Source: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e0/8b/11/e08b11d7c07e472a3f7b28fad2d67dec.jpg

This kind of mental balancing act can be witnessed all the time in our daily lives, and we’ve probably used it more than once for ourselves, too. The term was coined by Leon Festinger who infiltrated an UFO religion called “The Seekers” to study the cognitive reaction of the members if (and he was pretty sure of that) the prediction of their leader fails. The initial prophecy was for the members to be saved by a UFO as big catastrophes destroy the rest of the world and humanity. Needless to say, it didn’t happen. After that they predicted another date for the same event. With the second doomsday prediction failing as well, a lot of the members abandoned the religion and went home. But the ones who stayed claimed that their strong belief and faith had saved the world from the catastrophic disaster.

Source: https://ramonetrissha.blogspot.com/2023/06/ufo.html

This reaction was very fascinating for Leon Festinger and after further studies with his colleagues they came up with the cognitive dissonance theory. The underlying idea of the concept is that the perception of contradictory information leads to psychological stress. For example, perceived information about real world events clashes with the believes of a person. People who experience this kind of discomfort want to reduce it and use different ways of coping. Of course, the healthy one would be to accept the information and change your believes which is pretty hard for a lot of folks. “Easier” coping strategies are to make changes to the perceived information to justify the dissonance like adding new parts to the cognition (rationalization), avoiding circumstances and contradictory information which increases the dissonance (confirmation bias) or simply negate the information.

On a personal note, why I found this concept so interesting and horrible at the same time. All my life I have gladly argued with a lot of people over a lot of different stuff – which is fine because everyone should have the right for their own opinion and because the world is not black and white but rather infinity shades of gray there is always some arguments for something and against it. But with the pandemic, the rise of certain politicians and now the war in Ukraine something kind of changed. Not only got it harder to find the smallest piece of common ground but my arguments based on facts were just dismissed with crude and illogical reactions. I kind of “lost” even though I had tons of knowledge and scientific based arguments. And even though their predictions or statements were actually proven wrong they just didn’t give a s**t about it and continued with even cruder explanations (like the UFO people). This drove me kind of nuts because our whole world – like stuff we use every single day – is based on science and facts. And I’m not talking about believes or religion or some spiritual things that can not be disproven nor proven. But hard scientific, medical, or journalistic facts. If we need surgery or are sick most of us go to the hospital and trust the science underneath it which has been build up for centuries. If we need a direction where to go, we check some kind of GPS based map which also works because there are satellites that pinpoint our location. So, all that stuff works because we trust simple based facts like two and two equals four. But even though some of my discussion partners accepted most of those logical arguments they just negated others by heart, and I wondered why.

Source: https://www.livingmorefully.com/uploads/1/0/4/1/104129632/what-is-cognitive-dissonance-1_orig.jpeg

The construct of cognitive dissonance and the coping mechanisms are one explanation for this kind of behavior. There are some easy examples of this phenomenon which you might know or have experienced yourself.

Imagine you have too much weight and want to lose some, but you really love sweet things. Now there is a doughnut in front of you. The information that doughnuts make you overweight plus your own weight and the love for sweet things clash and leads to stress. You can just change your behavior and not eat doughnuts anymore which would be the logical thing. Or you can cope with it by changing the conflicting cognition (today is cheat day so it’s fine – still on a diet though), by adding new behaviors or cognitions (I work the doughnut off with thirty minutes extra in the gym) or by just ignoring or denying the information (there is not much sugar in this doughnut and it’s really not that unhealthy). Another very good example is smoking cigarettes. Even though it is proven that smoking is very harmful you get a lot of “good” reasons for this behavior. It calms me down, it is good for socializing (functioning beliefs) or one has to die anyway of something, so why not enjoy yourself and smoke, smoking is no more risky than stuff other people do or a bus can kill me any day (risk-minimizing-beliefs).

Source: https://autumnasphodel.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cognitive-dissonance.jpg

As you can see cognitive dissonance and the coping mechanisms for it are pretty standard and you experience them in a lot of different situations. But sometimes it has just a low influence for individual people like smoking or eating but on a bigger scale this can be very harmful like in conspiracy theories, disinformation, or cults.

Thanks for reading my article. I hope this knowledge helps you on a personal level with knowing how your mind works in different situations or maybe in discussions with others.

For full disclosure, I am the original author but I first uploaded it to another platform (Article - which is out of commission today).