Do you remember the day you found out Santa Claus didn’t exist? I remember being confused, stressed, trying to convince myself there was evidence that he did exist. I was experiencing cognitive dissonance.
Have you ever seen somebody living a lie to avoid an uncomfortable reality? Why do we keep looking to the other side? Humans want consistency in their lives, we want certainty, we don’t want to be wrong. The problem is that everything changes, living in a world of illusions only sets yourself for failure.
The reason we prefer comforting lies to unpleasant truths is that we want to avoid the pain caused by cognitive dissonance:
cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. The occurrence of cognitive dissonance is a consequence of a person performing an action that contradicts personal beliefs, ideals, and values; and also occurs when confronted with new information that contradicts said beliefs, ideals, and values.
In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency in order to mentally function in the real world. A person who experiences internal inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable and is motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance. This is done by changing parts of the cognition to justify the stressful behavior, by adding new parts to the cognition that causes the psychological dissonance, or by actively avoiding social situations and contradictory information that are likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance.(wikipedia)
An example of cognitive dissonance is whenever something challenges a belief held by a person. The possibility of being wrong is stressful because this belief is a foundation of his/her world view or self image. Some examples:
- Religious/atheists fanatics when challenged
- When you realize that sugar causes most of the ailments that will kill you
- When Charles Darwing introduced the theory of evolution and shattered creationism
When facing cognitive dissonance, we can either adjust to reality or make up more lies. Here are the 4 actions for reducing this discomfort:
- Change the behavior
- Change the belief
- Add a belief to justify behaviour
- Ignore the conflict
an example:
Cognitive dissonance is life telling you how things really are. As a friend says: Reality imposes itself. What we believe doesn’t matter, things are the way they are. It doesn’t matter if you believe in global warming or not, the temperature is increasing every year. It doesn’t matter if you think that the internet won’t take over your industry, soon some amazon will disrupt your business.
Developing tolerance to cognitive dissonance is something everybody should be working on. The first step is accepting our ignorance, embracing being wrong and learning from it. As Naval Ravikant says: “You should have strong opinions loosely held”. You can have strong opinions that change over time as you get more information.
Things are changing quickly, holding on to outdated views and unproven beliefs is a hindrance to growth. The more we understand how the world works, the more we can use it in our favor. The truth is the prize, stay curious, stay a beginner.
