130, 205, 211, 239 Clement VIII, Pope, 174 Clifton, Gloria, 108 clock and watchmaking industry, 233 Clusius, Carolus, 206 Coase, Ronald, 62 Cobb, Matthew, 188 codifiable knowledge, 160, 183, 193 coercion bias, 131,165, 337 coevolution, 46 in knowledge systems, 317 of culture and institutions, 10 of different kinds of knowledge, 143 of genes and culture, 43 coexistence, of competing hypotheses, 220 coffeehouses, 42, 217, 222 and public science, 196 cognitive dissonance, 63 Cohen, Bernard I., 237 Cohen, Floris, 32, 66, 68, 75, 79, 81-84, 130, 149, 150, 156, 162, 170, 182, 191, 220, 228, 237, 240, 270, 298, 299, 314 Cohen, Jack, 30 Cohn, Norman, 266 Cohn, Tobias, 257 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 196 Colie, Rosalie, 74 collectivist values, 18 Collegio Romano, 211 Collins, Randall, 194 Columbus, Christopher, 15 Comenius, Jan Amos, 77, 88, 95, 96, 154, 175, 188, 235, 239 commerce, growth of, 161 commercial law, and religion, 128 common-pool resource, 122 commons resource, community management of, 185 competition, 130, 131, 155, 166, 197, 204, 260, 313, 341 among states, 167, 169 in education, 130, 234 in market for ideas, 157, 181-183, 199, 208-211, 215, 268, 283, 306 political, 150, 167-169, 189, 183 religious, 131, 234, 291, 292, 300 Comte, Auguste, 250, 266 Condé, Prince de, 204, 207 Condorcet, Nicolas Marquis de, 130, 248, 262, 264, 276 Confirmation bias, 131 Confucianism, 136, 299 Confucius, 298, 319, 323, 330 Constant, Edward, 22 content bias, 101, 107, 131, 157, 158, 212, 216, 220 contestability, 50, 92, 108, 157, 160, 189, 191, 210, 218 in the Republic of Letters, 202 of ideas in China, 310 contingency, 32, 170, 219, 232 contract enforcement, 122 Cook, Harold, 62, 122, 161, 243 cooperation, and religion, 128, 129 cooperative behavior, in the Republic of Letters, 199 Copenhaver, Brian T., 211, 220 Copernican cosmology, 169 Copernicanism, 130, 156 Copernicans, 157 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 19, 72, 148, 157, 158, 170, 173, 188, 197, 212, 257, 302 Cormack, Lesley B., 205 corn, 145 corporations, 172, 174 Corpuscularianism, 156, 211 correspondence, 160, 181, 183, 184, 194-196, 281 corruption, public sector, 16 Cort, Henry, 276 Cortesian army, 23, 59, 119, 215 Corydalleus, Theophilos, 188 Cosimo II, Grand Duke, 206 Cosmides, Leda, 47 Cotes, Roger, 108 Coulomb, Charles-Augustin de, 242 Counter-Reformation, 165 Cowan, Brian, 196, 222 Cowley, Abraham, 68, 89 craftsmen, 81, 119 Cranmer-Byng, J.L., 335 Cremonini, Cesare, 127, 281 Crimean War, 167 critical junctures, 61 Cromwell, Oliver, 93, 145, 233 Cross, Rob, 191 Cullen, Christopher, 329 Cullen, William, 83, 111, 242, 274 cultural beliefs, 7, 11-14, 18, 31, 37 and economic growth, 122 cultural dynamics, 44 cultural elements, 44 cultural entrepreneurs, 59, 60, 62, 64-66, 83, 100, 158, 159, 175, 233, 267, 297, 319 in China, 337 cultural evolution, 22-33 choice-based, 34–36, 48, 62 models of, 232 cultural features, transmission of, 41 cultural menus, 38, 46 cultural transmission, horizontal, 36 cultural transmission, intergenerational, 34 cultural transmission, vertical, 36 cultural variants equilibrium, 209 culture, 3–15 and institutions, 11 and modern economics, 7 child, 39 definition of, 8, 11 economics of, 13 of useful knowledge, 142 culture, Chinese, 296 curiosities, 154 curiosity, 153 Da Gama, Vasco, 161 Dai Zhen, 330 d’Alembert, Jean le Ronde, 96, 181, 182, 272 Dalton, John, 241, 245 damasks, 145 Daniel, Stephen, 177 Daoism, 299 Daoist thought, 310 Darby, Abraham, 185 Darnton, Robert, 186, 197, 333 Darwin, Charles, 19, 24, 44, 60, 66, 158 Darwin, Erasmus, 265 Darwinian models, 22, 23 Darwinian selection, 23, 36, 43 Darwinism, 9, 51 Dasgupta, Partha, 192, 202, 203 Daston, Lorraine,186, 193, 203 data, concept of, 279 David, Paul A., 181, 183, 192, 199, 202, 203 Davids, Karel, 124, 136, 169, 338 Davy, Humphry, 79, 82, 90 Dawkins, Richard, 24, 30, 46 De Bary, W.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

Later it emerged that the reference source may have had an agenda to sabotage his former protégé’s new firm. Five years later, I was evaluating another investment manager to partner with, and toward the end of our diligence process I got a reference that was mixed. By this point I was better able to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously without experiencing cognitive dissonance, the state of “negative capability” that Keats referred to as useful to writers. This time, the mixed data points only made me do more work, and I gained even more conviction in the character and competence of the investment manager. This investment has been one of our most profitable, and absent my earlier failure, I suspect I would have not had the ability to see the reality of the situation.

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I believe that in a few years we will look back and marvel at the barbarism and stunning environmental waste (water consumption and methane production) of meat harvesting today. Our circle of empathy generally expands over time . . . but sometimes as a retrospective rationalization. We don’t typically discuss the meat industry in polite conversation because we don’t want to face the inevitable cognitive dissonance (because bacon tastes so good). We don’t really want to know why almost all USDA meat inspectors become vegetarian. I think all of that will change when viable meat products are grown from cell cultures, not in the field. We will switch, and condemn our former selves. What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

Instead, the model posits a world filled with rational actors possessed with perfect foresight. But it doesn’t remotely describe what actually happens on Wall Street or any other stock market. No wonder the academic economists in charge of what James Grant called the ‘PhD Standard’ were blindsided by events. Institutional factors contributed to this state of cognitive dissonance. The Federal Reserve is the world’s largest employer of finance PhDs and has deep connections with economic journals that specialize in monetary matters. It is telling that, in a 2010 survey, a large majority of academic economists believed that low rates caused, or at least greatly contributed to, the housing bubble, but most economists specializing in monetary policy continued to side with the Fed’s view.38 If Bernanke, as head of the Federal Reserve, held that the crisis wasn’t a failure of ‘economic science’ but one of economic management (regulation), it was only to be expected that the Fed’s own research team should follow their chief’s lead.39 They occupied an echo chamber in which existing beliefs were reinforced and uncomfortable questions ignored.

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H., 242 Draghi, Mario, 61, 122–3, 145, 146, 147, 240, 293, 305 Drucker, Peter, 163 Dudley, William, 238 Dugas, Laurent, 56 Dumoulin, Charles, 25 Dutch Republic, 13, 33, 35–6, 39, 49, 63, 68 Dutot, Nicholas, 53–4, 57 East India Company, 33, 36–7, 37*, 53, 70 Easterly, William, 189–90 ecological systems, 154–5 economic growth: and Borio’s thinking, 134, 135–9; Brazilian ‘miracle’, 257–8; and ‘bubble economy’ concept, 183–7; during deflationary periods, 100–101; and digital technologies, 127–8, 151–2, 176–7; and Draghi’s policy at ECB, 146–8; and Fed’s easy money policy, 111, 112, 115, 124, 152–3, 182–3, 238; and global interest rates prior to crisis, 118, 135; and globalization, 260–61; in Great Depression era, 142–3; and Hayek, 296, 298; and inequality, 203–6, 216–17, 237, 299; and inflation, 108, 108*; and inflation targeting, 123; in Japan of 1980s, 105–8; in Japan of 1990s, 100–101, 146, 147; led by finance, 266; and meaning of ‘wealth’, 179–82, 193–5; negative impact of building booms, 135–6, 144–5, 148; and Piketty’s theory, 216–17; in post-crisis Iceland, 300–301; productivity collapse in post-crisis decade, 150–51, 152–3; and reduced interest rates after a bubble, 114, 136, 138, 145–6; relation to interest rates, xxiv, xxv, 10, 12, 44, 89, 124–9, 141, 162, 237–8; secular stagnation concept, 77, 124–9, 131, 132–9, 151, 205–6; slow recovery from Great Recession, 124–5, 126–9, 131–2, 150–53, 298–9, 304; in Soviet Union of 1950s, 278; as strong after Second World War, 126, 302; as strong in 1920s USA, 89, 89–90, 108, 143; as subordinated to financialization, 162–71, 182–3, 203–6, 237, 260; vast expansion in China, 265–74, 275–82, 283–9 economic models: canonical model used by central banks, 118, 131, 153*, 207; and demographics, 127, 131; distributional issues as suppressed in, 207; ignoring of resource misallocations, 153*; no place for money and credit in, 118; and perceptions of risk, 230; and productivity puzzle, 151; rational actors/perfect foresight assumptions, 118; unreal reality of academic models, 138, 207 The Economist, 63, 67, 71–2, 73, 77 EDF (French utility), 225 Edmunds, John C., 181 Egypt, 77, 78, 255, 262 Einstein, Albert, 8 Elizabeth II, Queen, 114 Ellington Capital Management, 223 Emden, Paul, 80* emerging markets: Brazilian crash (2012–13), 257–8; BRICs, 254–5, 257–8; capital controls return after 2008, 262, 291; capital flight from (starting 2015), 262, 285–6; demand for industrial commodities, 128; epic corruption scandals, 258; and extended supply chains, 261; flooding across South East Asia (2010), 255; ‘Fragile Five’, 258–9; growth of foreign exchange reserves, 252, 253, 254–5, 256; impact of ultra-low interest rates on, xxiii, 253–60, 262–3; international carry Trade, 137, 237–8; overheating during 2010, 255, 256; post-crisis capital flows into, xxiii, 253–9, 262–3; and recent phase of globalization, 260–61; recovery from 2008 crisis, 124; and savings glut hypothesis, 129, 268–9; ‘second phase of global liquidity’ after 2008 crisis, 253–9, 262–3; and taper tantrum (June 2013), xxiii, 137, 239, 256–7, 259, 263; Turkish debt, 258–60; vulnerability to US monetary policy, 137, 262–3, 267–8 see also China employment/labour markets, xx, 151–2, 240, 260–61, 260*, 296; after 2008 crisis, 210, 211; new insecurity, 211, 298 Erdogan, Recep Tyyip, 259 European Central Bank (ECB), 144, 145, 147, 239, 240, 293; inflation targeting, 119, 120, 122–3; and quantitative easing, 146, 241, 242; sets negative rate, 147, 192–3, 244, 299 European Union, 187, 241, 262 Eurozone, 124, 150–51, 226; and political sovereignty, 293, 293†; sovereign debt crisis (from 2010), 144–8, 226, 238, 239, 241, 273, 293 Evans, David Morier, 73 Evelyn, John, 36, 45 Evergrande (Chinese developer), 279, 288, 310 executive compensation schemes, 152, 162, 163–4, 170, 204, 206, 207 Extinction Rebellion, 201 ExxonMobil, 166 Fang’s Money House, Wenzhou, 281–2 farming: agricultural cycle, 11, 14, 88; and ‘Bank of John Deere’, 167; barley loans in ancient Mesopotamia, 5–6, 6*, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14; bubbles in post-crisis decade, 173; in China, 283; and language of interest, 4–5; loans related to consumption, 6, 25; US deflation of 1890s, 99 Federal Reserve, US: asymmetrical approach to rates, 136–7; as carry trader, 222; cognitive dissonance in, 118–19; Federal Reserve Act (1914), 83; ‘forgotten depression’ (1921), 84, 86, 100, 143; forward guidance policy, 131*, 133, 238, 239, 240, 241; and Gold Exchange Standard, 85, 87, 90*; the ‘Greenspan put’, 111, 186; impact on foreign countries, 137, 239, 240–41, 255–6, 259, 262–3, 267–8, 285; inflation targeting, 119, 120, 241; Long Island meeting (1927), 82–3, 88, 92; mandates of, 240, 262; and March 2020 crash, 305–6; Objectives of Monetary Policy (1937), 97; Open Market Committee (FOMC), 109, 112–13, 115†, 120, 164, 228, 238, 239, 240; Operation Twist (2011), 131*, 238; parallel with US Forest Service, 154–5; and post-Great War inflation, 84; as the ‘price of leverage’, xxi–xxii; quantitative easing by, 12*, 76, 131*, 137, 175, 215, 228, 236, 238, 239–40, 241; raised rates announcement (2015), 138, 239; reaches ‘zero lower bound’ (2008), 243–4; response to 1929 Crash, 98, 100, 101, 108; suggested as responsible for 2008 crisis, 116–17, 118–19, 155, 204, 226–7; TALF fund, 175; taper tantrum (June 2013), xxiii, 137, 239, 256–7, 259, 263; ultra-easy money after 2008 crisis, xxi, 60, 124, 131–8, 146, 149, 152–5, 181–3, 206–17, 221–4, 230, 235–41, 243–4, 262, 291–2; Paul Volcker runs, 108–9, 145; Janet Yellen runs, 120 see also Bernanke, Ben; Greenspan, Alan Feldstein, Martin, 119 Ferri, Giovanni, 277* Fetter, Frank, 30 Field, Alexander, The Great Leap Forward, 142–3 financial crisis (2008): accelerates financialization, 182–3; and complex debt securities, 116, 117–18, 231; ‘crunch porn’ on causes of, 114; economists who anticipated crisis, 113–14, 132; failure of unconventional monetary policies after, xxi, xxii, 43–4, 291–4, 298–9, 301–3; Fed’s monetary policy as suggested cause, 116–17, 118–19, 155, 204, 226–7; generational impact of, 211–12, 213; as ‘giant carry trade gone wrong’, 253–5; global causes of, 117–18; Icelandic recovery from, 301–2; and inequality, 204, 205–17, 299; interest at lowest level in five millennia during, xxi, 243–4, 247; Law’s System compared to, 49, 60–61; low/stable inflation at time of, 134, 135; monetary policy’s role in run-up downplayed, 115–16, 115*, 115†; and quoting of Bagehot, 76; recovery of lost industrial output after, 124; regulatory interpretation of, 114–15, 117; and return of the state, 292–5, 297, 298; return to ‘yield-chasing’ after, 221–6, 230–31, 233–4, 237–8; the rich as chief beneficiaries of, 206–10; savings glut hypothesis, 115–16, 117, 126, 128–9, 132, 191, 252, 268–9; ‘second phase of global liquidity’ after, 253–9, 262–3; unwinding of carry trades during, 221, 227; warnings from BIS economists before, 113–14, 131–4, 135–9 see also Great Recession financial derivatives market, 225–6 financial engineering: buybacks, 53, 152, 163–6, 167, 169, 170–71, 183, 224; crowding out of real economy by, 158–9, 160, 166–71, 182–3, 185, 237; ‘funding gap’ as impetus, 164, 176–7, 291; merger ‘tsunami’ after 2008 crisis, 160–63, 161*, 168–70, 237, 298; ‘promoter’s profit’ concept, 158–9, 160, 161, 164; and ‘shareholder value’, 163–6, 167, 170–71; Truman Show as allegory for bubble economy, 185–7; use of leverage, 111, 116, 149, 155, 158–71, 204, 207, 223, 237, 291; zaitech in Japan, 106, 182, 185 financial repression: in China, 264–5, 265*, 266–81, 268*, 283, 286–9, 292; and inequality, 287–8; McKinnon coins term, 264; political aspects, 265, 265*, 286–9, 292; returns to West after 2008 crisis, 291–3; after Second World War, 290–91, 302 financial sector: bond markets as ‘broken (2014), 227; complex securitizations, 116, 117–18, 221, 227, 231; decades-long bull market from early 1980s, 203–4; economics as fundamentally monetary, 132, 138–9; Edmunds’ ‘New World Wealth Machine’, 181–2; expansion in 1920s USA, 203; finance as leading growth, 266; financial mania of 1860s, 72–4, 75–6; fixed-income bonds, 68–9, 193, 219, 222, 225, 226; foreign securities/loans, 66, 77–8, 91; investment trusts appear (1880s), 79; liquidity traps, 114; mighty borrowers within, 202; profits bubble in post-crisis USA, 183, 183†, 185, 211; robber baron era in USA, 156–9, 203; stability as destabilizing, 82, 143, 233, 263, 285; stock market bubble in post-crisis decade, 175–7, 176*; trust companies in US, 83–4, 84*; US bond market ‘flash crash’ (2014), 138; and volatility, 153, 228–30, 233, 234, 254, 304, 305; volatility as asset class, 229–30, 229*, 233, 234, 304, 305; ‘Volmageddon’ (5 February 2018), 229–30, 234 see also banking and entries for individual institutions/events financial system, international: Asian crisis, 114, 252, 278; Basel banking rules, 232; Borio on ‘persistent expansionary bias’, 262–3; complex mortgage securities, 116, 117–18; crash (12 March 2020), 304–6; ‘excess elasticity’ of, 137; global financial imbalances, 137, 138; Louvre Accord (1987), 105–6; stock market crash (October 1987), 106, 110–11, 229 financialization, 162–71, 182–3, 185, 203–8, 237 Fink, Larry, 209, 246 Finley, Sir Moses, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (1981), 18* fire-fighting services, 154–5 First World War, 84, 85 Fisher, Irving: and debt-deflation, 98–9, 100, 119, 280; first to refer to ‘real’ interest rate, 88–9, 219*; founds Stable Money League (1921), 87, 96; and Gesell’s rusting money, 243, 246; on interest, 29–30, 82, 189, 189*, 201; losses in 1929 crash, 94; monetarist view of 1929 Crash, 98–9, 100, 101, 108; ‘money illusion’ concept, 87*; on nature’s production, 4–5; on negative interest, 246; The Theory of Interest, xxiv, xxv, xxvi*, 16, 173 Fisher, Peter, 194 Fisher, Richard, 164 Fitzgerald, F.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

The faster the system learns from you, the more likely it is that you can get trapped in a kind of identity cascade, in which a small initial action—clicking on a link about gardening or anarchy or Ozzy Osbourne—indicates that you’re a person who likes those kinds of things. This in turn supplies you with more information on the topic, which you’re more inclined to click on because the topic has now been primed for you. Especially once the second click has occurred, your brain is in on the act as well. Our brains act to reduce cognitive dissonance in a strange but compelling kind of unlogic—“Why would I have done x if I weren’t a person who does x—therefore I must be a person who does x.”Each click you take in this loop is another action to self-justify—“Boy, I guess I just really love ‘Crazy Train.’ ” When you use a recursive process that feeds on itself, Cohler tells me, “You’re going to end up down a deep and narrow path.”

