The Cognitive Dissonance of Infidelity
It is a cliche: we humans are complex creatures. Our rich, conscious experience of life is the result of the most powerful and multifaceted brains on the planet. We absorb and react to the stimuli of our environment with a powerful ability to understand and an unavoidable tendency to feel. We are constantly scanning, interpreting, and emotionally reacting; it’s what we do, it’s how we work. It is the source of all beauty, pain, fascination, and fear that make up life.
There is a famous case in neuroscience that involves a standup family man named Elliot who developed a brain tumor that necessitated a removal of a significant chunk of his brain. When Elliot awoke from surgery, he was suddenly incapable of making decisions. Even the most mundane dilemmas (what to eat, what to wear) debilitated him. He understood the rational elements of his various predicaments perfectly, but was unable to move himself to make a choice. He could even discuss complex political affairs and when presented with hypothetical scenarios about the lives of others he could prescribe a course of action that would lead one to happiness. Tragically though, he was unable to apply his sound reasoning ability to his own life. He fell victim to investment scams and went bankrupt, he was unable to hold a steady job, he cheated on his wife and after she divorced him he married a prostitute.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied Elliot’s case in detail and concluded that the tissue he lost in his surgery was directly responsible for his demise. In the course of removing his tumor, Elliot’s surgeons essentially severed the connection between his limbic system (the emotional center of the brain) and his frontal lobes (the rational center of his brain). This left Elliot’s ability to reason and to feel intact but made it impossible for these two capacities to influence each other. This lack of internal communication debilitated Elliot to the point where he was not functioning as a person.
What can we learn from Elliot? Essentially this: a failure of harmony and cooperation between our rational and emotional capabilities is catastrophic. These operations occur simultaneously but they are housed in separate parts of our brain. We like to feel good about our thoughts and we like to think about what makes us feel good. When we are humming along in life, our reason and our emotion are on the same page, informing each other and conspiring to affirm our feelings with good reasons or to affirm our good reasons with satisfying feelings. In the ancient Greek fable of “The Fox and The Grapes,” a fox is enticed by some delicious looking grapes hanging high in a tree. When he determines that the grapes lay out of his reach, the fox convinces himself that they must be sour, that he isn’t missing out. By doing this bit of forced reasoning, the fox reconciles his internal cognitive dissonance: the discomfort experienced by his conflicting desire to have the grapes and his inconvenient reasoning that tells him that they are out of reach.
Those of us with our frontal lobe to limbic system connections intact do these mental gymnastics all the time, so much so that we usually don’t notice. It’s an adaptation to make us feel comfortable, to keep us looking ahead and functioning well. Occasionally though a situation comes along that poses a conflict of head and heart so severe that our systems crash.
The experience of infidelity, specifically being cheated on, is one of these such occasions. Many people who evaluate these cases from a third party perspective, that is without emotional investment, find them to be quite clear and unambiguous: someone wronged a person they love, it’s morally reprehensible, and this person should be unapologetically dumped. This perspective is only half of the equation for someone who personally faces this reality. In an ideally functioning brain there is a harmonious rational and emotional attitude towards a loved one: you think of them as highly as you feel of them and vice versa. When you’re cheated on, however, these rational and emotional stances divide and run away from each other. Your mind becomes like America, deeply and dysfunctionally polarized.
The dirty little secret about being cheated on is that it amplifies emotional attachment. Somebody took your thing, so you want it more. It’s a primal drive and it is very powerful. You had this clear path towards proliferating your genes in the world and somebody else has trespassed on it. The instinct is not to ditch the path and let them have it, it is to reclaim it at all costs and ramp up security. Your emotional draw to this person who’s just hurt you so deeply reaches an all time high. Conversely, the cold rational part of your brain is right there with the detached bystander and its perception of your transgressor is at an all time low. This is the crippling cognitive dissonance of infidelity. It is the reason the experience is so disorienting. In addition to causing an extraordinary amount of raw pain, being cheated on turns you into Elliot. How can you reconcile your divided mind when the sides are so radically opposed? Scientists and stock market wizards tell us to trust the numbers, be rational, use your head; while zen masters, sports psychologists, and musicians stress the beautiful wisdom of the intuition.
In this case, there seems to be no middle ground in the internal conflict. You either embrace the decisive rationalism of the mind, deny your feelings, and leave your lover behind; or you surrender to your feelings and intuition and embark on a challenging path back to trust and internal harmony. An important decision no doubt, but one that must be made with a warped and uneven mind.
