Being skeptical about our own thoughts

Leon Festinger defines cognitive dissonance as ‘a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent’. After experiencing cognitive dissonance we usually tend to justify it by using several self-deceptive explanations. The classical example is about smoking: you face two inconsistent, contradictory cognitions: ‘Smoking is slowly killing me’ and ‘I smoke two packs a day’. There is already some sort of mental discomfort produced. The easiest way to reduce it, is obviously to quit. But it may not be so easy for some thus those people find themselves trapped in some ingenious self-deluded ways of thinking. Like for instance: ‘Curiously my uncle who smokes all his life, has never had cancer’.

With the theory of cognitive dissonance we suddenly realize that what we’ve believed, what for some has been the pillar of our optimism towards human race, gets uncovered as being a self-deceptive soap bubbles over our perceptions. People aren’t logical, we are at the core — maybe not totally irrational, but surely — unreasonable. For instance, if you believe that something is true, you will be likely to dismiss the counterarguments in favor of those confirming your belief, sometimes even to exaggerate it. We’ll always find a way to criticize, distort or dismiss in order to keep our cognitive dissonance at bay. This phenomena is elegantly called the ‘confirmation bias’. This is why — once your mind is made up — it is so super hard to change it. No one likes to have their mistakes pointed out, don’t they?

Same mechanism we should keep in mind when taking testimonials for granted. Even if someone tells you what’s right because they experienced it in the past, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s really how it is. Because then you find out: having the same experience may lead you to the entirely different final conclusions. Say it is about a university. You need to decide whether to go to Sussex or to Bristol. In order to gain first-hand information, usually the primary reaction is to ask someone who’s already studied at Bristol (or Sussex). And usually what we receive is over-estimated image of the school. Why? It’s because after you’ve made a choice, you need to justify it to feel better with yourself. So if you choose Bristol, you will be praising it and keep finding new evidence to justify your decision. If you’re stuck, what else would you do anyway? And so, if you really need to ask for an advice, rather than relying on testimonials, speak to someone who has wide knowledge about the place, but is not yet there. And don’t forget to familiarize yourself with the course webpage.

Funny thing with favors. If you want to make peace with your enemy, ask them for help. Imagine you hold in your head this really nasty image of someone you truly can’t stand. Sometimes you can’t sleep because you ruminate on countless ways of your sweet revenge and how you make this person suffer. And then one night you’re fed up, because none of this works and even makes you feel much worse, so you come up with an idea to bury the hatchet. You have good intentions, but you know the person you had bad feelings towards, doesn’t necessarily liked you either. And then, what you do is, you’re asking this person for a favor. What does it do? If they agree to give you a hand, it activates this person’s cognitive dissonance, so they have to justify their action somehow. One of their halves tends to think: ‘I don’t like this person, because she is annoying’, the second: ‘I am helping the person I don’t like and respect’. One of the options to resolve it, is to rearrange mental representation: ‘Maybe this person isn’t really that bad, I am helping her after all and I don’t help people who don’t deserve my help’. The outcome couldn’t be overrated.

Cognitive dissonance is annoying under any circumstances but the most overwhelming and painful it may be to people threatened by loosing some element of their self-concept. It’s usually the case when we do or experience something inconsistent with our view of ourselves. Let’s say you commit a crime — say hire some men to beat your daughter ex-boyfriend up. The boyfriend ends up in hospital with broken ribs. Now. You have several options to explain it to yourself: ‘He deserved this, he hurt my daughter, he’s a bad person’, ‘I only tried to protect my daughter, I’m a good father’ or: ‘I’m a criminal’. First option will enable you to repeat this sort of problem-solving techniques in the future and will make your thinking of people as evil. Second option may wake up an evil father in you, a person who would — by all means, even by being possessive, aggressive and ruthless — protect his family (Walter White calling). But the third is the most dangerous, because it entirely changes your concept of who you are. From now on, you see yourself as a criminal therefore any criminal action you take, will be well justified, because grounded deeply into the perception of your character. ‘This starts a process of entrapment — action, justification, further action — that increases your intensity and commitment, and may end up taking you far from your original intentions or principles’.

We surely all know those people who, after failing, showing off this creepy relief tone on their faces, sprinkled with some lovely smile powder in addition. Why are we sometimes happy when failing? Because self-justification happens not always to be about protecting high self-esteem but also low self-esteem, if only that’s how a person sees herself or himself. Hence, reducing the dissonance is to preserve one’s self-image, whatever it is. Cognitive dissonance after all is all about being in a state of harmony, keeping balance, a proper status quo of our mental condition. So if a person succeeds in something, say gaining a reward in maths, she or he may feel like a fraud, because doesn’t believe her or his real abilities. Lots and lots of women are struggling with finding a nice man as a partner because of their self-esteem issues. Imagine a girl who’s constantly thinking: ‘This nice man seems to like me. There is obviously something wrong with him, because I am nothing to like’ or when she goes: ‘This nice man seems to like me. I am sure, as soon as he discovers how stupid and unworthy I am, he’ll dump me’. Those women will pay a high psychological price to have that consonance restored.

All in all, our dear cognitive dissonance is there to help us. Our well developed self-justification skills are greatly designed to make us feel good about ourselves — about what we’ve done, what we believe and who we are. Imagine how would it have been, if we were all so self-aware all the time. People would still be committing crime, making bad deeds, behaving filthily from time to time, it’s insurmountable. Maybe then, focusing on our lives full of self-deceptive lies shouldn’t be the case. Maybe instead we should try to find the thrill in every self-discovery. I love the way the ‘eureka moment’ feels like! Is it almost as if I enjoyed being proven wrong? Or maybe it’s more about admitting we all do make mistakes, and the relief after realizing it feels as comforting as only the restored cognitive dissonance can be felt like.