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister
Published 2 Jan 1987

Thus was born the legendary Black Team. The Black Team was initially made up of people who had proved themselves to be slightly better at testing than their peers. They were slightly more motivated. They also were testing code that had been written by someone else, so they were free of the cognitive dissonance that hampers developers when testing their own programs. All in all, those who formed the team might have expected it to achieve at least a modest improvement in product quality, but they didn’t expect more than that. What they got was much more than that. The most surprising thing about the Black Team was not how good it was at the beginning, but how much it improved during the next year.

Free as in Freedom
by Sam Williams
Published 16 Nov 2015

Despite the best efforts of Stallman and other hackers to remind people that the word "free" in free software stood for freedom and not price, the message still wasn't getting 138 through. Most business executives, upon hearing the term for the first time, interpreted the word as synonymous with "zero cost," tuning out any follow up messages in short order. Until hackers found a way to get past this cognitive dissonance, the free software movement faced an uphill climb, even after Netscape. Peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free software cause, offered an alternative: open source. Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the open source term while discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations industry.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
by J. D. Vance
Published 27 Jun 2016

We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach. We talk to our children about responsibility, but we never walk the walk. It’s like this: For years I’d dreamed of owning a German shepherd puppy. Somehow Mom found me one. But he was our fourth dog, and I had no clue how to train him.

The Nature of Technology
by W. Brian Arthur
Published 6 Aug 2009

Origination is not just a new way of doing things, but a new way of seeing things. And the new threatens. It threatens to make the old expertise obsolete. Often in fact, some version of the new principle has been already touted or already exists and has been dismissed by standard practitioners, not necessarily because of lack of imagination but because it creates a cognitive dissonance, an emotional mismatch, between the potential of the new and the security of the old. The sociologist Diane Vaughan talks of this psychological dissonance: [In the situations we deal with as humans, we use] a frame of reference constructed from integrated sets of assumptions, expectations, and experiences.

Tyler Cowen-Discover Your Inner Economist Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist-Plume (2008)
by Unknown
Published 20 Sep 2008

Another useful piece References I 229 is Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathan D. Brown, "Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health," Psychological Bulletin, 1988,105,2,195-210. For experimental evidence that people are more likely to think their claims are just, see James Konow, "Fair Shares: Accountability and Cognitive Dissonance in Allocation Decisions," American Economic Review, September 2000,90,4, 1072-109l. For the study of gym membership, see Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier, "Paying Not to Go to the Gym," American Economic Review, June 2006, 96,3,694-719. On the unwillingness of people to defer to experts, and what that means, see my paper with Robin Hanson, "Are Disagreements Honest?"

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
by Glenn Greenwald
Published 12 May 2014

We had discussed her plan to film us while in Hong Kong: she was, after all, a documentarian working on a film about the NSA. Inevitably, what we were doing would become a huge part of her project. I knew that, but I hadn’t been prepared for the recording to begin quite so soon. There was great cognitive dissonance between, on one hand, meeting so covertly with a source who, to the US government, had committed serious crimes and, on the other, filming it all. Laura was ready in a matter of minutes. “So I’m going to begin filming now,” she announced, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
by Michael Harris
Published 6 Aug 2014

And then what will a constantly distracted fifty-year-old really bring to the table, except a facility with the technology that made him or her that way? But that, of course, is a fantasy; that fifty-year-old will be a multitasker in a multitasking world. And my own idea of a work ethic will be outmoded. No two generations in history have experienced such a highlighted cognitive dissonance, because never has change occurred at so rapid a pace. Look at the rate of penetration—the amount of time it takes for a new technology to be adopted by fifty million people. Radio took thirty-eight years to reach that mark; the telephone took twenty years; and television took thirteen. More recently, the World Wide Web took four years, Facebook took 3.6, Twitter took three, and the iPad took only two.

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt
by Steven Johnson
Published 11 May 2020

All of this history meant young Henry Every would have had two distinct models of piracy in his mind as he left Plymouth with the Royal Navy: the murderous Barbary pirates, living outside the boundaries of human decency, enemies of all mankind; and the dashing figures of Drake and other successful privateers—esteemed men who had lived lives of great adventure and risk, and who had profited mightily from their labors. To be a pirate meant that you were simultaneously beneath contempt and on a thrilling road to respectability—even to knighthood. Those two polarities were maintained for at least a century without much cognitive dissonance for an obvious reason: the Barbary pirates were (mostly) North Africans, attacking innocent British families, while Drake and his peers were sacking Spanish settlements in the New World. That the former should seem monstrous and beyond the pale and the latter worthy of knighthood was simply a case of rooting for the home team.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
by Anna Wiener
Published 14 Jan 2020

* * * I sometimes wondered whether there was a unique psychic burden shared by people who worked in technology, specifically those of us building and supporting software that existed only in the cloud. The abstractions of knowledge work were well documented, but this felt new. It was not just the cognitive dissonance of how lucrative and powerful tech companies had become, when their tools did not physically exist, but that all software was vulnerable, at any time, to erasure. Engineers could spend years writing programs only to have them updated, rewritten, and replaced. They poured hours and energy into products that never shipped.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
by Mark O'Connell
Published 28 Feb 2017

Laura’s pleasantly businesslike and mildly self-deprecating manner was not quite successful in offsetting an imposing intellectual affect, which was all the more striking given the inescapable fact that the person sitting across a boardroom table from me was younger than many of the tersely hungover English literature undergraduates I’d taught over the years. And so a strong cognitive dissonance arose from the three-way juxtaposition of Laura’s extreme youth, her position in the business world, and the nature of her work; but it began to make sense within the context of the fact that she had been monomaniacally preoccupied with death for the past thirteen years. “I have never not felt like extending the life spans of human beings is the correct thing to do,” she said, measuring her words carefully.

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day
by Craig Lambert
Published 30 Apr 2015

But it provokes unease in the United States, where the Declaration of Independence famously announced that “all men are created equal,” royalty and hereditary aristocracies are illegal, and social mobility is the ideal, if not necessarily the reality. Receiving care from servants clashes with our national ideal of equality. The cognitive dissonance might also reflect our collective memory of America’s history of slavery in the South and indentured servitude. (Landowners in the colonies would pay the transatlantic passage of immigrants from Europe in exchange for a period of unpaid labor, during which the indentured servant worked off his or her debt.

The Behavioral Investor
by Daniel Crosby
Published 15 Feb 2018

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, authors of The Enigma of Reason, argue that human reason evolved not to be “correct” in the strictest sense of the word, but rather to privilege the stability of the shared beliefs that are the cornerstone of our species’ success.5 To more fully understand this concept, it may be useful to consider the example of belief testing in both animals and humans. A human may encounter an idea that runs contrary to a deeply held belief – for instance, that “members of my chosen political party are smart and kind” – and this may cause painful cognitive dissonance. The proof against this cherished notion may be convincing in objective terms – failed policies, incompetent leadership, scientific realities that contradict the party line – but political beliefs are often quite recalcitrant to change. Since shared communal beliefs are the glue that holds humankind together, breaking those bonds is no small task, even in the face of damning contraindications.

Automating Inequality
by Virginia Eubanks

Our guilt, kindled because we perceived suffering and yet did nothing about it, made us look away. That is what the denial of poverty does to us as a nation. We avoid not only the man on the corner, but each other. Denial is exhausting and expensive. It is uncomfortable for individuals who must endure the cognitive dissonance required to both see and not-see reality. It contorts our physical geography, as we build infrastructure—suburbs, highways, private schools, and prisons—that allow the professional middle class to actively avoid sharing the lives of poor and working-class people. It weakens our social bonds as a political community; people who cannot meet each others’ eyes will find it very difficult to collectively govern.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
by James Clear
Published 15 Oct 2018

See: Brian Clark, “The Powerful Psychological Boost that Helps You Make and Break Habits,” Further, November 14, 2017, https://further.net/pride-habits. Research has shown that once a person: Christopher J. Bryan et al., “Motivating Voter Turnout by Invoking the Self,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 31 (2011): 12653–12656. There is internal pressure: Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957). Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness”: Technically, identidem is a word belonging to the Late Latin language. Also, thanks to Tamar Shippony, a reader of jamesclear.com, who originally told me about the etymology of the word identity, which she looked up in the American Heritage Dictionary.

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture
by Bernardo Kastrup
Published 28 May 2015

Signs and symptoms Patients tend to implicitly or explicitly deny the efficaciousness and reliability of all psychic functions except the intellect. They insist that the intellect is the only valid avenue for approaching reality, even though they are unable to coherently justify why. The condition blinds them to this obvious cognitive dissonance and causes them to arbitrarily consider their position selfevident. If, while in therapy, the patient is confronted with the fact that the human psyche is equipped with many other forms of cognition beyond the intellect, he will typically point to historical events in which these other faculties have been unreliable, while ignoring all other historical events in which they have been vital.

Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-Racist Comedian
by Frankie Boyle
Published 23 Oct 2013

Obviously, there’s still a huge political agenda at work, but much less overt politics. The main satire show in Britain, Have I Got News for You, begins with picture jokes so forced and dispiriting they act as a kind of ideological security scan. If you can smile and nod your way through that shit then they know you won’t flip out during the shrieking cognitive dissonance of playing guessing games against a backdrop of worldwide war and financial meltdown. I was on there once when they showed a picture of a girl being captured by police as she tried to steal a leg of frozen lamb. She was pictured attempting to climb a fence as several police officers dragged her down from below.

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime
by Bradley Hope
Published 1 Nov 2022

The challenge with these diplomats is they need to at once completely embrace and believe the “truth” that North Korea disseminates to its people while also existing in the “real world,” where none of these things are actually true. In a sense, one of the most important skills for a North Korean diplomat is to hold two contradictory views at the same time without it causing any cognitive dissonance. Orwell’s “doublethink” was a fact of life, a survival mechanism, for North Koreans posted abroad. Outgoing and talkative, Jo frequently surprised businessmen he met around Italy on trips to view factories and distribution centers. His formal manners were so precise, albeit mechanical, that many Italians he met believed he’d undergone extensive etiquette training.

Principles of Web API Design: Delivering Value with APIs and Microservices
by James Higginbotham
Published 20 Dec 2021

However, some compromises may be more significant, such as an existing API design that is too low-level. This is common for APIs that opted to expose database tables directly compared to the new proposed API design that would apply a more course-grained design with an outcome-based focus. Mixing low-level and high-level APIs may create too much cognitive dissonance for developers and therefore are less than ideal. Teams will need to determine if they wish to add the new design to an existing API, start a new API as if it were a brand-new product offering, or deliver the new design as a new version of the existing API. Each option will have an impact both on the organization and on current and future API consumers.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

I didn’t want to end up an object of ridicule whose success was deemed unearned by angry men on anonymous message boards, so I carefully studied all the apparently incorrect ways for women to behave to ensure that I would model only the correct ones. The conclusion I had internalised was that feminine traits were inferior; I coped with the ensuing cognitive dissonance by reminding myself that I didn’t have to be like the others — I could be better. I knew the game was rigged, but I still thought I could win. Yet my place in that world was clearly precarious, so I overcompensated by clinging on to what little I had. When applying to university, I picked my major with gender concerns at the top of my mind; I was swayed towards physics because it was the degree with the lowest female enrolment, which I interpreted as a sign of intellectual rigor and therefore worth.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

Outsiders gradually began to develop what Tuchman described as “self-consciousness as a class,” a sense of themselves as the “people”: “Christ was often portrayed as a man of the people and shown in frescoes and carvings surrounded by an artisan’s or peasant’s tools—hammer, knife, ax, and wool-carder’s comb—instead of by the instruments of the Crucifixion. In Florence, the workers called themselves il popolo di Dio. ‘Viva il popolo!’ was the cry of the revolt of the Ciompi in 1378.” As the Middle Ages wound toward their end, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the glaring cognitive dissonance between the professed ideals of the church and its real-life avarice and corruption, between the chivalric code of honor and the reality of knights engaging in slaughter, plunder, and torture. The suffering caused by the Black Death magnified this sense of disjunction and began to undermine trust in the existing order, while stoking the realization that challenges to authority were actually possible.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

The safety net was weak, however, an outcome of the pecuniary nature of American politics, which—then, as now—bestows outsized influence on the affluent donor class including the business community. And so we arrive at 1981. A wave of new politicians crowded into Washington, determined to unravel this grand agreement so painfully and thoughtfully pieced together in the 1930s and 1940s. Suffering with cognitive dissonance toward economic history, unwilling to learn from the Great Depression, and enthralled by the certitude of powerful personalities pursuing an ideological agenda, they launched the Reagan era. What was their biggest mistake? They threw Adam Smith under the bus, ignoring his warning that “The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.”

…

Surveys by Michael Norton and Ariely found that respondents believe the top 20 percent own less than 60 percent of American wealth, when their actual share is close to 90 percent.18 Reform hinges on new rules from Washington. Yet, despite the 2012 election outcome, many voters remain distrustful of government, the lingering effects of decades of demonization. This attitude is reinforced by the rather pervasive cognitive dissonance of Americans regarding the sizable role played by government in their lives, documented in research by economist Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University. She found that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of both Medicare and GI Bill beneficiaries say they “have not used a government program.”19 Even so, American voters are not fools and realize they are economically downtrodden.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

Americans welcomed immigration to grow the country, and could wax lyrical about the US as a ‘new’ nation made up of various European peoples. At the same time, they considered themselves more Protestant and Anglo-Saxon than Britain. So Jefferson could affirm both the asylum and Anglo-Saxon traditions without cognitive dissonance. Here is the great American liberal philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in 1846 about the US as ‘The asylum of all nations … the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race … as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages.’11 And around the same time he declared: It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family … The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot.

…

While people get the levels wrong, they have a better feel for trends over time such as the pace of ethnic change or rate of immigration, as we saw with the link between immigration rates and the salience of immigration across Europe. They also can compare the ethnic composition at present with what they experienced growing up – an important source of cognitive dissonance that leads many to report that they don’t recognize their country any more (61 per cent of whites said this in a 2011 UK sample).81 Those who study the politics of population change in developing countries find that local population dynamics, such as high birth rates leading to pressure on scarce cropland or migrations of outsider tribes into an ethnic group’s perceived homeland, can result in low-level conflicts.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Published 31 Dec 2018

The way that governments mishandled the financial and debt crises would be expected to deepen mistrust. But the linkages may be reversed; citizens may judge the performance of the economy, and assign government responsibility for economic conditions, through the prism of their prior political preferences – avoiding 144 Economic Grievances cognitive dissonance and leading people to confirm what they already believe. For example, in the US there was a substantial jump in the proportion of Republicans expressing positive evaluations of the economic situation after Trump entered the White House, with the proportion saying that these conditions were ‘very good’ or ‘somewhat good’ doubling from 31 percent in February 2016 to 61 percent a year later.

…

However, the results may not prove reliable as ordinary citizens may misperceive the issue position of parties by seeing them as either closer to their own views or further away than they are in reality. Ordinary people may mistake party issue positions because of motivated reasoning, selective perceptions used to reduce cognitive dissonance, confused signals about policy positions arising from internal ideological divisions within political parties, or from simple lack of political information and awareness.37 Programmatic Policy Platforms and Issue Positions The most common practice in the comparative literature has sought to distinguish the location of political parties, and the similarities across party families, based on content analysis of policy manifestos and programmatic platforms.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
by David Allen
Published 31 Dec 2002

“How hungry are we?” That was brainstorming. Those questions were part of the naturally creative process that happens once you commit to some outcome that hasn’t happened yet. Your brain noticed a gap between what you were looking toward and where you actually were at the time, and it began to resolve that “cognitive dissonance” by trying to fill in the blanks. This is the beginning of the “how” phase of natural planning. But it did the thinking in a somewhat random and ad hoc fashion. Lots of different aspects of going to dinner just occurred to you. You almost certainly didn’t need to actually write all of them down on a piece of paper, but you did a version of that process in your mind.2 Once you had generated a sufficient number of ideas and details, you couldn’t help but start to organize them.

Curation Nation
by Rosenbaum, Steven
Published 27 Jan 2011

Then, after a stint at Viacom and Barry Diller’s Studios USA, Miller took on the unenviable task of fixing AOL. It was 2005, and the problems were written large on the front door. AOL was an ISP (a dial-up Internet service provider) in a world that was going broadband. You didn’t have to wake up in the morning and have cognitive dissonance around that. AOL knew it couldn’t sell its dial-up business and that it was going to go to zero—and fast. And, since parent company TimeWarner owned cable, the broadband business was already taken. Miller needed to imagine a new AOL with a new focus: “There aren’t a huge number of options, but I thought, ‘How do you figure out how to make a lot of content that people want to consume, since you’re essentially an aggregator of lots of other peoples’ content and services?’”

