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Logic dictates that one’s actions reflect one’s thoughts, and even one’s thoughts maintain
consistency with each other. However, minds are complicated, and you subvert your beliefs more often than you realize. Maintaining otherwise, in itself, is a form of cognitive dissonance as your brain refuses to process the truth.
Cognitive Dissonance refers to the discomfort one feels when they try to rationalize two different but contradictory beliefs or an action that they performed that runs contrarily to their beliefs, and because one does not like being uncomfortable, they usually try to double down on one belief in an attempt to create consistency in their motivations. The greater the discomfort, the greater the attempt to create consistency.
Some examples of this include a non-vegetarian finding the animals they eat to look cute, or an environmentalist realizing that something that they love is actually really harmful to the
environment, or you when you realize that you really should be working right now instead of trying to feel smart by reading a blog on psychology written by an amateur.
The theory of cognitive dissonance was first proposed by Leon Festinger, upon which he wrote a book titled "A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance," which was published in 1957. He developed the theory after studying a doomsday cult called "The Seekers" or "The Brotherhood of the Seven Rays", led by a suburban housewife named Dorothy Martins. Martins said that she had been sent messages from a group of beings known simply as "The Guardians", who did not in fact live in a spaceship named Milano, but rather lived on a planet named "Clarion". She claimed that a flood would destroy the world on the 21st of December 1954, and that there would be salvation for those who believed her in the form of a flying saucer.
Obviously, there was no flood or a flying saucer. Those who had believed in the news sparingly immediately realized that they were acting stupid, while those who had become invested in the conspiracy began making up justifications for the lack of a flood, eventually concluding that it was their faith that had convinced God to spare the Earth
from being destroyed.
An entire book documenting this event, titled "When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World,"
was authored by Mr. Festinger along with Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter.
The brain deals with the discomfort of cognitive dissonance in one of four ways:
1. You change your behavior to comply with the cause of the dissonance.
2. You change one of the dissonant thoughts and create consistency.
3. You add justifications and excuses to one thought in order to make it seem more correct than the other.
4. You ignore the inconsistency by making it seem unimportant.
Using our previous examples again, the non-vegetarian may decide to become vegan, the
environmentalist may look for alternatives, and you ignored both the issue and your work; with that attitude, you truly stand as an excellent justification for the gene pools' need for a life guard or two.
The brain's need to resolve dissonances also leads to phenomena such as the induced compliance effect, in which the brain convinces itself that it has a valid reason for something even when it doesn't. This is shown clearly in a study conducted once again by Leon Festinger, this time with
James Merrill Carlsmith. In the study, a group of participants were required to participate in a mind-numbingly boring activity for a period of 30 minutes and then asked to convince a waiting participant to perform the same activity. One group of participants was paid $20 to do so, and the other group was paid only $1. Even though they all found the activity boring, when asked to convince someone else, they all argued the exact opposite. When asked why later on, those paid $20 justified themselves by saying that they did so by saying they were paid to do so, while the group that was paid $1, not having such an excuse, managed to convince themselves that the activity was in fact actually interesting, and that was why they recommended it to the waiting participants.
These subtle traps, which your brain can dig itself into, are why you need to be conscious of even your own thoughts. So the next time you feel extreme discomfort and you start thinking of justifications, take a pause, and evaluate if you really mean it or are just trying to convince yourself that you mean it so that you don’t have to deal with an uncomfortable situation.
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