Cognitive Dissonance

Michael Hagos

…a low tolerance for cognitive dissonance leads most propagators of falsehood to self-deception;
they tend to say what they believe, having first come to believe what they say.[1]

“Cognitive dissonance is a condition first proposed by the psychologist Leon Festinger in 1956,
relating to his hypothesis of cognitive consistency. Cognitive dissonance is a state of opposition
between cognitions. Cognitive dissonance is a perceived inconsistency between two cognitions
in which the person believes one thing but then acts in a different way from what they believed.
For the purpose of cognitive dissonance theory, cognitions are defined as being any element of
knowledge, attitude, emotions, belief or value, as well as a goal, plan, or an interest. In brief, the
theory of cognitive dissonance holds that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that
compels the human mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing
beliefs, so as to minimize the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions,”[2] since it is
very hard to live with cognitive dissonance. In other words, “once two competing cognitions are
held simultaneously, the individual can be said to be in a state of ‘cognitive dissonance’.” And a
“conflicted state of mind will necessarily seek to attain psychological consonance, i.e., a balance
between competing cognitions,”[3] through different subterfuges: consensual validation (which
is “one of the most deceptive features of social life”[4]), illusions, suppressing doubts,
mindguarding (i.e., the sanitization of information so that it conforms to the current schemas),
rationalizations, ethical blinders (i.e., a sense of righteousness: “if we are good, then whatever
we do must be good”), stereotypes (which are tenacious, since most people tend to stick to them
despite all evidence to the contrary), denial, projection (i.e., blaming others for the very thing
that we are apparently guilty of), conformity (since the latter “reduces the chance of future
cognitive dissonance, because the individual can rationalize that the group imposed its
judgment”[5]), the operation of unconscious elements which render subjective sincerety
questionable,[6] etc.

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 In accordance with this definition and the qualifiers appended to it, people “prefer a
particular truth over other, more accurate truths because, for example, it does not cause cognitive
dissonance and inconsistency or because it is simpler to deal with and thus satisfies the cognitive
miser’s need for parsimony. People strive to lighten the burden of information processing by
avoiding comprehensive expenditures of thought and energy, by using heuristics, and by
structuring their experiences into cognitive schemata that provide shortcuts to judgment, even at
the cost of accuracy, and that store information in memory in a form that is economical,
accessible, and resistant to decay. Cognitive structure and substance, once formed, tend to
persevere, although change is not impossible.” (Vertzberger, 1990: 113). These observations
appear to be valid, in my view, because not only do they take into account the intricacies
underlying information processing, but they also lend credence to the contention that it is rather
easy to sacrifice truth for falsehood (which is done mostly subconsciously), in light of the fact
that even minimal standards of honesty create internal discomfort. But this is not to suggest that
cognitive dissonance is always strong in humans; it can be mild (Vertzberger, 1990: 138), but not
necessarily for the illustrative reason discussed by Vertzberger. If decision-makers experience
only mild dissonance as a result of public pressure demanding change in policy, for example,
then that mildness can only be explained in terms of the general contempt that’s felt towards
ordinary citizens, across the board, among the ruling classes.[7]
That said, there are two kinds of dissonances: pre-decisional and post-decisional. The
former “might be analogous to what Freud called ‘compensation’” (Wikipedia), which simply
means that a latent bias is compensated for by ostensible displays of impartiality so that moral
judgments may be withheld by one’s surrounding, especially by the subjects towards whom one
is biased. So the ostensible measures are hoped to reduce dissonance in the later decision,
meaning that the bias resides in a ‘comfort zone’ as long as there’s no external stimuli
challenging the bias. Post-decisional dissonance, on the other hand, is characterized by conscious
efforts to assuage dissonance-arousing situations if and when one does things that one knows are
wrong. For example, “many studies have shown that people with compulsive disorders like
gambling will subjectively reinforce decisions or commitments they have already made. In one
simple experiment, experimenters found that bettors at a horse track believed bets were more
likely to succeed immediately after being placed. According to the hypothesis, the possibility of
being wrong is dissonance-arousing, so people will change their perceptions to make their
decisions seem better. Post-decisional dissonance may be increased by the importance of the