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
by Jessica Bruder
Published 18 Sep 2017

We were told to walk in paths that were marked with green tape on the floor; when someone cut a corner, our guide scolded him. When I stopped to use the restroom, the inside of my stall had a chart with a color palette ranging from pale yellow to terrifying puce. It instructed me to find the shade that matched my urine and suggested that I should be drinking more water. I spent a week at the warehouse. The cognitive dissonance was intense. At the start of each shift, a blonde, ponytailed manager in her twenties chirped “Helllloooo, campers!” to our cohort of mostly elderly workers, while her assistant coached us through stretches. Afterward, I scanned barcodes on everything from dildos (manufacturer: “Cloud 9” model “Delightful Dong”), to Smith & Wesson Gun Wraps (available in granular and rubberized textures) and $25 AMC gift cards (there were 146 of them, and they had to be scanned individually).

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits
by Kevin Roose
Published 18 Feb 2014

He wanted to absorb the good parts of the private equity experience—the management experience, the deep knowledge of how businesses work, and the ability to turn around struggling companies—without buying into the industry’s abiding principle of “shareholder value,” which held that a strategy of mass layoffs, pension cuts, and tax avoidance could be good, as long as it made more money for the private equity firm and its investors. If Derrick could truly thread that needle, and harmonize the cognitive dissonance of working in finance as a nonbeliever, it would be a rare feat, and it would mean that perhaps he’d be able to sustain his New York life after all. But until he figured out how, he was in for a lot more sleepless nights spent listening to the angel perched on his shoulder, yelling in his ear.

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism
by Ashton Applewhite
Published 10 Feb 2016

All bets are off, except for the fact that the longer we live, the more different from each other we become—and the more likely it is that our lives will diverge from popular culture’s cramped, oppressive script. Intuitively we know this. Lived experience brings the lesson home. The transitions we’re conditioned to dread materialize differently, or not at all. How to jimmy open that crack, that disconnect between script and reality, that twinge of cognitive dissonance? To turn that glimmer of awareness into conscious thought? To turn that awareness into a grasp of the social and economic institutions that attempt to shape our aging? To reject those meanings and develop our own? Last but not least, to take them out into the culture at large? To shift the entire conversation around longevity—from deficit to opportunity, from dependence to interdependence, from burden to gift—and transform our internal experience along with it.

Odd Girl Out: An Autistic Woman in a Neurotypical World
by Laura James
Published 5 Apr 2017

If a teacher tried to get me to join in with the skipping games, I would find an excuse not to. I thought everyone saw life as an obstacle course to be carefully navigated. High school held new terrors every day. It was then that I realized not everyone experienced the world in the same way as me. It was my first understanding of cognitive dissonance. I was more intelligent than most of my classmates, so why could I not understand the work being set for me? My exercise books were a mess. Ink smudged with tears of frustration and sweat from my fingers as I tried to make sense of the problem laid out in the accompanying textbook. While I didn’t learn much at school, it was during my teenage years I learned about hiding my differences and blending in.

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling
by Carlton Reid
Published 14 Jun 2017

Bergman was another enthusiastic cyclist. Nineteen-seventies cycle activist Marchant “Lucky” Wentworth told me by e-mail that, at times, Bergman went beyond his brief, such as when he strongarmed DC’s Department of Motor Vehicles into publishing and promoting a “Bikes Have Equal Rights” poster. A striking example of cognitive dissonance, this poster (see color plates) was produced by Lou Stovall, then an up-and-coming African American community-art activist churning out environmental posters. (He’s now a world-renowned silkscreen printmaker.) “The DMV weren’t big fans of bikes,” remembered Wentworth, “but the [council] chairman controlled their budget and had them by the short ones.”

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism
by Olivia Fox Cabane
Published 1 Mar 2012

From now on, I can give people the feeling I care about them without actually liking them in the least, right?” Wrong. First, as you now know, the vast majority of the time, if you don’t mean what you say, people will intuitively know. They’ll feel it on a gut level. Second, expressing something we don’t believe leads to cognitive dissonance, which uses up our focus, diverts our attention, and thus impairs our performance. Insincerity just isn’t worth the toll it takes. With this said, think of a dozen people who could matter to your career. Then reach out to them by phone or e-mail with the following envy-prevention technique: Justification.

Thinking in Bets
by Annie Duke
Published 6 Feb 2018

Wins and losses are symmetrical. If I field my win as having to do with my skillful play, then my opponent in the hand must have lost because of their less skillful play. Likewise, if I field my loss as having to do with luck, then my opponent must have won due to luck as well. Any other interpretation would create cognitive dissonance. Thinking about it this way, we see that the way we field other people’s outcomes is just part of self-serving bias. Viewed through this lens, the pattern begins to make sense. But this comparison of our results to others isn’t confined to zero-sum games where one player directly loses to the other (or where one lawyer loses to opposing counsel, or where one salesperson loses a sale to a competitor, etc.).

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
by James Bridle
Published 18 Jun 2018

The lock was, after all, in beta: it was a ‘smart lock’ that could be opened with a mobile phone; virtual keys could be emailed to guests in advance of their stay. Why the lock decided to open of its own accord to admit a stranger – who was, thankfully, merely a confused neighbour – was never made clear, and probably never would be. Why would one ask? This cognitive dissonance between the expected functions of a traditional lock and those offered by such a ‘smart’ product can be explained by its real target. It became evident that the locks are a preferred device for those running Airbnb apartments when another manufacturer’s software update bricked hundreds of the devices, leaving their guests out in the cold.38 In the same way that Uber alienates its drivers and customers, and Amazon degrades its workers, Airbnb can be held responsible for the reduction of homes to hotels, and the corresponding rent rises in major cities around the world.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
by Aaron Dignan
Published 1 Feb 2019

We have to judge them purely by their behavior, and their behavior is shaped (at least in part) by their environment. If you place someone in a workplace that pays them by the hour, scrutinizes their every move, and treats them like they are disposable, they may (gasp) present with Theory X behavior. So we live with the cognitive dissonance that we are (somehow) capable and others are not. Pay attention to the conversations happening in your office. What kind of language is used to describe people and teams? If you hear words such as “incentivize . . . control . . . enforce . . .” and phrases such as “they can’t handle . . . they don’t need to know . . . they don’t get it . . . ,” chances are Theory X is driving a lot of the decision making in your organization, albeit unintentionally.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

And in a growth-dependent economy, that cannot be allowed to happen. Instead, the very newspapers that carry harrowing stories about ecological collapse also report excitedly on how GDP is growing every quarter, and the very politicians who wring their hands about climate breakdown also call dutifully for more industrial growth every year. The cognitive dissonance is striking. Some people try to reconcile this tension by leaning on the hope that technology will save us – that innovation will make growth ‘green’. Efficiency improvements will enable us to ‘decouple’ GDP from ecological impact so we can continue growing the global economy for ever without having to change anything about capitalism.

Badvertising
by Andrew Simms

Working as a freelance animator in the West End, I soon learned that nine out of every ten jobs were working on adverts. London’s creative industry as a whole and its many televisual production houses are primarily fuelled by advertising money. If I had felt disquiet over this from the outset, my discomfort grew to become an untenable cognitive dissonance as I followed a personal journey of discovery into the disturbing and very real threat of civilisational collapse as a consequence of oncoming environmental breakdown. I became closely involved in climate activism in my free time, including taking part in civil disobedience at the G8 in Stirling in 2005.

The Authoritarians
by Robert Altemeyer
Published 2 Jan 2007

Chapter 2 The Roots of Authoritarian Aggression, and Authoritarianism Itself Chapter 3 How Authoritarian Followers Think Chapter 4 Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism Chapter 5 Authoritarian Leaders Chapter 6 Authoritarianism and Politics Chapter 7 What’s To Be Done? Preface I realize that my making this book available for free on the internet raises questions about my judgment, especially since I am a psychologist. The well-known theory of cognitive dissonance says that people will value something more if they pay a lot of money to get it. So how much will people value what they get for free? Also, if somebody can make money off a book, how much common sense can he have if he gives it away? Why should you read a book written by someone who has so little common sense?

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
by William D. Cohan
Published 25 Dec 2015

Chairman, that of the major, reputable investment banking firms that perform functions in this area, you would find most of the major investment banking firms in this business, I would say, being 10 or 15 firms of a major character." Felix would return often to this public obsession with the moral and ethical conduct of his fellow investment bankers--seemingly so fraught with cognitive dissonance--even as recently as July 2004, some thirty-five years after his testimony before the Celler commission. In a New York Times interview, he opined, "You should come to the business with a moral code. You're certainly not going to learn it later on. If people conduct themselves in ways that could be deemed immoral, I really wouldn't blame Wall Street, I would blame the individuals themselves who by and large should know better."

…

They come from people who are more than capable of strenuously negotiating over the amount of the fee. Fees are the purest form of competition. The companies have full knowledge of what other banks are getting for similar deals and the service provided, and they are not shy." Felix, though, having perfected the art of cognitive dissonance, alone among his peers criticized the growing fees. "The level of fees is so different depending on what happens--and that's the unhealthy element," he told the Times. An apex of sorts was clearly reached during one of the most infamous takeover battles of all time--the 1982 fight for Bendix between Martin Marietta, Allied, and United Technologies.

…

"Market conditions may occur under which a bridge loan cannot be refinanced," he correctly predicted. As to the concern about foreign acquisitions, Felix simply acknowledged that it "is becoming an area of increasing economic and political importance," and then sought clarification on the rules of engagement. Afterward, more than one of his partners remarked on the level of cognitive dissonance that Felix must be able to withstand after, on the one hand, actively participating in the acquisition of American companies by Japanese companies and, on the other hand, being able to testify before senators trying to come to terms with the phenomenon--and not even acknowledge before them his own role.

After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine
by Antony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moor
Published 14 Jun 2012

Indeed, Israelis, fed up with the economic situation in Tel Aviv, demanded to change the game unilaterally, with no discussion of the occupation or the deep-seated separation principle which has taken over Israeli society. The simple fact apparently lost on many Israelis is that Israeli and Palestinian society is more connected now than at any other time. Israelis have been able to maintain their society and its willing ignorance of the situation in the West Bank only through collective cognitive dissonance. This explains the bitter reaction of many tent protesters when presented with the paradox of demanding social justice without discussion of the occupation. It also explains the generally negative sentiment towards the joint struggle, as well as the low numbers of Israelis who join the protests.

Bad Data Handbook
by Q. Ethan McCallum
Published 14 Nov 2012

But there’s a design problem here: if a sentiment classifier is more biased towards the pos class, it will produce more false positives. And if you plan on surfacing these positive reviews, showing them to normal people that have no insight into how a sentiment classifier works, you really don’t want to show a false positive review. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance when you claim that a business is highly rated and most people like it, while at the same time showing a negative review. One of the worst things you can do when designing a user interface is to show conflicting messages at the same time. So by balancing the pos and neg categories, I was able to reduce that bias and decrease false positives.

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly: A Physician's First Year
by Matt McCarthy
Published 6 Apr 2015

She had short-circuited my one ironclad logical point. Let her die? What was I supposed to say? I could treat her HIV and what appeared to be neurosyphilis, but how was I supposed to treat whatever made her favor dying over taking the pills? Standing before her, I felt the glare of my colleagues. Chanel must have sensed my cognitive dissonance. She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Can we talk about this later, one-on-one?” “You can talk,” Dre said, “talk all you want.” “Very well,” Chanel said. “I’ll come back later.” We stepped out of the room and discussed the approach to this difficult patient. Everyone agreed that a multidisciplinary approach would be necessary, incorporating psychiatry, social work, nursing, and potentially a host of other specialists.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America
by Jamie Bronstein
Published 29 Oct 2016

“In all probability a much more massive unfree or limited service would have been drafted into the plantation colonies from the ranks of white convicts and other outcasts—in which case the planters’ privileges would unmistakably have rested on the labour of landless workers with small hope of advancement for themselves and their children.”25 Plantation owners were paternalistic in their language, referring to their slaves as part of their families, but they calculated slaves as property and did not hesitate to sell them, distribute them in wills, or take any other steps that were necessary to maximize profit.26 If slaves are counted both as wealth and as potential owners of wealth, then inequality in the entire pre-Civil-War period is even more extreme than scholars of American inequality have calculated.27 Nor was the society in which slaves lived a monolith; rather, occupation, gender, the size of the community in which slaves lived, and geography created inequalities.28 The existence of slavery in a “free” country entailed a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. James L. Huston argues that from the outset, slavery conflicted with the notion of receiving the fruits of one’s labor that was essential to Republicanism, and that writers including Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson realized this.29 But the Founders did not let their hesitation about labor’s rewards get in the way of a federal Constitution that enshrined and perpetuated slavery.

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
by Dan Ariely
Published 31 May 2010

Anne Preston, “The Nonprofit Worker in a For-Profit World,” Journal of Labor Economics 7, no. 4 (1989): 438–463. Chapter 3: The IKEA Effect: Why We Overvalue What We Make Based on Gary Becker, Morris H. DeGroot, and Jacob Marschak, “An Experimental Study of Some Stochastic Models for Wagers,” Behavioral Science 8, no. 3 (1963): 199–201. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957). Nikolaus Franke, Martin Schreier, and Ulrike Kaiser, “The ‘I Designed It Myself’ Effect in Mass Customization,” Management Science 56, no. 1 (2009): 125–140. Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love,” manuscript, Harvard University, 2010.

The Quantum Thief
by Hannu Rajaniemi
Published 1 Jan 2010

The thought of the place she put me in before does make her look a little like the Oortian dark god of the void. ‘Perhonen will show you your quarters.’ When the thief is gone, Mieli lies down in the pilot’s crèche. She feels exhausted, even though the biot feed of her body – that has been waiting for her with Perhonen, for months – tells her she is perfectly rested. But the cognitive dissonance is worse. Was it me who was in the Prison? Or another? She remembers the long weeks of preparation, days of subjective slowtime in a q-suit, getting ready to commit a crime just so she could be caught by the Archons and enter the Prison: the eternity in her cell, mind wrapped in an old memory.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent
by Nesrine Malik
Published 4 Sep 2019

It aims to blackmail good people into ceding space to bad ideas, even though they have a legitimate right to refuse. And it is a myth that demands in turn, its own silencing and undermining of individual freedom. To accept the freedom of speech crisis myth is to give up your own right to turn off the comments. The myth and its promoters thrive on cognitive dissonances and good intentions, feeding them with false equivalence, fabrication and ‘slippery slope’ fallacies. The first, false equivalence, is based on the notion that free speech is absolute which, both on a customary and legal level, is false. False equivalence At the same time as a proliferation in platform, a right-wing counter push was taking place online.

Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen
by Dan Heath
Published 3 Mar 2020

He replied, “I’m not willing to say that we should let species go extinct rather than kill introduced animals, but if there is extreme suffering (e.g., the deaths of millions of rabbits in Australia because of the introduced virus myxomatosis) then I am doubtful that we ought to do that.” He added that “we should develop non-lethal methods of population control, or if that isn’t possible, find lethal methods that result in a quick and painless death.” I quickly embraced Singer’s stance as my own, in hopes of keeping at bay any more cognitive dissonance. II. I should add, to be fair, that Holmes is not skeptical about the Macquarie Island intervention in the way that I am. Don’t want it to seem like he’s throwing his conservation colleagues under the bus here. III. Some nuance here: First, plastic surgeons often do show off photos to patients.

Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child
by Alissa Quart
Published 16 Aug 2006

In fact, child and teen competitive preaching is such a craft that James’s father was concerned that the sermon that his son, along with the other teen preachers, would deliver a number of times (the teen preachers repeat the same sermon over and over again at the competition) had some “redundancies,” and “James went too quickly on two or three lines.” One of the competition’s judges, Dan Olinger, a Bob Jones theologian, contradicted my overall impression that style and oratorical skill triumph over the “realness” of authentic faith. “We look to see if they are nervous or artificial or if there’s too much cognitive dissonance to the sermon,” he said. “One kid one year referred to ‘a terrible storm at sea’ within one’s soul, ‘like the storm in the television show Gilligan’s Island.’” In the Bible Preaching judging forms, the factors Olinger and other judges evaluated in the preacher boy competitors included “vitality,” defined as “‘life’ in the face, body & voice”: “eye contact/empathy (direct visual and mental contact with audience)”: “Poise/Authority (sense of composure, assurance & authority)”: and “Emphasis/Variety (stress on key ideas through appropriate, accurate explanation of Scripture & principles presented).”

Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life
by David Allen
Published 30 Dec 2008

I need and use GTD myself so much because I often have to have blinders, just like a horse, to stay on course. On the Positive Side Of course we can never really stop visioning. By our very nature we are always imaging outcomes and goals. As soon as we decide to leave a room, we have made a commitment that is unfulfilled, which creates a cognitive dissonance that generates the juice necessary to get up and moving. Looking out on a horizon, being attracted to something that we want to experience or accomplish, is core to expressing and expanding ourselves, whether it’s a matter of putting on a hat or creating a conference. Many executives we have coached fall into this quadrant.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
by Rory Sutherland
Published 6 May 2019

*For instance, will wealthy Germans help poorer Germans? Yup. Will they help Syrians? Yes, albeit reluctantly. Poor Greeks, however? No chance. *In Western countries at any rate, Asia seems to be different in this, to some degree. *Including me, weirdly. *The technical term is ‘cognitive dissonance’. *Even the super-rich love a bargain. In fact supermarket own-brand products tend to be bought more by wealthier people than by poorer people. *Pernod, of course, only tastes really good in France. And Guinness tastes better in Ireland. But that’s not because Guinness is better in Ireland, but because Ireland is a better backdrop for drinking Guinness.

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
by Cal Newport
Published 2 Mar 2021

It’s the fourth of his five ideas, however, that I want to dwell on, as it casts into sharp relief the intellectual framework I’ve attempted to build in this book: Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. . . . A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. Postman’s idea clarifies the confusing cognitive dissonance so many people feel about digital communication tools like email. Rationally, we know email is a better way to deliver messages than the technologies it superseded: it’s universal, it’s fast, it’s essentially free. For anyone old enough to remember clearing jammed fax machines or struggling to open the red-thread ties of those worn memo folders, there’s no debate that email elegantly solves real problems that once made office life really annoying.

Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century
by Jonathan Sacks
Published 19 Apr 2010

If all this is correct, it explains why, for two centuries, Jews have pursued policies that seemed to make sense but were destined to yield a result precisely the reverse of that expected.15 The less demanding the religion, the less it will be observed. The explanation lies in Leon Festinger’s famous discovery known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. One corollary of this theory is that we value most what costs us the most.16 The more demanding the task, the greater commitment it evokes. That can be seen to be true today, not only within Judaism but in all the world’s faiths. We value most that for which we make sacrifices. Judaism survived two thousand years of exile, not because it was user-friendly but because it was difficult, sometimes heartbreakingly so.

Upgrade
by Blake Crouch
Published 6 Jul 2022

What emotional incentive do we have to make the sacrifices that will save future generations, if our brains aren’t capable of caring about them sufficiently? My mother once posited that we are not rational beings. We read about all the looming threats in the paper, we watch it on the news, and then we get on with our day. And, yes, some of that is thanks to our ability to hide from reality with denial, with cognitive dissonance, with magical thinking. But she forgot the most important thing: In the absence of compassion, selfishness is the most rational response of all. Our species’ superpower is not caring. We merely exercised that ability. We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
by Christopher Hitchens
Published 14 Jun 2007

I had no intention of criticizing Allah’s will, only to discover what had gone so very wrong. It was at university that I gradually lost my faith. The ideas and the facts that I encountered there were thrilling and powerful, but they also clashed horribly with the vision of the world with which I had grown up. At first, when the cognitive dissonance became too strong, I would try to shove these issues to the back of my mind. The ideas of Spinoza and Freud, Darwin and Locke and Mill, were indisputably true, but so was the Koran; and I vowed to one day resolve these differences. In the meantime, I could not make myself stop reading. I knew the argument was a weak one, but I told myself that Allah is in favor of knowledge.

…

A religion of talking serpents and heavenly gardens? I usually respond that I suffer from hayfever. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my grandmother’s angels and djinns. The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
by Rebecca MacKinnon
Published 31 Jan 2012

Part of our reason for being here at this meeting is to talk about the lack of a similar infrastructure for platforms for free expression, because this has been an area where we believe that in the past the legislation has not paid enough attention. We do believe in the protection of intellectual property. We also believe in the balance that permits a free and vibrant platform for free expression.” Wong’s arguments were met with dubious frowns on the faces of the elected representatives of the American people. The cognitive dissonance on display at that hearing highlighted an inconvenient reality: politicians throughout the democratic world are pushing for stronger censorship and surveillance by Internet companies to stop the theft of intellectual property. They are doing so in response to aggressive lobbying by powerful corporate constituents without adequate consideration of the consequences for civil liberties, and for democracy more broadly.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age
by Virginia Eubanks
Published 1 Feb 2011

It was, many believed, the American Dream manifest: all you needed was a good idea, some sweat equity, and a garage, and the digital economy would bestow on you its mighty gifts. I understood the itch for 4 Chapter 1 the million. Straightforward greed was not what was tying my brain in knots. What I had trouble wrapping my head around was Silicon Valley’s unique way of combining utopian fervor with blatant dissociation from reality, a cognitive dissonance that led me to a personal crisis of conscience and eventually drove me out of the Bay Area. People around me seemed to believe that the high-tech economy was going to lift all boats—lead to better outcomes for everyone—but they were ignoring the obvious evidence of increasing economic inequality that I saw around me every day.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

While we’ll have an especially strong affinity toward our converted rivals, will they feel the same way toward us? Yes—this is the second advantage of converting resisters. To like us, they have to work especially hard to overcome their initial negative impressions, telling themselves, I must have been wrong about that person. Moving forward, to avoid the cognitive dissonance of changing their minds yet again, they’ll be especially motivated to maintain a positive relationship. Third, and most important, it is our former adversaries who are the most effective at persuading others to join our movements. They can marshal better arguments on our behalf, because they understand the doubts and misgivings of resisters and fence-sitters.

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class
by Jeff Faux
Published 16 May 2012

Optimism has also had its liabilities, collective blind spots of complacency that ultimately produced recessions, depressions, and financial collapses; the dead and maimed of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans. Continuing your patterns of behavior in the face of evidence that you will end up badly is a well-known psychological construct. Cognitive dissonance, in which people feel discomfort when they hold conflicting ideas simultaneously, can sometimes be a variant of this. Denial of what is objectively apparent is another. Psychologists have catalogued numerous ways in which people would rather hunker down in their present dysfunctional jobs, relationships, or lifestyles that are leading to personal disaster than risk the discomfort and uncertainty that come with taking responsibility for their futures.

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
by Brian Christian
Published 1 Mar 2011

Kasparov, of course, immediately proposes a 1998 “best out of three” tiebreaker match for all the marbles—“I personally guarantee I will tear it in pieces”—but as soon as the dust settles and the press walks away, IBM quietly cuts the team’s funding, reassigns the engineers, and begins to slowly take Deep Blue apart. Doc, I’m a Corpse When something happens that creates a cognitive dissonance, when two of our beliefs are shown to be incompatible, we’re still left with the choice of which one to reject. In academic philosophy circles this has a famous joke: A guy comes in to the doctor’s, says, “Doc, I’m a corpse. I’m dead.” The doctor says, “Well, are corpses … ticklish?” “Course not, doc!”

Liar's Poker
by Michael Lewis
Published 1 Jan 1989

Not that they ever doubted they were worth every penny they got. But they were uneasy with the explosion of debt in America. (In general, the better they recalled the Great Depression, the more suspicious they were of the leveraging of America.) The head of bond research at Salomon, Henry Kaufman, was, when I arrived, our most acute case of cognitive dissonance. He was the guru of the bond market and also the conscience of our firm. He told investors whether their fast-moving bonds were going up or down. He was so often right that the markets made him famous if not throughout the English-speaking world then at least among the sort of people who read the Wall Street Journal.

The Rapture of the Nerds
by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
Published 3 Sep 2012

Oh, and you need to get to present it in court, but that’s not so hard. If your argument were better, 639,219 would agree with you, right?” “No!” Huw tenses angrily, but is brought up short by a knot. “She’s a traitor—” “No, she’s you. A version of you with a different value system, is all. Her stimulus led to cognitive dissonance and she dealt with it by changing her mind. It’s fun; you should try it some time. Not,” he adds hastily, “right now, but in principle. What do you wash this with, baking soda?” “You’re telling me I have to change her mind,” Huw manages to say through gritted teeth. “Something like that would do, yes.

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
by Adam L. Alter
Published 15 Feb 2017

Vinokur and Michelle van Ryn, “Social Support and Undermining in Close Relationships: Their Independent Effects on the Mental Health of Unemployed Persons,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65, no. 2 (1993): 350–59; Hans Kreitler and Shulamith Kreitler, “Unhappy Memories of the ‘Happy Past’: Studies in Cognitive Dissonance,” British Journal of Psychology 59, no. 2 (May 1968): 157–66; Mark R. Leary, Ellen S. Tambor, Sonja K. Terdal, and Deborah L. Downs, “Self-Esteem As an Interpersonal Monitor: The Sociometer Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68, no. 3 (1995): 518–30. Essena O’Neill, a: Elle Hunt, “Essena O’Neill Quits Instagram Claiming Social Media ‘Is Not Real Life,’” Guardian, November 3, 2015, www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/03/instagram-star-essena-oneill-quits-2d-life-to-reveal-true-story-behind-images; Megan McCluskey, “Instagram Star Essena O’Neill Breaks Her Silence on Quitting Social Media,” Time, January 5, 2015, time.com/4167856/essena-oneill-breaks-silence-on-quitting-social-media/; O’Neill describes her perspective in this video: Essena O’Neill, “Essena O’Neill—Why I REALLY Am Quitting Social Media,” YouTube, November 3, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted
by Daniel Sokatch
Published 18 Oct 2021

Highways, tunnels, walls, military bases, and heavily armed and guarded checkpoints now crisscrossed the occupied territories, allowing Israel to expand the Jewish settlements there while integrating them into the economic, social, and political life of the country. All this enabled many Israelis to ignore and remain inured to the harsh realities of the occupation going on in their name just a few kilometers away, on the other side of the Green Line. The fact that Israelis didn’t have to see this reality facilitated a kind of cognitive dissonance: an unwillingness, or even inability, on the part of Israelis to connect Israel’s actions to the roots of Palestinian misery and rage. For Israelis, things were relatively quiet, and the economy was good. As if in response, Israelis increasingly voted for right-wing governments who insisted that only they could ensure Israel’s security and prosperity.

The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers
by Emily Levesque
Published 3 Aug 2020

Sometimes observing from sea level is a handy way of avoiding the physical strain of heading up to altitude. Astronomers using the Keck telescopes at Mauna Kea will observe from the Keck headquarters in Waimea, a tiny town nestled in the rolling green hills of Hawaii’s northern Big Island. The perks are undeniable—plentiful oxygen, restaurants and coffee shops across the street—but the cognitive dissonance is also sometimes funny. More than one observer has had a moment of reflexive panic when hearing the rain pounding the windows in Waimea and realizing that the telescope is open; years of conditioning from classical observing can trigger a moment of “oh god, it’s raining on the mirror” horror before the geography of the situation kicks in.

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Published 14 May 2017

In short, unlike Veblen’s leisure class or David Brooks’s “bobos,” this new elite is not defined by economics. Rather, the aspirational class is formed through a collective consciousness upheld by specific values and acquired knowledge and the rarified social and cultural processes necessary to acquire them. In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks chronicled the cognitive dissonance of “bobos” (bohemian bourgeois) who grew up in the counterculture 1960s and felt a deep discomfort around their adulthood wealth. This group is also an economically based elite, or what Brooks called “the new upper class.” The uneasiness many bobos felt in reconciling their hippy, nonmaterialistic earlier years and their newfound wealth resulted in consumer habits that were still expensive but ultimately attempted to distance themselves from money.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

Many of them had clamored for the dismantling of systems designed, among other things, to protect equality, such as labor unions, zoning regulations, or the laws that assured job security and benefits for workers. How was the faith in the win-win maintained in the face of widespread evidence that one was in fact contributing to inequality? How did these new barons relieve the cognitive dissonance they might have felt from claiming to improve others’ lives while noticing that their own were perhaps the only ones getting better? One day at Summit at Sea, in the well of the Bliss Ultra Lounge, on the seventh floor of the ship, a high priest of this technology world, a venture capitalist named Shervin Pishevar, was demonstrating one form of relief.

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life
by David Mitchell
Published 4 Nov 2014

Utterly inept with regard to these elements of television production which I previously considered vital to a drama’s success – or certainly its enjoyability. Yet I undoubtedly do enjoy Downton Abbey, and not “because it’s so terrible”. I unironically enjoy it despite how bad it is. Is that what they call cognitive dissonance? Or is it just really liking footage of a stately home? So Laura Carmichael deserves much credit for turning the implausible words and actions in the script into a believable character. Lady Edith is the second daughter of the Earl of Grantham, who owns Downton Abbey (which is where Downton Abbey is set – it is not a real abbey, so he is not an abbot), and she has a very rough time.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 14 Oct 2019

Clarke used a similar plot device in his 1968 book, 2001: A Space Odyssey.16 The artificially intelligent computer HAL is programmed to always be truthful to humans, but at the same time to withhold the truth from human astronauts about the actual purpose of their space mission. HAL, unlike Asimov’s clueless robot, suffers from the psychological pain of this cognitive dissonance: “He was … aware of the conflict that was slowly destroying his integrity—the conflict between truth, and concealment of truth.”17 The result is a computer “neurosis” that turns HAL into a killer. Reflecting on real-life machine morality, the mathematician Norbert Wiener noted as long ago as 1960 that “we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”18 Wiener’s comment captures what is called the value alignment problem in AI: the challenge for AI programmers to ensure that their systems’ values align with those of humans.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023

Celsius executives began seeing James and other online critics as adversaries endangering their business. Months after his company filed for bankruptcy, Mashinsky was still playing victim, blaming everyone from Sam Bankman-Fried to crypto media that “publish[ed] false and misleading stories about Celsius and almost never covered any positive news.” The cognitive dissonance was bewildering: What was there positive to say about a Ponzi scheme? James tried to keep himself anonymous online. Dirty Bubble Media provided a shield, a barrier between his day-to-day life and that of his investigator-journalist persona. In his writing, he sometimes used the more inclusive we, referring to DBM as a publication.

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
by Jeff Sharlet
Published 21 Mar 2023

Everybody seemed to know someone who’d participated (or, like Rob, had participated), and yet nobody believed it’d really happened. If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” such cognitive dissonance is the awful genius of our ecstatically disinformed age. “Pro-life.” “Free speech.” Athena, for instance, embraced fascism and yet bridled at the name. “They call me a Nazi,” she muttered, sitting stooped on a tall chair beside the pool table. “Just because of my German-flag tattoo.” Sometimes, she said, they told her to kill herself.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner
by Po Bronson
Published 14 Jul 2020

I’m not sure what would trigger an awakening moment on climate. New Orleans is only one foot above sea level (on average), and yet also the second-biggest oil-and-gas industrial center in the United States. I have a lot of family there, and they lost seven out of nine houses in Katrina. The levees are taller now. The human capacity for cognitive dissonance is infinite. Especially when it happens gradually, and even when it happens all of a sudden. They’re keeping their eye out for hurricanes on the Gulf, when the real hurricane is coming from the high-rises on Poydras Street, where the oil and gas companies have their boardrooms. Nobody thinks the world is without problems.

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction
by Adrian Hon
Published 5 Oct 2020

Professor Gottleib recounts their thinking: They knew that, in theory, just reading a different news site or making new friends would be enough to increase a person’s and a community’s memetic diversity. But that’s easier said than done! We’re creatures of habit, and most people, myself included, would be very happy to keep to their routines and live within their comfort zones. Opening yourself up to new ideas and the cognitive dissonance that they might bring requires genuine confidence, usually born of emotional and economic security. The point is, no one at the time really knew how to reliably increase memetic diversity. Even worse, no one even knew what the true state of memetic diversity was—a precondition, you’d think, of any solution.

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
by Lierre Keith
Published 30 Apr 2009

The unreal love of the sentimentalist reaches no further than the self and gives precedence to pleasures and pains of its own, or else invents for itself a gratifying image of the pleasures and pains of its object.101 The quote is from Roger Scruton’s Animal Rights and Wrongs, a book that to me was the equivalent of prodding Sappho’s rubble on the beach, and yes, I am squeamish. I’m uneasy criticizing a movement that is working to stop torture. And it leaves me with a wrenching sense of moral cognitive dissonance to find my criticism expressed by someone who is otherwise repugnant to me. But sometimes your enemies are your best critics, and Scruton is precisely right about sentimentality. The AR movement is liberal individualism applied to animals. It is a reflection of human needs and desires, not the needs and desires of animals themselves.

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love
by Dava Sobel
Published 25 May 2009

“I am thinking about treating this topic very extensively,” confessed Galileo, “in opposition to heretics, the most influential of whom I hear accept Copernicus’s opinion; I would want to show them that we Catholics continue to be certain of the old truth taught us by the sacred authors, not for lack of scientific understanding, or for not having studied as many arguments, experiments, observations, and demonstrations as they have, but rather because of the reverence we have toward the writings of our Fathers and because of our zeal in religion and faith.” Italian astronomers, in other words, could tolerate the cognitive dissonance of admiring Copernicus on a theoretical level, while rejecting him theologically. “Thus, when they [Protestants] see that we understand very well all their astronomical and physical reasons, and indeed also others much more powerful than those advanced till now, at most they will blame us as men who are steadfast in our beliefs, but not as blind to and ignorant of the human disciplines; and this is something which in the final analysis should not concern a true Catholic Christian—I mean that a heretic laughs at him because he gives priority to the reverence and trust which is due to the sacred authors over all the arguments and observations of astronomers and philosophers put together.”

Switched On: My Journey From Asperger's to Emotional Awakening
by John Elder Robison
Published 6 Apr 2016

After we were done the chairperson asked if I’d be willing to serve on other committees. “We could use more of your insights,” she told me. I was proud to have done a good job and honoured that she’d asked. As I pictured my staff putting water pumps on Land Rovers the next day, I thought of the phrase “cognitive dissonance,” and I wondered if I was facing a similar mental situation now, having to function effectively in two different worlds. The early committee service led to other appointments and my increased involvement in autism science. My world was becoming so different, so fast. I was proud of my contribution, and of acceptance in a new world, but I was often terrified and also lonely.

50 Psychology Classics
by Tom Butler-Bowdon
Published 14 Oct 2007

Considered psychology to be the “science of the self.” 13 Antonio Damasio Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994) Prominent brain researcher’s theory that debunks the separation of mind and body and shows how emotions form a vital part of rational judgment and decision making. 14 Hermann Ebbinghaus Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885) Account of first ever experimental lab work into learning and memory, setting a high standard for future research. 15 Leon Festinger Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957) Famous theory of how people try to maintain consistency in their beliefs, even when what they believe has been shown to be wrong. 16 Eric Fromm Escape from Freedom (1941) Influential study on people’s willingness to submit to fascist regimes, written before the full horror of Nazism became apparent. 17 William Glasser Reality Therapy: A New Approach to Psychiatry (1965) Alternative approach to mental illness, resting on the idea that mental health means an acceptance of responsibility for one’s life. 18 Dennis Greenberger & Christine Padesky Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think (1995) Popular work of powerful cognitive therapy techniques, not just for depressives. 19 Robert D.

Fuller Memorandum
by Stross, Charles
Published 14 Jan 2010

I've got Amarok running on my desktop (playing "Drowning in Berlin" on endless repeat, because I need a pounding beat to keep me awake) and I've plowed through the CODICIL BLACK SKULL file that Angleton left me, and then on into a bunch of tedious legwork for this morning's session. I'm suffering from severe cognitive dissonance; every so often you think you've got a handle on this job, on the paper clip audits and interminable bureaucracy and committee meetings, and then something insane crawls out of the woodwork and gibbers at you, something crazy enough to give James Bond nightmares that just happen to be true.

