What is cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and virtue signalling?

When looking at the election of president Trump, Brexit, other populists movements across Europe (Le Pen, Wilders, Frauke Petry) and the rest of the world (Duterte) you probably have noticed that they all happened in spite of a clear media bias against these movements.

Where the traditional media were able to steer the collective mindset of the population in a certain direction in the past, their influence now seems to be limited to an elite of affluent professionals (I’m trying hard to avoid use of the word intellectuals here), students & the traditional left.

The debate seems to have moved away from the traditional press into the social media and this gives us an interesting insight in human psychology as both factions clash and interact with each other via these channels.

These events are an interesting case of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and virtue signalling. Now what are these in layman’s terms?

Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort or stress we feel when something happens that conflicts with our own ideas or beliefs and challenges our thoughts about these ideas or beliefs. A sort of internal conflict of beliefs we hold.

For example when you buy a very expensive “brand” product or service in the hope it would offer you a better experience than the cheaper version but it turns out to be just the same or worse. You now hold two different views in your brain.

1. The expensive brand is high quality
2. I paid more than I actually can afford for a similar or less satisfying experience

Since our brain is not very good at dealing with conflicting emotions eg. try being happy and sad at the same time, it’s very hard to do, our brain needs to find a way out of this deadlock.

4 things can happen:

1. We change our view : “We will not buy this expensive brand again”
2. We change the conflicting view : “It’s actually decent quality if you take everything into consideration” or “Everything is made in China nowadays, so you won’t find better anyway”
3. We add a new view to counter the conflicting view: “Instead of focussing on the quality you shift to price as the problem and say to yourself I’ll just work more hours so I can actually afford paying these premium products/services I deserve”
4. We ignore the conflicting view: “It’s excellent quality, I love this brand”

A great example is the “Trump is the new Hitler” meme.

Not only is this a great example of cognitive dissonance as I will show you next but also a great example of a fallacy (invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning), a reductio ad Hitlerum.

A “reductio or argumentum ad Hitlerum” is the attempt to invalidate someone’s position on the basis that the same beliefs were once held by Adolf Hitler or his party. Hitler deported Jews and Trump wants to deport illegal immigrants. Hitler didn’t drink alcohol, Trump doesn’t drink alcohol and so on. “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1”, this phenomenon has been commonly referred to as Godwin’s law.

The comparison with Hitler is something that has been shared over and over on Twitter and and has even been suggested in the media.

But then slowly people discover that Trump’s son in law happens to be Jewish, that contradicts with the Hitler or the white supremacist narrative. Next he seems to get along with Israel and president Netanyahu on a better level than the previous president.

Now we have Hitler vs someone who seems to be a philosemite (Jew-friend). These two notions are very conflicting.

So the same 4 things can happen:

1. Change of view: ”He’s not that bad after all”
2. Change of the conflicting view: “Israelis are the new Nazis look at what they do to the Palestinians” (So your initial view is still intact)
3. Add a new counter view: “He might not be antisemitic but he is islamphobic and hates Mexicans or he’s incompetent, chaotic, incoherent & dumb”.
4. Ignore it all together: “Trump is just a bigot (and still a Nazi but we just call it differently now)” (while being totally oblivious to the meaning of bigotry)

This way people can put their minds at rest and deal with the inner conflict without losing their minds.

Confirmation bias is another phenomenon that becomes very apparent in the online discussions. This is the tendency to interpret, favor or look for information or evidence that confirms pre-existing ideas or believes. This means that once we have established a belief in our mind we will look for evidence to confirm that same belief.

A great example of this was when Sarah Silverman out of ignorance posted a tweet depicting a spray painted markings on a sidewalk that vaguely resembled swastikas. In other words she became more perceptive to those markings.

Turns out these markings were utility markings used to designate the locations of underground pipes and wires.

Once people are in this state of cognitive dissonance and have changed, countered or ignored the conflicting idea and reinforced it through confirmation bias, they want to signal or express the resulting moral values to their peers within their social group to elevate their status and acceptance. This is what is called virtue signalling. We have evolved from being inner-directed to being other-directed (dependency on acceptance of our social circle) (David Riesman).

To overcome these patterns we need to allow conflicting opinions to be stated and preserve freedom of speech at all cost while trying to form objective views based on objective evidence as much as possible. But it’s hard since we aren’t as logical and objective as we tend to think we are.