What Is Cognitive Dissonance, & Where Does It Come From?

Although most of us haven’t heard of cognitive dissonance, we are all hugely familiar with the patterns of behaviour it is describing.

For example, dissonance can occur when we go out with the intention of not getting drunk, and then we end drinking far more than intended! The next morning, we must engage in dissonance reduction strategies to justify the behaviours of the night before or the hangover of the following day. ‘It’s ok that I made a complete idiot of myself last night because I’ll never drink again’ is a classic I became very familiar with!

If we decide to gorge on junk foods, we may attempt to justify the behaviour by promising to do more exercise this week, or by promising to eat more healthy foods to compensate. Or, we may start toning down the negative effects of the junk food by saying that ‘a little bit of naughtiness never did anyone harm’ even when it\’s considerably more than a little bit!

Smokers are another well-trained group of dissonance reducers. They may play down the harmful effects of smoking, latch onto the fact that some smokers live to a hundred, or justify it as a good way of socialising with work colleagues , relieving stress, or looking attractive to the opposite sex.

Stress is another activity we see people indulging in and then justifying it afterwards. In fact, as a society, we seem to have done a really good job of justifying stress in order to ‘get things done’. We may ignore the effects on our health and wellbeing in the name of paying the mortgage, putting food on the table or saving for some grand adventure that is going to make it all worthwhile.

It\’s only when the stress becomes unavoidable and our mind or body start breaking down that some of us wake up to how unsustainable it all is.

And of course there is the environmentalist, who is happy to fly lots on business ‘because cow’s farts are even worse than aeronautical exhaust’ or who is happy driving around town thinking they are a do-gooding citizen when in actual fact lots of dirty fossil fuels had to be burnt to power the electricity that their car runs on.

If the level of investment in a position is high, then the dissonance is much greater. The person either has to confront the high levels of dissonance and attempt to resolve or as is more common, the person must go to ever greater lengths to justify their position. A classic example of this was the geocentric theory that the sun went around the earth. Up until the 17th century, the biggest thinkers went to great lengths to create models of planetary movements that could justify the observations they found in the night sky. They were so stuck on the concept that the earth was the centre of the universe, they simply couldn\’t compute the more obvious conclusion that was staring them in the face; namely that the earth travelled around the sun.  It was too much of a paradigm shift. As more information came dispelling the theory, the model the scientists built became so complex and convoluted, introducing all these fanciful elaborations called ‘epicycles’ to justify their model.

Eventually, paradigm shifting thinkers such as Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were able to turn the tables on the geocentric model, but not without a good century of resistance from many within the religious and scientific establishment.

Another classic tactic to relieve oneself of dissonance is to work even harder to try and persuade others to subscribe to your belief so that you can find solace and justification in their agreement with you. I’m sure you can all think of someone you know who is desperate to get you to align with their beliefs. I am told that in many places in the US, neighbourhoods have become either primarily democratic or primarily republican, where all the people in those particular neighbourhoods watch the TV channels and listen to the radio stations that justify their belief is the way ahead and that is that. It means there is no challenge to their worldview and therefore they are faced with less dissonance, but at what cost?

In the long term, it may mean that as an entire global society we could sleepwalk towards some disaster because we have collectively convinced ourselves that our position and behaviours are justified. In the short term, it may lead to the election of Donald Trump!

Another classic example that has been researched extensively is how people easily able to lie to themselves and others when there is an externalised incentive like money. It may help explain how people who are earning large sums of money are able to justify to themselves that they actually enjoy their job or that its ‘not so bad’ in order to continue being rewarded with one of the things our culture deems most valuable… CASH!

Owning a house is another particularly strongly held belief in the UK, and I have noticed over the years the lengths people will go to justify binding their lives to a mortgage. And the fact that since the early 80’s house prices have significantly appreciated, thus providing the so-called monetary reward, means homeownership represents a double whammy of convincing activity that goes unquestioned here and yet receives a relatively lukewarm reception in Germany, where renting is the norm.

When making a choice between two propositions, the person making the choice then practices revisionist thinking to justify the choice they made – applying greater value to the thing they chose and devaluing the thing the elected not to choose.

So how do we go about ensuring that cognitive dissonance doesn’t cause us to justify unsustainable thinking and behaviours? The first thing to do is to be honest with yourself when you catch yourself doing it. Now that you know of this phenomenon, start having fun observing it in your life. You may realise just how ridiculous you are being in so many ways. If you do, don’t lambast yourself, simply smile at your humanity and then perhaps resolve to move to move towards a more coherent position later.

You can also open your mind with regular meditation. Meditation helps free us from the conditioned responses we have imported from family and society and allows us to see things much more clearly and therefore make choices that are in keeping with how feel fundamentally feel. And how we fundamentally feel will be informed by a more all-inclusive sense of awareness, our impact on others and of our purpose in life. It will connect you with who you really are and what you’re really about. The stories we have been telling ourselves over the years have led to all sorts of layers of dissonance we\’ve conveniently ignored. By peeling away the layers of the facade, we find something that is totally coherent and consistent.

Another strategy is to allow yourself to feel the discomfort of dissonance. We have become accustomed to trying to do anything in the world to avoid discomfort. We have become so well practised at ignorance and justification. When you’ve been meditating for a while, you begin to allow yourself to feel the discomfort without investing in it. And when you do this, you accept the realities of a situation so much more easily. Having accepted the reality of a given situation, you can then respond in a really evolved and progressive way.

As you move ever more towards a state of total cognitive coherence, you begin to feel completely at peace with yourself. With your thoughts. With your actions and with the world in which you live. There is no need to justify, simply to live, love and be.