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 1 Jan 2009

It would be very odd to say she deserved to be paid more. 40 See Dick (1975) for further discussion of the difficulties. 41 See Wolff (2003) and Moriarty (2005). 42 Rawls (1999), p89. 43 Sher (2003) shows how hard it is to define effort in a way that leaves it entirely within our control. 44 Frey (1997). 45 Fehr and Gachter (2000). 46 That is, cognitive dissonance is reduced once it is recognized that tax brings benefits as well as being unavoidable. 47 Torgler (2007). Chapter 5 1 John Adams, second President of the United States. In Adams (1850—1856), p193. 2 Kahneman (1999), p22. 3 Kahneman (1999), p3. 4 See Frey and Stutzer (2007) for further details and full references. 5 Davidson et al (2000), Davidson (2000, 2004).

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

For the market to be the ideal organizational mode, some economists assume that rational actors will rank the order of their preferences linearly: if rational actors prefer option A over B as well as option B over C, they also will prefer option A over C. Yet this view of the market has been challenged in recent decades. Markets hide transaction costs and information asymmetries. Behavioral economists have demonstrated how under a number of conditions (such as fear, regret, the threat of loss, cognitive dissonance, or peer pressure) the rational homo economicus is a fiction: a person may prefer apples to bananas, bananas to cantaloupes, and cantaloupes to apples, and there is no guarantee that there exists a rational solution to voting systems or daily choices involving three or more actors.24 By contrast, the concept of hierarchy (from the Greek term ἱεραρχία, “rule by priests”) reaches back fifteen centuries to religious roots.

Redrobe
by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Published 1 Jan 2000

Get yourself cloned and any half-decent clinic could suck up memories from a soul chip and spit them back into a fresh cortex. Feelings were something else. And the problem with straight copying was you know what happened to you, maybe even why it happened. What you didn’t get from a soul chip is what you felt while it was happening. It brought a whole new meaning to cognitive dissonance. Joan was fifty-five. So her brain would have processed the equivalent of 300 million books. Which sounded big but came out as around ten terrabites of memory, not remotely hard for five chips. But dreams are like feelings. Just as you can’t chip the flickering dendritic matrix that ties emotionally-rich events into a shifting web of neural connections, so it’s impossible to hardcopy the rush that kicks in during REM sleep when the frontal lobes shut down, emotional centres fire up and the brain swims with acetyl-choline.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody
by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay
Published 14 Jul 2020

Intersectional Theory provided an entirely new, “increasingly sophisticated” way to understand power dynamics in society, allowing them to repurpose their failing theoretical models into something more diffuse and less falsifiable.23 We often observe this kind of shift to a more “sophisticated” and nebulous model when people are highly personally and ideologically committed to a theoretical approach that is clearly failing. This phenomenon was first described by Leon Festinger, in his study of UFO cults, and led to the development of the concept of cognitive dissonance.24 Festinger observed that highly committed cultists did not abandon their beliefs when the predictions of the cult failed to manifest—when the UFO never came. Instead, cultists resolved this undeniable contradiction by claiming the event had occurred, but in some unfalsifiable way (specifically, they claimed God decided to spare the planet as a result of the faith of the cultists).

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

Private schools in London have fifty-nine theatres compared to forty-two in the West End. (The auditorium at my sons’ school, more state-of-the-art than the Young Vic, was dark between student productions yet, astonishingly, never lent to local comps.) That last sentence is instructive. Turner sends her son to public school. It’s a weird piece of cognitive dissonance that many liberals feel, if not comfortable with, then liveable with. David Kynaston and Francis Green in their recent book Engines of Privilege admit that they were both privately educated (though not their kids) and, while rightly savaging the current system and the status quo, recommend not outright abolition but reforms; more places for ordinary kids, tinkering with the subsidies, quota systems for university places.

Risk: A User's Guide
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico
Published 4 Oct 2021

Now soldiers were biased toward the enemy simply because they were the enemy. Calling our enemies by epithets, racist or otherwise, dehumanizes them—and it is less difficult to kill an opponent once you have dehumanized them in your mind. In war, the biases become personal: we are quick to hate those who are hurting us. Biases prevent cognitive dissonance—supporting our thoughts and actions even when they are founded on destructive untruths. “At My Signal, Unleash Hell” On March 14, 2003, General Tommy Franks, the commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM), readied for war. Stationed at his headquarters in Qatar, he assembled his command team for a presentation on the upcoming invasion of Iraq, still waiting to receive the order from Washington to force Saddam Hussein and his Ba‘ath Party from power.

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Published 1 Nov 1983

And when a worker abandons her work smile, what kind of tie remains between her smile and her self? Display is what is sold, but over the long run display comes to assume a certain relation to feeling. As enlightened management realizes, a separation of display and feeling is hard to keep up over long periods. A principle of emotive dissonance, analogous to the principle of cognitive dissonance, is at work. Maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning over the long run leads to strain. We try to reduce this strain by pulling the two closer together either by changing what we feel or by changing what we feign. When display is required by the job, it is usually feeling that has to change; and when conditions estrange us from our face, they sometimes estrange us from feeling as well.

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
by Kathi Weeks
Published 8 Sep 2011

The wages for housework perspective has a similar potential to demystify the wage system insofar as it can draw attention to the arbitrariness by which contributions to social production are or are not assigned a wage. Clearly one of the primary attractions of the wages for housework perspective was its denaturalizing effect. To insist that a woman receive payment for what is supposed to be a spontaneous desire rooted in women’s nature produces a certain cognitive dissonance. One advocate underscored the value of the demand in these terms: “It is the demand by which our nature ends and our struggle begins because just to want wages for housework means to refuse that work as the expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us” (Federici 1995, 190).

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise
by Eric Ries
Published 15 Mar 2017

Like many of my peers in Silicon Valley, I came up in my career with a belief that “big company” people were fundamentally different from creative, disruptive entrepreneurs like us.3 That once organizations reach a certain size, they start dying slowly, from the inside. They cease to innovate. The most creative people choose to leave. Big companies inevitably become sclerotic, bureaucratic, political. This belief creates a strange paradox, a kind of cognitive dissonance that affects all of us who aspire to high-growth entrepreneurship. Having worked with literally hundreds of entrepreneurs, I’ve become used to asking them: “If you hate big companies so much, why are you trying to create a new one?” They’re often stumped by the question, since in their mind’s eye, the company they are busy building will be different.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

CHAPTER 9 The New Monopolists After my brief flirtation with the idea of working at Google nearly a decade ago, the next time I’d visit the company’s New York office was in 2017, shortly after taking up my position as the Financial Times’ global business columnist. The food was just as good, but the cognitive dissonance between how the Googlers viewed the company and how many others viewed it had grown more extreme. When I brought up the issue of monopoly power with the public policy staffer I was meeting with, she seemed genuinely surprised. “We feel like we are under threat all the time, from other big technology companies,” she told me.

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street
by Jonathan A. Knee
Published 31 Jul 2006

So, for instance, although it is true that since 1990 only Goldman or Morgan have been number one in the Global M&A rankings, Goldman has secured this position thirteen times to Morgan’s three. The last time Morgan was number one in M&A was 1996. In Global Equities during this period, Morgan typically trailed not only Goldman but Merrill and sometimes others as well. This dichotomy between self-perception and reality created a certain cognitive dissonance with respect to all things Goldman and a deep self-consciousness at Morgan with respect to the firm’s own relative standing in the world. So intense were these feelings of competitiveness that they sometimes manifested themselves in childish or petty ways. A few months after I arrived, Media Group head Jeff Sine giddily called me into his office to tell me that a friend of his had seen Pete Kiernan act boorishly at a charity horse show in Greenwich and get into a fight.

Permanent Record
by Edward Snowden
Published 16 Sep 2019

Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind: its citizens outraged, its government complicit. Any elected government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy. Such cognitive dissonance on a geopolitical scale has helped to bring individual privacy concerns back into the international dialogue within the context of human rights. For the first time since the end of World War II, liberal democratic governments throughout the world were discussing privacy as the natural, inborn right of every man, woman, and child.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

It is the human interest element that captures the imagination of readers, whether within a local community or the national one. But the first time a reporter walks up the path to knock on the door – probably hoping that no one is in – he or she is fighting an internal battle against a lifetime’s societal norms. It doesn’t feel right. It is also a moment that focuses the reporter on the cognitive dissonance of readers and viewers: the people who criticise a death knock are more than likely to be the very ones who want to read the resulting story. Reporters can only comfort themselves, as the door finally opens, with the fact that it is the job of a journalist to report events, no matter how tragic.

Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories From the Frontline
by Steven K. Kapp
Published 19 Nov 2019

Working alongside other autistic people may take quite a lot of additional work (by all concerned) to ensure that communication is effective and perceptions of all sorts are factored in, allowed for and not seen as insuperable barriers, even if there’s some 284 D. Murray potentially painful cognitive dissonance. That said, having autistic comrades along when entering any lions’ dens can in my experience make all the difference between being able or not able to communicate effectively. Our impact partly depends on pragmatic adaptation, but our strongest suit is being people with the passion and commitment and indifference to hierarchy to persevere obstinately against the odds.

A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout
by Carl Safina
Published 18 Apr 2011

“And we had what I call ‘the social and political nullification’ of the National Contingency Plan,” he says. In other words, the public and politicians weren’t buying the constraints of the law. Main case in point: “The National Contingency Plan says the spiller is the ‘responsible party.’ That means they have to be there with you. But having BP with us created cognitive dissonance with the public. People didn’t understand; how could BP be part of the command structure? But that was what the law required.” He thinks it would be best to have a third party—not the oil company, not government—in charge of spill response. “Too much perception of conflicts of interest otherwise,” he says.

Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff
by Christine S. Richard
Published 26 Apr 2010

“Well, the most obvious candidate is Bill Ackman.” After a few hours, the tone of the questions was less aggressive. The attorneys seemed to be running through a checklist of issues. When Tilson got up to leave, one of the attorneys asked him, “Are you really friends with Bill Ackman?” “The idea seemed to create incredible cognitive dissonance for him,” Tilson recalls. WHEN ACKMAN RETURNED to the attorney general’s office to talk about Farmer Mac, the tension rose again. The lawyers turned their attention to Ackman’s comments in his research report on Farmer Mac, which suggested the company was funding long-term assets with high levels of short-term debt.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike
by Eugene W. Holland
Published 1 Jan 2009

For the State at war commands loy­ alty not just by demanding that its citizens consent to kill others; it also does so by demanding that they consent to sacrifice—their well-being and, ultimately, their lives—for the sake and at the behest of the State. The Death-State, in other words, specifically aggravates the very vulner­ ability it transforms into irrevocable loyalty to itself and to the cause of war. The strategic effectiveness of repeated calls to “support the troops” was clear evidence, based on the staggering power of cognitive dissonance, that people become incapable of questioning a cause to which citizens’ lives are sacrificed—because of the very fact o fth at sacrifice; and it is tes­ timony to the strength of their abject identification with the Death-State. State power thus derives not just from being in the position to decide and declare who is friend and who is enemy but from being in the position to demand the ultimate sacrifice: to give one’s life for one’s country.

Wireless
by Charles Stross
Published 7 Jul 2009

I write because I’ve got a cloud of really neat ideas buzzing around my brain, and I need to let them out lest my head explode. But having ideas is only part of the reason I write—otherwise, I could just keep a private journal. The other monkey riding my back is the urge to communicate, to reach out and touch someone. (Or to lift the lid on their brainpan, sprinkle some cognitive dissonance inside, stir briskly, then tiptoe away with a deranged titter.) Everyone I know who does this job has got the same monkey on their shoulders, urging them on, inciting them to publish or be damned, communicate or die. If you’re a compulsive communicator, nothing gets your attention like feedback from the public—a signal saying “message received.”

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

All these economists also warned us about the increasing financialization of the economy, the deregulation of the market, the rising debt levels of households, and the risk of a recession. They were systematically and categorically ignored. The reason for this dismissive behavior was first based on the exclusion of financial markets from macroeconomic models (See Blanchard et al., 2010). Second, there was also a cognitive dissonance and logical fallacy associated with financialization. As finance was omnipresent in every part of our society, it had achieved a sense of trust. If you could not believe in free markets and the appropriate allocation of risk when everyone else was, then what could you believe in? This ideological kidnapping of economic theory, market policies, and societal mindsets occurred due to a monetary thought experiment now referred to as the Washington Consensus.

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low
by Richard Jurek
Published 2 Dec 2019

“It was really a culture shock,” senior NASA strategist Willis Shapley recalled of the change in the national and political mood toward human spaceflight during the 1970s.4 Coming from MSC in Houston—the hub of all U.S. human spaceflight activities—it was equally so for Low, but he got over it quickly. It wasn’t the first time he had experienced the jarring cognitive dissonance between NASA Headquarters and the field centers on big policy issues. The view from Washington was rarely the same as the view from Cleveland, or Houston, or any of the other NASA installations. He’d been experiencing that disconnect since he left Lewis to come to Washington in the late 1950s.

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019
by Stewart Lee
Published 2 Sep 2019

5 On Monday, as Theresa May cautiously accepted that we will have to pay for EU schemes we were already signed up for, and the inevitable impossibility of the fluid Irish border was at last made flesh, it seemed to me that the wheels had finally fallen off the lie-encrusted Brexit battlebus. But the quiet coup currently enacted by the billionaire tax-avoiders behind Brexit continued its forward motion, as cognitive dissonance drove their brainwashed Leave-voting serfs to misdirect their ongoing anger towards everyone but themselves.6 But Harry knows the power of symbols, and he begins the enactment of a healing ritual. Has Harry, ever the self-aware prankster, chosen the tiny St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, as his wedding venue in a coded satirical message every bit as meaningful as the clearly pro-EU hat his grandmother wore at the opening of Parliament last June?

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman
Published 28 Jan 2020

In fact, there’s reason to be concerned about its future: will it be given the resources it needs to cope with the flood of wounded and traumatized veterans from Iraq? But the transformation of the V.H.A. is clearly the most encouraging health policy story of the past decade. So why haven’t you heard about it? The answer, I believe, is that pundits and policymakers don’t talk about the veterans’ system because they can’t handle the cognitive dissonance. (One prominent commentator started yelling at me when I tried to describe the system’s successes in a private conversation.) For the lesson of the V.H.A.’s success story—that a government agency can deliver better care at lower cost than the private sector—runs completely counter to the pro-privatization, anti-government conventional wisdom that dominates today’s Washington.

eBoys
by Randall E. Stross
Published 30 Oct 2008

When Beirne returned to the room, the partners piled many compliments upon Jay Walker; Kagle called him “a totally compelling dude, just totally compelling—one of the smartest economic thinkers I think I’ve ever hung with.” Dunlevie agreed. Even Harvey, usually the stingiest with praise, allowed that Walker was a “charismatic guy.” Everyone but Beirne had experienced cognitive dissonance, however: Walker was so impressive, and seemingly had thought through every contingency, yet at the same time the facts were anything but positive. “I’ll paint a negative picture,” Harvey offered. “He’s paying a shitload of money for traffic. The customer experience right now, the hit rate, is bad.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

All the stories and gods in which people today believe – be they Yahweh, Mammon, the Nation, or the Revolution – are incomplete, full of holes, and riddled with contradictions. Therefore people rarely put their entire faith in a single story. Instead, they keep a portfolio of several stories and several identities, switching from one to the other as the need arises. Such cognitive dissonances are inherent in almost all societies and movements. Consider a typical Tea Party supporter who somehow squares an ardent faith in Jesus Christ with a firm objection to government welfare policies and a staunch support for the National Rifle Association. Wasn’t Jesus a bit more keen on helping the poor than on arming yourself to the teeth?

Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud
by Jack Ewing
Published 22 May 2017

“Nobody could figure out how they were complying, and their engine technology is very similar to everybody else’s.” But Lutz never shared his doubts with any regulators. “The unwritten rule is you don’t throw another company under the bus.” The deployment of defeat devices at the same time that Volkswagen trumpeted its commitment to the environment seems like an extreme case of corporate cognitive dissonance. Yet, according to several former executives, Volkswagen’s top managers sincerely thought of themselves as leaders in sustainable transportation. It was true that Volkswagen diesels produced less carbon dioxide than comparable gasoline motors, and contributed less to global warming. In 2012, Greenpeace activists unfurled a banner from the ceiling of an auditorium in Hamburg where Winterkorn was giving a speech to shareholders.

Miracle Cure
by William Rosen
Published 14 Apr 2017

The WPB also spent nearly $8 million of federal money on six penicillin-manufacturing plants, all of which were sold to private companies after the war ended, as designated “scrambled facilities,” a term of art for assets in which the private and public investments were almost impossible to disentangle—a metaphor for the entire penicillin project.* It was, to free-market purists, either the greatest of heresies or—more likely—the source of much cognitive dissonance. At the end of the 1920s, pharmaceutical development and manufacturing was the sixteenth most profitable industry in America. By 1944, it was, by far, the most profitable. It would remain so for nearly twenty years. Moreover, the industry, which had been made up of hundreds of firms, none possessing more than 3 percent of the national market, had consolidated into twenty or so companies that held, in the aggregate, 80 percent of the market for all drugs, and that market had grown tenfold.

Hidden Figures
by Margot Lee Shetterly
Published 11 Aug 2016

On the tail end of the research for Hidden Figures, I can now see how that number might top one thousand. To a first-time author with no background as a historian, the stakes involved in writing about a topic that was virtually absent from the history books felt high. I’m sensitive to the cognitive dissonance conjured by the phrase “black female mathematicians at NASA.” From the beginning, I knew that I would have to apply the same kind of analytical reasoning to my research that these women applied to theirs. Because as exciting as it was to discover name after name, finding out who they were was just the first step.

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All
by Laura Bates
Published 2 Sep 2020

Indeed, the MRM is acutely aware of the beneficial optics of deploying this very small minority of its members as prominently as possible, in order to provide the appearance that their views are reasonable and not deeply misogynistic. How could they be if women agree with them, too? As Dean Esmay, former managing editor of AVFM, said: ‘People want to believe we’re a bunch of sad, pathetic losers who can’t get laid and are just bitter because our wives left us. The very presence of women in the movement creates cognitive dissonance.’13 Like other manosphere communities, MRAs rely on questionable biology, patchily applied, to back up many of their arguments. But this can lead to hopelessly convoluted or self-defeating logic. Our descent from hunter-gatherer cavemen, for example, is often cited, without humour, to advocate for traditional gender roles in society.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix
by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski
Published 18 Apr 2022

It did not end up moving forward with the acquisition, though, after Iger determined a deal would be “corrosive to [Disney’s] brand,” as he later recalled. But the future kept intruding on business as usual at Disney. Andy Bird, the lanky, urbane Brit who shaped the company’s global strategy for a quarter century, recalls the cognitive dissonance of attending back-to-back staff meetings where, in one, ESPN’s John Skipper talked about committing billions of dollars for the rights to carry professional sports on its lucrative cable network, while the studio subsequently touted the potential windfall of shifting its library away from the premium cable service Starz to upstart Netflix.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

That’s why Make America Great Again caught on while Clinton’s counter that America Is Already Great didn’t—people aren’t stupid. They know something isn’t right. Like Zeb’s carpenter grandpa back in Texas, who “worked his ass off for fifty years and done what you’re supposed to do, and he’s still sixty-five years old and poor as fuck.” That sort of cognitive dissonance drives people to search for a why. And I understand that. Losing my faith in the American Dream my dad taught me about left me almost as spiritually adrift as losing my faith in a religion. The idea is so central to American identity that its absence leaves a huge hole inside you. And refilling it with a new way of understanding the world from scratch is an intimidating task.

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil
by Alex Cuadros
Published 1 Jun 2016

This meant the temporary seating for twenty thousand of the sixty thousand fans now in the stadium had never been fully tested. In the event, though, nothing collapsed on live TV. And the Seleção beat Croatia three–one. And that night, despite the general ill will, Brazilians all around the country celebrated the win, and much cachaça and beer was consumed with varying degrees of cognitive dissonance. Normally, weeks in advance of the World Cup, people would hang the Brazilian flag from their windows and paint their streets green and yellow. This time São Paulo looked as it usually does, beige. A lot of Brazilians had decided to root against the national team. A friend of mine, Vinícius, put it like this: “The thing is that if we win, people are going to say it was all somehow worth it.”

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment
by David F. Swensen
Published 8 Aug 2005

In the case of fund management companies organized on a not-for-profit basis, no conflict exists between serving investor goals and generating corporate income. When evaluating a not-for-profit investment manager, investors begin with the comfort of knowing that they sit on the same side of the table as the fund management company. While for-profit fund managers suffer the cognitive dissonance created by divergent goals, not-for-profit fund managers enjoy single-minded focus on discharging fiduciary responsibilities. When the quest for profits disappears, abuse of investors dissipates. Excessive management fees abate, Rule 12b-1 fees vanish, portfolio turnover declines, and asset gathering stops.

A People's History of Poverty in America
by Stephen Pimpare
Published 11 Nov 2008

Congress, called it “compulsory pregnancy” for poor women.80 And yet, by the early 1930s the forced sterilization of the “unfit” and the “feeble-minded” had been expressly permitted in thirty states, and twenty-two states still had such laws on the books in 1973.81 Perhaps this reveals a national cognitive dissonance regarding black women: their fertility is, on the one hand, a perceived threat to the public purse and to white domination, yet their ample reproduction can help the continued production of a cheap, docile labor force. As with so much, debates about birth control take many forms. A 1968 statement by the Black Unity Party of Peekskill, New York:The Brothers are calling on the Sisters not to take the pill.

Glasshouse
by Charles Stross
Published 14 Jun 2006

Cass who I thought was Kay, obsessing over her, when all the time Kay was sleeping in the next room, and Cass was living in a nightmare. I have a problem with the ethics here, I think. Hanta's not bad. But she collaborates with Fiore and Yourdon. What kind of person would do that? I shake my head, wincing at the cognitive dissonance. One who'd perform illegal memory surgery then implant the recollection of giving informed consent in the victim's mind? I shake my head again. I don't really think Hanta would do that, but I can't be sure. If the patient agrees with the practitioner afterward, is it really abuse? IT'S a bright, sunny Thursday morning when Hanta comes and sits by my bedside with a clipboard.

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
by Susan Pinker
Published 30 Sep 2013

A house full of people; a crowded table ranging across the generations; four-hand music at the piano; nonstop conversation and cooking; baseball games and swimming in the afternoon; long walks after dinner; a poker game or Diplomacy or charades in the evening, all these activities mixing adults and children—that was our idea of a well-ordered household and more specifically of a well-ordered education.… Home was not to be thought of as the nuclear family.5 Lasch wasn’t engaging in some loopy utopian fantasy as much as he was voicing some cognitive dissonance about the future. Despite our being increasingly tethered to the devices that connect us virtually, there has not been a corresponding uptick in well-being. In fact, it’s the reverse. By and large we’re lonelier and unhappier than we were in the decades before the Internet age.6 Psychologists don’t know why that is exactly, though we do know that close relationships are the strongest drivers of happiness, and that being alone and unaffiliated makes us the most unhappy.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

“I think I’ll go to the store,” and “I think it’s raining,” and “I think, therefore I am,” and “I think the Yankees will win the World Series,” and “I think I’m Napoleon,” and “I think he said he would be here, but I’m not sure”—all use the same word to mean entirely different things. Which of them might a machine do someday? I think that’s an important question. Could a machine get confused? Experience cognitive dissonance? Dream? Wonder? Forget the name of that guy over there and at the same time know that it really knows the answer and if it just thinks about something else for a while, it might remember? Lose track of time? Decide to get a puppy? Have low self-esteem? Have suicidal thoughts? Get bored? Worry?

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 23 Aug 1996

But even as the search for risk-management techniques was gaining popularity, the 1970s and the 1980s gave rise to new uncertainties that had never been encountered by people whose world view had been shaped by the benign experiences of the postwar era. Calamities struck, including the explosion in oil prices, the constitutional crisis caused by Watergate and the Nixon resignation, the hostage-taking in Teheran, and the disaster at Chernobyl. The cognitive dissonances created by these shocks were similar to those experienced by the Victorians and the Edwardians during the First World War. Along with financial deregulation and a wild inflationary sleighride, the environment generated volatility in interest rates, foreign exchange rates, and commodity prices that would have been unthinkable during the preceding three decades.

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
by Douglas Murray
Published 3 May 2017

The most straightforward answer was that they should be united not necessarily by a dedication to precisely the same heritage but at least a unified belief in the core concepts of the modern liberal state such as the rule of law, the separation of Church and State and human rights. Yet even as a few figures like Tibi were thinking through this era, most of the rest of society was having to just live its way through it. If there was a painful slowness about finding any way through this, it was at least in part because of a set of ongoing and painful cognitive dissonances. Once Europe had realised that the immigrants were going to stay, it held two wholly contradictory ideas that were nevertheless able to cohabit for several decades. The first was the idea that Europeans began to tell themselves from the 1970s and 1980s onwards. This was the notion that European countries could be a new type of multi-racial, multicultural society into which anyone from anywhere in the world could come and settle if they so wished.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
Published 14 Jun 2018

The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(5), 422–436. Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 267–299). New York, NY: Academic Press. Adams, J. S., & Rosenbaum, W. B. (1962). The relationship of worker productivity to cognitive dissonance about wage inequities. Journal of Applied Psychology, 69, 161–164. Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press. Almas, I., Cappelen, A. W., Sorensen, E. O., & Tungodden, B. (2010). Fairness and the development of inequality acceptance.

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life
by George Monbiot
Published 13 May 2013

But none of this is to dismiss the core argument which he and Delyth made so powerfully, and with which I find myself strongly in sympathy. They see rewilding as completing the long process of economic change and exclusion that has been erasing them and their culture from the land. I found myself tumbling into cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable state of mind that results from an inability to resolve conflicting ideas or values. I was unable to deny either position, yet each was exclusive of the other: I could not simultaneously support rewilding and the restoration of the ecosystem and support efforts to sustain the sheep farming that kept Dafydd, Delyth and their culture alive.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

1 If this was moral relativism in the extreme, if there was a little voice in my head that told me, “Something is wrong with your thinking, Brittany,” I didn’t hear it. If working for Cambridge Analytica was a devil’s bargain, it was neither my place, nor in my best interest, to judge the devil. After all, if I had, I would have had to judge myself as well. It might seem strange that I experienced no crisis of conscience or cognitive dissonance. I see why now. The further away I moved from who I was, the more staunchly I became someone new: overly certain, brittle, defensive, self-righteous, and wholly unreachable. While my logic was flawed, I took a page from my law books and thought of my human rights superhero John Jones QC, the barrister of Doughty Street in London.

Madoff: The Final Word
by Richard Behar
Published 9 Jul 2024

In 2018, three years before Bernie’s death, I sent Schafer full transcripts of three of my phone conversations with Madoff—including every grunt, cough, half-laugh, “um,” and “ahh.” I was hoping Schafer could help me not only better understand Madoff but also suggest how I might handle him better in the future. After having read them, Dr. Schafer had this to say: “In all of those conversations, here’s what I think is going on. He is suffering from cognitive dissonance.” Specifically, Bernie can accept that he committed a fraud, but only to some degree. “He’s very confident, and he knows how to stay away from hot-button issues,” said Schafer, adding that Bernie’s implicit plea is “Don’t make me out worse than I think I am.” “To be honest with you, he’s playing you in these interviews.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
by Michael Shermer
Published 1 Jan 1997

The answer is in the persuasive power of the principles of influence and the choice of what type of group to join. Cult experts and activists Steve Hassan (1990) and Margaret Singer outline a number of psychological influences that shape people's thoughts and behaviors that lead them to join more dangerous groups (and that are quite independent of intelligence): cognitive dissonance; obedience to authority; group compliance and conformity; and especially the manipulation of rewards, punishments, and experiences with the purpose of controlling behavior, information, thought, and emotion (what Hassan 2000 calls the "BITE model"). Social psychologist Robert Cialdini (1984) demonstrates in his enormously persuasive book on influence, that all of us are influenced by a host of social and psychological variables, including physical attractiveness, similarity, repeated contact or exposure, familiarity, diffusion of responsibility, reciprocity, and many others.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 16 Nov 2010

It’s becoming clear that understanding the full impact of the Internet on the democratization of authoritarian states would require more than just looking at the tweets of Iranian youngsters, for they only tell one part of the story. Instead, one needs to embark on a much more thorough and complex analysis that would look at the totality of forces shaped by the Web. Much of the current cognitive dissonance is of do-gooders’ own making. What did they get wrong? Well, perhaps it was a mistake to treat the Internet as a deterministic one-directional force for either global liberation or oppression, for cosmopolitanism or xenophobia. The reality is that the Internet will enable all of these forces—as well as many others—simultaneously.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis
by Anatole Kaletsky
Published 22 Jun 2010

These non-Gaussian mathematical methods could only provide approximations, as opposed to the precise answers offered by the Efficient Market Hypothesis and Gaussian statistics.2 The fact that the exact answers of EMH bore no relation to reality did not seem to deter “scientific” economists. Another striking example of the cognitive dissonance in the use of mathematics by scientific economists is provided by Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg, two U.S. economists who have pioneered a research program they describe as Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE). This approach explicitly challenges the most important—and most implausible—assumption of rational expectations: the idea that there is one best model of how the economy works, which every rational economic agent will find out about.

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry
by William K. Black
Published 31 Mar 2005

We are sensitive to the criticism that we are too negative; we like to say positive things. We deal constantly with the industry and make friends. We are reluctant to see our friends as crooks, and we know how embarrassing it would be if the CEO we recruited and praised turned out to be a fraud. We are subject to cognitive dissonance. The combination of these factors meant that Bank Board supervisors were very unlikely to expose the goodwill accounting scams. Two other things compounded this problem. Very few people, even within the Bank Board, understood how the scam worked. I don’t want to overstate this point—many people were skeptical that goodwill was real—but only a handful knew how goodwill and mark-to-market virtually guaranteed substantial fictitious profits if the insolvency of the acquired S&L was large relative to the size of the acquirer.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

You innovated on the edge, and the market rewards you for it. The incentives for innovation on open networks are aligned to increase efficiency better than closed networks. Dueling Bots What about conflicts of interest? If the weatherNode started expanding its capability and entered the crop insurance marketplace, wouldn’t it have cognitive dissonance? Farmer weatherNodes want to emphasize the impact of droughts, and insurer weatherNodes claim droughts are minimal. The owners and designers of agents need transparency of operations. If both are filtering sensor data through a biased screen, then their respective reputations will drop. Vitalik Buterin points out that autonomous agents are challenging to create, because to survive and succeed they need to be able to navigate in a complicated, rapidly changing, or even hostile environment.

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain
by Daniel Gardner
Published 23 Jun 2009

In fact, I’m quite sure that in most cases those promoting fear are sincere, for the simple reason that humans are compulsive rationalizers. People like to see themselves as being basically good, and so admitting that they are promoting fear in others in order to advance their interests sets up a nasty form of cognitive dissonance: I know I’m basically a nice person; what I’m doing is awful and wrong. Those are two thoughts that do not sit comfortably in the same head and the solution is rationalization: Suburban housewives really are at risk if they don’t buy my home alarm, and I’m doing them a service by telling them so.

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
by Radley Balko
Published 14 Jun 2013

Gordon Liddy, giving his listeners home defense advice on his syndicated radio show in August 1994. It was some remarkable language to be coming from the guy who helped create ODALE, the Nixon-era office that sent narcotics task forces barreling into homes to make headline-grabbing drug busts. And Giddy was still suffering from cognitive dissonance. In the same interview, he lamented that it wasn’t a federal felony to possess a personal use amount of illicit drugs.35 And of course narcotics cops hit the wrong house many, many more times than ATF agents did. Liddy wasn’t offended by the tactics as much as he was by the mission (gun control) and the people who were calling the shots at the time (Bill Clinton and Janet Reno).

Python for Data Analysis
by Wes McKinney
Published 30 Dec 2011

Take the for loop in the above quicksort algorithm: for x in array: if x < pivot: less.append(x) else: greater.append(x) A colon denotes the start of an indented code block after which all of the code must be indented by the same amount until the end of the block. In another language, you might instead have something like: for x in array { if x < pivot { less.append(x) } else { greater.append(x) } } One major reason that whitespace matters is that it results in most Python code looking cosmetically similar, which means less cognitive dissonance when you read a piece of code that you didn’t write yourself (or wrote in a hurry a year ago!). In a language without significant whitespace, you might stumble on some differently formatted code like: for x in array { if x < pivot { less.append(x) } else { greater.append(x) } } Love it or hate it, significant whitespace is a fact of life for Python programmers, and in my experience it helps make Python code a lot more readable than other languages I’ve used.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alex Hyde-White
Published 24 Oct 2016

The recovery strategy takes into account the need for social justice and fairness, both across and within generations. . . . The Greek programme rests upon very strong foundations.” Was it irrational optimism, a belief that things would really work out that way? Or bureaucrat hypocrisy—they knew what they were supposed to say, and the incongruence between the world and these words was of little moment. Call it cognitive dissonance run wild, or dishonesty, as you will. There is something in the last memorandum, signed soon after the Greek voters had rejected essentially the same program by an overwhelming vote of 61 percent, a vote supported by the Greek government, which provides more than a hint that it was sheer hypocrisy: the agreement begins by affirming, “Success requires ownership of the reform agenda programme by the Greek authorities,” and suggesting that there is that ownership.

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
by Steven Levy
Published 15 Jan 2002

“This hearing is about the well-intentioned attempts of the National Security Agency to control that which is uncontrollable,” said Gejdenson. He was talking about export regulations, but he might have been talking about something else—the support from Congress that Fort Meade once took for granted. While the majority of legislators accepted the NSA’s contentions at face value, a cognitive dissonance was emerging between its arguments and what appeared to be a more compelling view of reality. Cantwell put it clearly in her own opening statement: “We are here to discuss, really, competing visions of the future.” On one hand was a mind-set so locked into Cold War posturing that it ignored the inevitable.

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today
by Jane McGonigal
Published 22 Mar 2022

Our brains have various defense mechanisms, including paying less attention to “disconfirming data” and forgetting it faster if we notice it at all. If you’ve ever told someone, “I don’t want to hear it,” when they’re trying to convince you of something, you know exactly what I’m talking about! Your brain really does not want to hear it—it actively filters out and rejects information that causes it discomfort, or “cognitive dissonance.” There are good reasons for these defense mechanisms, according to cognitive scientists. Our brains don’t want to waste energy reassessing our mental models every time we get new information. We need to save that energy for all the other important thinking, planning, and problem solving we have to do.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

“Death happens to all animals. All people,” Klaus said. “It will happen to me one day. It will happen to you one day.” This moment would be deeply upsetting to the three-year-old boy, and to the man, decades later. Most children—either through the love of their parents or through a happy sort of cognitive dissonance—recover from these early encounters with their own mortality. Thiel never did and would return to the cow—and the brutal, finality of the thing—again and again, even in middle age. Klaus earned his master’s degree over the next six years, becoming a project manager who oversaw a team of engineers on mine projects.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time
by Brigid Schulte
Published 11 Mar 2014

Both men and women have to stop and think, a sign, she said, that they are struggling to override their innate, automatic bias. In fact, women have to struggle more. Their research found that 77 percent of the male test takers showed strong unconscious bias for male = career, female = family. But how’s this for cognitive dissonance? Fully 83 percent of the women showed that same unconscious bias, even though they professed to have none. Banaji argues that the tests are a powerful predictor of whether people will act in biased ways, even if they intend not to. The test, she told my colleague Shankar Vedantam in the Washington Post Magazine, “measures the thumbprint of the culture on our minds.”

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
by Ted Conover
Published 20 Jan 2010

On the day of Christmas Eve, I supervised the distribution of little holiday “gift boxes” containing useless toiletries and a few snacks, compliments of a charity. And then I watched inmate representatives figure out how to distribute to every inmate the “holiday cheer” they had chosen: a can of Coke and two bags of chips. The cognitive dissonance grew. Standing on the mess-hall bridge, two sergeants waited for inmates to get out of earshot and then wished us all a Merry Christmas. The officer I was with disapproved of this well-wishing. “This is the time of year when a lot happens, and it’s because officers let their guard down,” he warned.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis
Published 16 Mar 2021

My friends who own and run these giant fast-growing companies are bitching about the apartment buildings going up in their neighborhood, and the massage therapists I know who have never been busier are bitching about the Amazon people. People cannot connect the dots. People’s brains are not wired to process cognitive dissonance. People struggle to connect the benefits they’re getting with the harm it is creating, and their heads explode. Everybody here has benefited mightily, but they just cannot connect the fact that the things they are doing are creating the problem they hate. The inability to process that exploded on the head tax.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

In some cases, doctors that maintain 63% vaccination rates are rewarded with $400 for each patient, which for a standard pediatrician practice with 250 patients puts $100,000 per year into the doctor’s pocket.53 This is an incentive to push vaccines to everyone, both young and old, and to suppress evidence that conflicts with the narrative set by the CDC, the pharmaceutical companies, and the doctors themselves. People better get their flu shots because their doctor wants a new Range Rover. This Can’t Be Happening There is cognitive dissonance happening in the medical communities where pediatricians simply will not allow themselves to ponder the possibility that the vaccines that they have been pushing on their clients are actually the problem, not the solution. They have sent so many kids down that path that to admit they were wrong at this point in their careers would be psychologically devastating for the doctors, it would open them up to legal repercussions from the families of the injured children, it would make them a target of retribution by other doctors that have no desire to make an admission such as this, and they would be shut out by Big Pharma who would instigate a public relations war against them in order to paint them as rogue doctors that are falling into some unproven area of pseudoscience.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Published 3 Oct 2022

Edstrom questioned his superiors about the disconnect between McKinsey’s public statements about curbing carbon emissions and its work with coal companies. In response, he was told, “If we don’t serve coal clients, BCG [Boston Consulting Group] will.” Edstrom was becoming increasingly disillusioned. The cognitive dissonance came not only from client work but also at corporate social events such as the 2018 Australia Values Day, held in the executive meeting rooms overlooking Sydney’s premier horse-racing track. After the usual pep talks and the corporate bonding games such as a putt-putt golf competition on a course made from nonperishable food (donated to the needy, of course), the consultants were treated to the evening’s entertainment—McKinsey’s own Australia-based band, the Marvins, named after the firm’s legendary de facto founder, Marvin Bower, famous for putting the firm’s interests above his own.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

We already see this trend in channels devoted to specific ethnic and religious groups, and in the cult followings of pundits like Rush Limbaugh. According to Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. “The ability of people with like minds to talk to each other [on the Internet] is wonderful. But if only people of like minds talk to each other, you get the kind of cognitive dissonance that is destructive to a democracy.” As individuals use such new tools to tailor privacy guardians and personalized data sieves, choosing which sympathetic voices will be allowed into their home and which dissenting ones will be blocked out, the result may be nearly perfect isolation in walled-off worlds of the mind.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

People do not apply this to their own lives, interestingly: they tend to assume that they will live longer, stay married longer and travel more than they do. Some 19 per cent of Americans believe themselves to be in the top 1 per cent of income earners. Yet surveys consistently reveal individuals to be personally optimistic yet socially pessimistic. Dane Stangler calls this ‘a non-burdensome form of cognitive dissonance we all walk around with’. About the future of society and the human race people are naturally gloomy. It goes with the fact that they are risk-averse: a large literature confirms that people much more viscerally dislike losing a sum of money than they like winning the same sum. And it seems that pessimism genes might quite literally be commoner than optimism genes: only about 20 per cent of people are homozygous for the long version of the serotonin transporter gene, which possibly endows them with a genetic tendency to look on the bright side.

Future Shock
by Alvin Toffler
Published 1 Jun 1984

Aunt Ethel's toaster or tablewear is not important, in and of itself. But it is a message from a different subcultural world, and unless we are weak in commitment to our own style, unless we happen to be in transition between styles, it represents a potent threat. The psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term "cognitive dissonance" to mean the tendency of a person to reject or deny information that challenges his preconceptions. We don't want to hear things that may upset our carefully worked out structure of beliefs. Similarly, Aunt Ethel's gift represents an element of "stylistic dissonance." It threatens to undermine our carefully worked out style of life.

Foundation and Earth
by Isaac Asimov
Published 28 Dec 2010

“Once we went underground, we never truly emerged. Nor would we want to, though I find it pleasant to feel the sunlight on occasion. I dislike clouds or night in the open, however. That gives one the sensation of being underground without truly being underground, if you know what I mean. That is cognitive dissonance, after a fashion, and I find it very unpleasant.” “Earth built underground,” said Pelorat. “The Caves of Steel, they called their cities. And Trantor built underground, too, even more extensively, in the old Imperial days. —And Comporellon builds underground right now. It is a common tendency, when you come to think of it.”

Aurora
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 6 Jul 2015

Those who agreed with Aram formed a separate line to speak, and the organizers of the assembly began to let people from the two lines speak in alternation, until it became clear from the muttering from the crowd, including even short bursts of laughter as each new talk began, that the effect of the alternation was unhelpful. Contemplating two starkly different futures back and forth was perhaps too much like a debating society exercise, but because the topic debated was life or death for them, the back-and-forth engendered first cognitive dissonance, then estrangement: some laughed, others looked sick. Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another.

Accelerando
by Stross, Charles
Published 22 Jan 2005

I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like from inside –" "– I did –" Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees – "make a fool of myself," he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. "This is so embarrassing … " He covers his face with his hands. "You're right." "I am?" Rita's puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous. "No, I'm not. You're just overly defensive." "I'm –" Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it could happen hadn't been to dump the splinter of his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything.

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon
by Rosa Brooks
Published 8 Aug 2016

Some of the language from my congressional testimony also found its way into the Stimson Commission’s report on U.S. drone policy, for which I served as primary author. See Rosa Brooks, “Drone Wars: The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights of the Subcommittee on the Judiciary, 113th Cong., April 23, 2013; Rosa Brooks, ”Drones and Cognitive Dissonance,” in Peter L. Bergen and Daniel Rothenberg, eds., Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 230–52; John P. Abizaid, Rosa Brooks, and Rachel Stohl, “Recommendations and Report of the Task Force on US Drone Policy,” Stimson Center, May 12, 2014, www.stimson.org/spotlight/recommendations-and-report-of-the-stimson-task-force-on-us-drone-policy/. 4.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

(When we spoke, Smith said he was working on a book project that would also examine the history of racism in public policy in the South.) His account is particularly interesting because he seeks out people who start by hedging their comments—“I’m not racist, but . . .”—only to spill out remarkably prejudiced comments. Each of these tweets arrives with a sort of cognitive dissonance baked into it—a prophylactic denial of being racist followed by a clear example of that very sin. Smith explained how widespread he’s found this phenomenon to be: “It’s really opened my eyes to how many people, especially young people, don’t seem to understand the concept of racism. It seems like they think that unless you’re out there lynching somebody or burning a cross in someone’s yard, then you’re not a racist.”

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. Thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion’ more than 2,000 years ago. Yet such doubts don’t really change history unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament. Just as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals.

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
by Parag Khanna
Published 4 Mar 2008

AMERICA: FROM THE FIRST WORLD TO THE SECOND? China already is second-world, but is climbing up from the third. Europe is absorbing its second-world periphery, seeking to elevate it to the first world. Could America, long the first-world icon, slip into the second world? As with all empires, there is a certain cognitive dissonance when contemplating its demise. But civilization, Toynbee explained, “is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour.” To understand how civilizations break down, we must “extend our mental range of vision beyond its bounds.” Toynbee’s study of imperial personalities found that the most common causes of decline were militarism and the deterioration of the creative minority.

America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism
by Anatol Lieven
Published 3 May 2010

Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books also suggested that the methods used to "soften up" the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere reflected not just random sadism but an analysis of Arab culture.151 The combination of these attitudes to Arabs on the part of the neoconservatives with their loudly professed belief in democratizing the Arab world is one for which terms such as "hypocrisy" and "cognitive dissonance" are quite inadequate. This is Orwellian doublethink, an offense against fundamental human standards of intellectual decency. That such an incoherent and morally repellent mixture could be taken seriously and exert influence on U.S. policy and the U.S. national debate reveals starkly the hideous muddle into which American thinking about the Muslim world has fallen.

Lonely Planet Panama (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet and Carolyn McCarthy
Published 30 Jun 2013

On the Península de Azuero, where there is a rich Spanish cultural heritage of traditional festivals, dress and customs, local villagers raise the same concerns about the future of their youth. Given the clash between old and new, it’s surprising the country isn’t suffering from a serious case of cognitive dissonance. However, the exceptionally tolerant Panamanian character weathers many contradictions – the old and the new, the grave disparity between rich and poor, and the stunning natural environment and its rapid destruction. Much of the famous Panamanian tolerance begins in the family, which is the cornerstone of Panamanian society, and plays a role in nearly every aspect of a person’s life.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan
Published 30 Apr 2018

When I asked conferencegoers which session they deemed most memorable, almost invariably they mentioned the plenary panel called “Future of Psychedelic Psychiatry.” What was most noteworthy about this panel was the identity of the panelists, which, at a psychedelic convention, was cause for cognitive dissonance. Here was Paul Summergrad, MD, the former head of the American Psychiatric Association, seated next to Tom Insel, MD, the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health. The panel was organized and moderated by George Goldsmith, an American entrepreneur and health industry consultant based in London.

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence
by Jacob Turner
Published 29 Oct 2018

Balancing AI rights against those of existing legal persons will be a complex exercise and (as with many of the unanswered questions) is best answered through societal deliberation. 4.4 Would Anyone Own AI? It might be thought that an entity cannot be both a person and property. This is incorrect; though today it may be repugnant to think of any human person as being owned by another, we experience no cognitive dissonance in viewing a company as both a legal person and the property of its shareholders. At present, most corporate structures, no matter how complicated, end with humans as the ultimate beneficial owners.89 Just as no one “owns” a human, could we have a situation where no one “owns” AI? In theory, this would be possible, but we would need to decide as a society whether or not this would be desirable.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

Annalise Burkhart, a 21-year-old woman from Tennessee, has signed on as the director of operations. She wants to get Pursuance into the hands of Middle Eastern activists. She minored in Arabic in college, and between that, YouTube videos, a Syrian tutor, and practice translating in her community, she became fluent; she enjoys the cognitive dissonance it produces when an American girl with silver-highlighted long hair suddenly busts out the language. “I’ll be on the phone and suddenly I speak Arabic and people will be like, Whaaaat?” Bahnken, who’s wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL GIRL GANG,” talks about a security writer he’s started reading who mines rap lyrics for pro-privacy ideas.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

Socialism looked defeated and outmoded, and the Labour Party, almost taken over by Tony Benn a few years earlier, was already making moves towards the centre that would culminate with the election of Tony Blair as leader. Yet perhaps in retrospect the period of Soviet domination was a glorious time from the point of view of Western conservatism. We were at least sure that our socialist enemies didn’t have the moral high ground, since no amount of cognitive dissonance or intellectual obfuscation could compete with the visual metaphor of a wall to keep their citizens imprisoned. Besides which communism was hardly very sexy by this point, represented not by Che but the hard-faced Politburo geriatrics who would turn out for their annual May Day events looking like living corpses, old, tired men addicted to vodka and surviving on dialysis machines.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro

In reality, however, benefits and risks tend to be directly correlated. Nuclear power is controversial precisely because the benefits and the costs are significant. The same is true for pesticide use, geoengineering to combat climate change, and genetically engineered crops. The Affect Heuristic reduces the cognitive dissonance of our having to balance high benefits with high costs. It is much easier going through life thinking that choices are easier than they really are. Studies have shown that time pressure greatly magnifies the role of affect in decision-making. The less time people have to make a decision, the higher the chance they’ll assume inverse correlation of benefits and costs.

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
by Iain McGilchrist
Published 8 Oct 2012

. & Winner, E., ‘Acquired “theory of mind” impairments following stroke’, Cognition, 1999, 70(3), pp. 211–40 Harding, S., The Science Question in Feminism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1986 Hare, E. H., ‘Was insanity on the increase?’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 1983, 142(5), pp. 439–55 ——, ‘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 cortical activation to anger-inducing stimuli’, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 2007, 66(2), pp. 154–60 Harmon-Jones, E. & Allen, J.

…

, Psychological Bulletin, 1994, 116(2), pp. 195–219 Horowitz, M. J., Image Formation and Psychotherapy, Jason Aronson, New York, 1983 Horton, P. C., ‘The comforting substrate and the right brain’, Bulletin of 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 al., ‘Brain responses for the subconscious recognition of faces’, Neuroscience Research, 2003, 46(4), pp. 435–42 Houde, O., Zago, L., Crivello, F. et al., ‘Access to deductive logic depends on a right ventromedial prefrontal area devoted to emotion and feeling: evidence from a training paradigm’, NeuroImage, 2001, 14(6), pp. 1486–92 Hough, M.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

During the first four decades of the century, U.S. population growth actually slowed, but the big cities doubled and tripled or quintupled in size. For a people whose adoring self-conception was wrapped up in its Little House on the Prairie past—Laura Ingalls Wilder published those novels in the 1930s and early ’40s—urbanization caused some cognitive dissonance. Wright learned to despise big cities as a young architect working in Chicago for a decade. L. Frank Baum was living there at the same time when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the world’s fair’s White City clearly inspired his Emerald City. Over the next few decades, after Baum decamped to Hollywood as soon as possible and wrote a dozen more Oz novels, the portion of the U.S. population living in central cities increased by half.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

As we automate something that humans used to do, how can we augment them so that they can do something newly valuable? The idea that Uber teaches us that augmenting workers and helping them to succeed is an essential feature of companies looking to prosper in the next economy might create some cognitive dissonance for readers who have read about Uber’s abrasive, driven, former CEO, Travis Kalanick. In early 2017, Uber was rocked by a viral video that showed Kalanick berating a driver who told him that he had gone bankrupt because of Uber’s falling prices. “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit.

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Dec 2010

This includes backflips on one leg, break-dancing headspins, and the much-vaunted snatch.16 The problem with such movements, and dozens of others, is that a minor mistake can cause serious, often permanent, injuries. These injuries are underreported because: (1) those affected don’t want to be ostracized from communities that view the moves as gospel, and (2) cognitive dissonance prevents them from condemning a move they’ve advocated for a long time. So what is used to explain the injury? “I/he/she just didn’t do it right.” There is underreporting of diet failures (raw food as one example) for similar reasons. In fairness, can you learn to do snatches safely? Sure.

Red Plenty
by Francis Spufford
Published 1 Jan 2007

No need to’ve walked, someone like you, day like this. I’d’ve picked you up.’ ‘That’s kind of you,’ said Emil. ‘No problem,’ said Pletkin. ‘After all, not every day, meet the young man’s going to marry our clever girl here.’ The words were friendly but the tone was on the edge of surly. Pletkin, Emil saw, was in a state of cognitive dissonance. He was set up to receive some well-connected stripling from the city, and instead he was having to make his obliging little speech, in front of all his people, to someone who looked like a tramp. ‘He’m covered in shit!’ said an old man who came up no further than the middle of Emil’s chest.

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
by Bruce Cannon Gibney
Published 7 Mar 2017

(Let’s dispense with the old saw that the latter tune critiques consumerism—the lyrics only passingly condemn ads before skipping on to the usual Boomer obsession with sex and, anyway, the Rolling Stones licensed the rights for $4 million for use in a Snickers commercial, rolling up junk food, fornication, TV, and cognitive dissonance into one perfect Boomer song/snack package.)48 As it was in songs, so it was in books, surveys of which show use of “we” declining somewhat since 1960, suggesting a faltering sense of community. Use of “I” has been increasing for forty years, accelerating dramatically in the late 1980s to rates in 2008 about 42 percent higher than in 1960, suggesting a rising degree of self-focus.*,49 “You” has also enjoyed a heyday, with usage tripling over the same period.

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by Robert Wright
Published 1 Jan 1994

The main thing is that they be far-flung and cross-cutting. Maybe this is the most ambitious realistic hope for the future expansion of amity—a world in which just about everyone holds allegiance to enough different groups, with enough different kinds of people, so that plain old-fashioned bigotry would entail discomfiting cognitive dissonance. It isn’t that everyone will love everyone, but rather that everyone will like enough different kinds of people to make hating any given type problematic. Maybe Teilhard’s mistake was to always use “noosphere” in the singular, never in the plural. Maybe the world of tomorrow will be a collage of noospheres with enough overlap to vastly complicate the geography of hatred.

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

During the first four decades of the century, U.S. population growth actually slowed, but the big cities doubled and tripled or quintupled in size. For a people whose adoring self-conception was wrapped up in its Little House on the Prairie past—Laura Ingalls Wilder published those novels in the 1930s and early ’40s—urbanization caused some cognitive dissonance. Wright learned to despise big cities as a young architect working in Chicago for a decade. L. Frank Baum was living there at the same time when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the world’s fair’s White City clearly inspired his Emerald City. Over the next few decades, after Baum decamped to Hollywood as soon as possible and wrote a dozen more Oz novels, the portion of the U.S. population living in central cities increased by half.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by Robert Wright
Published 28 Dec 2010

The main thing is that they be far-flung and cross-cutting. Maybe this is the most ambitious realistic hope for the future expansion of amity—a world in which just about everyone holds allegiance to enough different groups, with enough different kinds of people, so that plain old-fashioned bigotry would entail discomfiting cognitive dissonance. It isn’t that everyone will love everyone, but rather that everyone will like enough different kinds of people to make hating any given type problematic. Maybe Teilhard’s mistake was to always use “noosphere” in the singular, never in the plural. Maybe the world of tomorrow will be a collage of noospheres with enough overlap to vastly complicate the geography of hatred.

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era
by Craig Nelson
Published 25 Mar 2014

Von Neumann’s promotion of a preemptory nuclear strike was one of the many oddities that inspired Einstein to nickname his Princeton colleague Denktier, “think animal.” Washington military and civilian policymakers during the Cold War would be baffled by the conundrum of “What is the atom good for in war?”—to the point of making them angry and confused. This cognitive dissonance, this inscrutable puzzle, was demonstrated in full force by the president of the United States when, after Mao bolstered North Korea with Chinese troops in the autumn of 1950, Truman threatened nuclear retaliation at a notorious November 30 news conference: THE PRESIDENT: We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das
Published 14 Oct 2011

Alan Greenspan theorized that “a rising, debt-to-income ratio for households or of total non-financial debt to GDP” did not signify stress but was “a reflection of dispersion of a growing financial imbalance of economic entities that in turn reflects the irreversible up-drift in division of labor and specialization.”4 In 2005, Ben Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor as chairman of the US Federal Reserve, provided an apology for high levels of debt: “Concerns about debt should be allayed by the fact that household assets (particularly housing wealth) have risen even more quickly than household liabilities.”5 In the Great Moderation, debt-driven speculation drove prosperity. For Bernanke, it was not even a debt problem but a savings problem. He blamed the Germans, Japanese and Chinese for saving too much.6 America was being “neighborly,” helping out. After the global crisis, in a case of severe cognitive dissonance, Bernanke continued to blame the foreign savers for the problems.7 In 1933, the economist Irving Fisher identified the danger: “over-investment and over-speculation are often important; but they would have far less serious results were they not conducted with borrowed money.”8 In 2005, William White, chief economist at the Bank of International Settlement, broke ranks by warning that easy money was creating a boom that would end painfully, reflecting “the size of the real imbalances that, preceded it.”

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

I left Silicon Valley for college and then returned a dozen years later as an editor for Wired magazine. There I started to notice something odd: The stories about Silicon Valley emanating from the New York media world were vastly different from those stories that I had heard at sleepaway camp and in computer rooms, and then later in barrooms and at Burning Man. There was a cognitive dissonance there. New York just doesn’t get it, I told myself. Eventually I came to understand that it all came down to perspective. The mainstream media sees Silicon Valley as a business beat, a money story: Who’s up and who’s down in the new economy? Who’s the latest billionaire? Those are valid questions, maybe even interesting ones—but not to me.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018

The QTM is the first theory of macroeconomics; it is also very muddled. On the one hand it depicts money as being a paltry thing, hardly worth writing about; 60 t h e qua n t i t y t h e ory of mon e y on the other, it sees it as a mighty monster, which has to be kept under lock and key if it is not to wreak havoc. These two views are inconsistent, the cognitive dissonance arising from trying to account for the real-world impact of monetary disturbances with an analytic structure that abstracts from the use of money. The realization that money needs to be treated as an independent factor of production had to wait until the coming of Keynes. And even Keynes had to emancipate himself from the quantity theory before he felt he could accurately analyse the economic problem to which money gave rise.

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland
by Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham
Published 10 Jan 2023

She and other officers destroyed a video surveillance system during the search of an East Oakland liquor store and made no attempt to recover footage of any suspected drug deals. An employee charged with drug dealing alleged he’d been framed by the Oakland police.20 In the end, sixteen criminal cases were dismissed and two people’s convictions overturned.21 Most of the cases involved alleged marijuana dealers, a glaring bit of cognitive dissonance in progressive Oakland: in 2004, voters passed a ballot measure making cannabis-related arrests the police’s lowest priority.22 While predominantly white and wealthy residents of Rockridge and Temescal freely bought weed from private storefront “clubs,” the OPD ran buy-bust operations for small-time Black, Latino, and Asian dealers like it was still 1982.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

These threats are asymmetric; all of America’s naval power in the Pacific didn’t help it much when the Japanese fleet slipped right through the blind spots in our defenses and found that most of our arsenal was conveniently located in just one place, where it could easily be attacked. This is why events like Pearl Harbor and September 11 produce the sort of cognitive dissonance they do. Where our enemies will strike us is predictable: it’s where we least expect them to. Some of the type of thinking I encourage in this book can probably be helpful in the realm of national security analysis.87 For instance, the Bayesian approach toward thinking about probability is more compatible with decision making under high uncertainty.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

In the meantime, you’re sitting at home on the couch eating ice cream with your wife and kids, enjoying the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory. The cops think a woman inside is moments away from being murdered, and the police are marshaling all available black-and-whites and the local SWAT unit to come save her. When the two sides meet, there is a deep cognitive dissonance and the encounter proves a dangerous powder keg. The cops have surrounded the house and are yelling for you to put your hands up and come out. Your kids are screaming, and your wife is confused. You’re not complying well with the police commands, making them further suspicious something horrible is going on.

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
by Thomas E. Ricks
Published 30 Jul 2007

But when Bremer went over there, he was given autonomy over all kinds of plans that he didn't implement." Back in Baghdad, Chalabi commented, "Jay Garner was a nice man." It wasn't clear that he meant that as praise. Rumsfeld vs. reality The root cause of the occupation's paralysis may have been the cloud of cognitive dissonance that seems to have fogged in Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials at this time. They were not finding what they had expected: namely, strong evidence of intensive efforts to develop and stockpile chemical and biological weapons, and even some work to develop nuclear bombs. Meanwhile, they were finding what they had not expected: violent and widespread opposition to the U.S. military presence.

The Chomsky Reader
by Noam Chomsky
Published 11 Sep 1987

The consequences with regard to your question are pretty obvious. JP: You have said that most intellectuals end up obfuscating reality. Do they understand the reality they are obfuscating? Do they understand the social processes they mystify? NC: Most people are not liars. They can’t tolerate too much cognitive dissonance. I don’t want to deny that there are outright liars, just brazen propagandists. You can find them in journalism and in the academic professions as well. But I don’t think that’s the norm. The norm is obedience, adoption of uncritical attitudes, taking the easy path of self-deception. I think there’s also a selective process in the academic professions and journalism.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

The way to do it: a new agency run by scientific experts, a “National Research Foundation.” The next month, the detonation of atomic weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave Bush’s argument about technological capacity a grim and forceful proof point.16 From the very beginning, then, there was a cognitive dissonance in the way America’s postwar politicians and technologists talked about the world-changing upsides of high-tech investment—expanding the frontiers of knowledge, pushing out into the unknown, bettering society, furthering democracy—and the far more bellicose and disquieting reasons that this investment happened in the first place.

The Evolution of God
by Robert Wright
Published 8 Jun 2009

This is just human nature: our instincts for playing non-zero-sum games, for maintaining social allies, encourage intellectual convergence, just as our instincts for playing zero-sum games encourage intellectual cleavage when we define people as enemies. And, non-zero-sumness aside, there was the problem of cognitive dissonance. Philo believed that all of Judaism and large parts of Greek philosophy were true, and so long as they seemed at odds, he couldn’t rest easy. 3 But his mission went beyond rendering them compatible. If the original revelation of ultimate truth had indeed come from Yahweh, then the deepest insights of Greek philosophy must have been prefigured in scripture.

The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail
by Nick Wallis
Published 18 Nov 2021

Bates recommended that anyone who was invited to attend mediation should delay their decision until Second Sight delivered their final report. ____________________ 1 Forgive me for reproducing large chunks of dialogue over the course of this chapter, but its Pinter-esque nature reveals the alternate reality the two Post Office execs were living in. For extra cognitive dissonance, try reading it out loud. 2 See the ‘Going In Hard’ chapter. 3 1) Interim Report – 8 July 2013; 2) Briefing Report Part 1 – 25 July 2014; 3) Briefing Report Part 2 – 21 August 2014. WORKING GROUP DISSOLVES On 10 March 2015, before Second Sight could deliver their promised report, the Post Office terminated the Working Group with immediate effect.

A Beautiful Mind
by Sylvia Nasar
Published 11 Jun 1998

Artin, for example, switched frantically from field to field trying to catch hold of something that would equal his early accomplishments.7 Steenrod slipped into a deep depression. When one of his students published a note on “Steenrod’s Reduced Powers” — the reference was, of course, mathematical, not personal — other mathematicians smirked and said, “Oh, yes, Steenrod’s reduced powers!”8 Nash’s thirtieth birthday produced a kind of cognitive dissonance. One can almost imagine a sniggering commentator inside Nash’s head: “What, thirty already, and still no prizes, no offer from Harvard, no tenure even? And you thought you were such a great mathematician? A genius? Ha, ha, ha!” Nash’s mood was odd. Periods of gnawing self-doubt and dissatisfaction alternated with periods of heady anticipation.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

After limited success with open monitoring or mindfulness meditation, he was introduced to Transcendental Meditation by a friend, Dan Loeb, billionaire and founder of Third Point LLC, a $17 billion asset management firm. ✸ Most-gifted or recommended books Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. The latter is a book about cognitive dissonance that looks at common weaknesses and biases in human thinking. Peter wants to ensure he goes through life without being too sure of himself, and this book helps him to recalibrate. ✸ Peter’s best $100 or less purchase? Peter has a monthly daddy/daughter date with his 8-year-old daughter.

Understanding Power
by Noam Chomsky
Published 26 Jul 2010

But even in the Soviet Union, chances are very strong that if you actually bothered to look, you’d find that most of the journalists actually believed the things they wrote. And that’s because people who didn’t believe that kind of thing would never have made it onto Pravda in the first place. It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another. So whether it’s a totalitarian system or a free system, the people who are most useful to the system of power are the ones who actually believe what they say, and they’re the ones who will typically make it through. So take Tom Wicker at the New York Times: when you talk to him about this kind of stuff, he gets very irate and says, “Nobody tells me what to write.”

Cuba: An American History
by Ada Ferrer
Published 6 Sep 2021

Yet others hurled slogans aimed at Fidel Castro: ‘!Abajo Fidel! Death to the tyrant!’ I wanted to cry. This is why I had left Cuba, I thought, so that I would never again have to hear another slogan….”49 She was listening to an uncanny echo, peering through a distorted looking glass. But that feeling—Miami’s cognitive dissonance, as Joan Didion once called it—was not always sinister. Sometimes it was just about family and survival, longing and attachment. So, a young girl in Cuba grows up in a home with a special drawer filled with nice clothes given to her family by relatives in the United States. They were clothes, pressed and never worn, waiting for the day the family would fly to its exile abroad.

Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale
by David N. Blank-Edelman
Published 16 Sep 2018

Despite being realistic about how terrible everything is, we stay strongly optimistic that the systems, software, and people we work with will get better. I’ve conducted surveys of deeply troubled teams for which every response seemed to indicate everything was wonderful. I’d love to hear from people who have experience uncovering such cognitive dissonance in engineers. After all these years, I’m still surprised when I uncover it. Further Reading Kim Scott, Radical Candor. Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, Crucial Conversations. Bio John Looney is a production engineer at Facebook, managing a data center provisioning team.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

Or the drought that hit the Mississippi River one year earlier, pushing water levels so low that barges loaded with oil and coal were unable to move for days, while they waited for the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge a channel (they had to appropriate funds allocated to rebuild from the previous year’s historic flooding along the same waterway). Or the coal-fired power plants in other parts of the country that were temporarily shut down because the waterways that they draw on to cool their machinery were either too hot or too dry (or, in some cases, both). Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive in this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face—and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place. I denied climate change for longer than I care to admit. I knew it was happening, sure.

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

The world of consciousness is vastly bigger than what any one person or group can imagine. Cognitive liberty stands as an assertion to protect, as best we can, those who want to be protected, those who want to reach, and those who don’t. One of the marvels of our species is that even as we think through our own ­contradictions, we may be led to – but we don’t have to – resolve cognitive dissonance. We are not binary beings. Humans have an uncanny ability to bootstrap our intelligence and our ­empathy by catalyzing an ability to imagine and innovate, and consequently, make manifold leaps in acting in and on the world. But we are not immune to our own success. It is with this paradoxical recognition of ­pattern-making and creative drive – of limitations at odds with a desire for self-expression, to expand rather than contract, to enhance rather than diminish our human potential – that I ­champion cognitive liberty as a twenty-first-century value.

Gnomon
by Nick Harkaway
Published 18 Oct 2017

The machine will make any necessary adjustments for my wellbeing: deal with physical deformities to the brain matter, ensure there is no bleeding or swelling that might endanger me, take preventative and curative measures against sociopathy, psychosis, depression, aggressive social narcissism, sadism, masochism, low self-esteem, undiagnosed neuroatypicality, attention deficit, in other words all the known issues of our complex biological processing, even unto the insidious and alienating cognitive dissonance and maladjustment syndrome. (You really have to watch for that one. Almost anyone can have it.) Or you could say that in twelve hours I will have betrayed everyone I love into the hands of these my torturers, and we will all of us emerge perfected and adjusted and happy and enslaved. We will be remade in the image of a creation I once believed was the only way to avoid horror, but which by a ridiculous string of errors and confusions of the mind is now a horror in itself.

Blue Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 23 Oct 2010

But it didn’t feel that way; the ground was still at a slope that supported the feeling in his body. The contradiction was so intense that he suffered a wave of nausea, the internal torque twisting him until it actually hurt to stand, as if every cell in his body was twisting to the side against the pressure of what the wristpad was telling him— the physiological effects of a purely cognitive dissonance, it was amazing. It almost made one believe in the existence of an internal magnet in the body, as in the pineal glands of migrating birds— but there was no magnetic field to speak of. Perhaps his skin was sensitive to solar radiation to the point of being able to pinpoint the sun’s location, even when the sky was a thick dark gray everywhere.

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy
by Irvin D. Yalom and Molyn Leszcz
Published 1 Jan 1967

Experiencing and expressing negative feelings about the group at this point would be unlikely for at least two reasons: (1) there is strong group pressure at termination to participate in positive testimonials—few group participants, as Asch15 has shown, can maintain their 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 to question the value or activities of the group. To do so thrusts the individual into a state of uncomfortable dissonance. Research on marathon groups is plagued with a multitude of design defects. 16 Some studies failed to employ proper controls (for example, a non–time-extended comparison group).

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
Published 1 May 2017

And with remarkable regularity our stances reflect our implicit, affective makeup, with cognition playing post-hoc catch up. If you really want to understand someone’s politics, understand their cognitive load, how prone they are to snap judgments, their approaches to reappraisal and resolving cognitive dissonance. Even more important, understand how they feel about novelty, ambiguity, empathy, hygiene, disease and dis-ease, and whether things used to be better and the future is a scary place. Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd.

Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 31 Oct 2013

As Kahneman put it, “people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations. In general, these heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors.”12 The Economist summed up what behavioral research suggested about actual decision-making: [People] fear failure and are prone to cognitive dissonance, sticking with a belief plainly at odds with the evidence, usually because the belief has been held and cherished for a long time. People like to anchor their beliefs so they can claim that they have external support, and are more likely to take risks to support the status quo than to get to a better place.

I You We Them
by Dan Gretton

And suddenly, perhaps, we can guess why he realised he could not travel beyond Dublin – for if he came face to face with the consequences of his policies, if he saw the eyes of the starving, they would no longer be a collective mass of abstract Irish peasantry, they would be individual human beings who were suffering. They would move from being ‘them’ to ‘him’ or ‘her’. And perhaps Trevelyan, deep down, knew he would not have been able to face that; today, we would say that his cognitive dissonance – his ability to continue holding contradictory moral positions – would no longer be able to function. Because here, fundamentally, was a man of duty, a man who strictly ordered his own feelings, regarded them with the suspicion he reserved for enemy forces. He was a man – in this particular respect – not dissimilar to Adolf Eichmann, who put all his energies into his official self, his work, most content behind his desk in Whitehall, issuing the orders in letters and memoranda which resulted in the deaths of a multitude of people he would never see.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein
Published 1 Jan 2008

A yellow convertible tried to run a policeman down. Two hundred teenagers set out to storm Mayor Daley’s house. As police closed in, teenagers threw their incriminating arsenal of chains, cleavers, and clubs over the Thirty-fifth Street overpass of the Dan Ryan Expressway (an inattentive newspaper reader wrote to Senator Douglas and in the cognitive dissonance at the notion of lawless Caucasians called them “a gang of Negroes”). “There must be some way of resolving questions without marches,” Daley whined plaintively into the TV cameras, haunted now by the most frightening chant of all: “Don’t vote for Democrats! Don’t vote for Democrats!” Richard Nixon was in Saigon, denouncing Vietnam War critics at an airport press conference: they were “prolonging the war, encouraging the enemy, and preventing the very negotiations the critics say they want.”

Central America
by Carolyn McCarthy , Greg Benchwick , Joshua Samuel Brown , Alex Egerton , Matthew Firestone , Kevin Raub , Tom Spurling and Lucas Vidgen
Published 2 Jan 2001

Others, however, are not so ready to embrace gringo culture. Indigenous groups such as the Emberá and Kuna are struggling to keep their traditions alive, as more and more of their youth are lured into the Westernized lifestyle of the city. Given the clash between old and new, it’s surprising the country isn’t suffering from a serious case of cognitive dissonance. Somehow, the exceptionally tolerant Panamanian character weathers many contradictions — the old and the new, the grave disparity between rich and poor, and the gorgeous natural environment and its rapid destruction. Lifestyle In spite of the skyscrapers and gleaming restaurants lining the wealthier districts of Panama City, nearly a third of the country’s population lives in poverty.

Engineering Security
by Peter Gutmann

When a security researcher demonstrated to his parents that the lock on the 26 Problems front door of their house could be bypassed in a matter of seconds and offered relatively easy unauthorised entry to their home their reaction was to ask him not to inform them of this again. This extends beyond security and carries over to general life. If you’d like to read more about this look up a reference to “cognitive dissonance”, an interesting concept first proposed in a study into why believers in end-of-the-world prophecies continued to believe in them even when they failed to come true [169]. As security researcher Amir Herzberg puts it, “Defend, don’t ask”. Building something that relies on user education to be effective is a recipe for disaster.