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issue, the length of time the subject takes to make or avoid the decision, and the extent to which
the decision could be reversed. ” (Wikipedia) Therefore, since cognitive dissonance naturally
evokes negative feelings, the temptation to eliminate contradictions in order to feel good is rather
strong, and this temptation is often precisely the thing that compels the distortion of truth, even if
there are times when the elimination of contradictions is done honestly, but that seems to be rare.
Fortunately, there is a moral dimension involved in information processing and cognitive
dissonance, as when leaders, for example, are supposedly compelled to make a trade-off between
“commitments to morality in politics” on the one hand, and “the pragmatic behavior required by
realpolitik” (Vertzberger, 1990: 170) on the other hand. But in reality it is preposterous to
presuppose that ethical considerations come into play within the framework of military-based
state-capitalism,[8] so we can safely discount Vertzberger’s claim to the contrary, so far as
Wilson, Nehru and Carter are concerned (ibid). In fact, leaders in general do not have a
commitment to morality (except for public relations purposes), and certainly Wilson and
Carter[9] were as thuggish as many of their predecessors and successors.[10] States are not
moral agents. Whenever they have acted humanely, it has never been out of any inherent
goodness but because they were forced to act humanely by a demanding and threatening
constituency, by popular democratic struggle, which brings us back to rationalization, since even
the most heinous crimes are typically rationalized through one or another dishonest way, in order
to assuage the pangs of consciousness and thereby reduce cognitive dissonance, since most
people have a low tolerance for it. It’s for this reason that human beings have developed a wired-
in need to justify their actions, whether right or wrong, even to themselves, so that their high
self-esteem can remain intact, thereby also allowing them to present themselves to the world in a
positive light, regardless of how immoral their actions and behaviors may be, since they also
appear to have a wired-in need for a positive self-image. “The point is simply that a striving to
minimize ‘cognitive dissonance’ appears to be a common human trait related to our species
power of consciousness.”[11]

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 Finally, modern life under authoritarian structures does, of course, translate into a
considerable amount of cognitive dissonance, not just for the oppressed but for the oppressors as
well. This explains why modern man is fundamentally depressed,[12] since the ideologically
constructed reality of the masters does not, and arguably cannot, almost by definition, correspond
with non-ideological reality as it appears (or should appear, since many of the oppressors’ values
are internalized by the oppressed) to the powerless. It is, therefore, of the essence for enslaved
humanity (with all the inevitable inherent and extraneous tensions and conflicts entailed by
humanity’s enslavement) to try to learn to live with cognitive dissonance (crucially while
striving to bring about conditions of equality and freedom, so that cognitive dissonance can be
incrementally decreased to the lowest possible level over time), without letting it translate itself
into socially undesirable means and ends. The ability to do so is a sign of both wisdom and
maturity, surely a desideratum for those who care about the foreseeable consequences of human
action and inaction.

__________________________________________
© Michael Hagos 2006, 2007, 2008
All rights reserved

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Notes
[1] Joshua Cohen & Joel Rogers, Knowledge, Morality and Hope: The Social Thought of Noam Chomsky,
New Left Review, 187, May/June 1991, www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/199105--.htm
[2] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
[3] Ibid.
[4] Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, Routledge, 1955, pp. 14-15.
[5] Yaacov Y.I. Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, 1990, p. 231. The logic here is of course
disingenious, since responsibility for personal failure can conveniently be avoided because the “pressure to
conform” to groupthink was “too overwhelming.” After all, “the majority can never be wrong?” And “its
opinion has to be respected, right?” Right! especially when the leader of the group is an authoritarian figure
who demands unquestioning conformity and loyalty to the group’s ethos. And so far as leaders and/or
decision-makers are concerned, an effective subterfuge “when threatened by potential post-decisional
cognitive dissonance [is the] use of history to relocate the burden of responsibility from their shoulders to
metaphysical ones, to the “course of history.” They thus overcome their reluctance to make a decision,
especially common in high-risk choice situations, and avoid post-decisional regret and the related urge to
reverse the decision.” (Ibid., p. 302)
[6] Since Erich Fromm has described this process better than I ever could, here goes: “…a person, even if he
is subjectively sincere, may frequently be driven unconsciously by a motive that is different from the one he
believes himself to be driven by: that he may use one concept which logically implies a certain meaning and
which to him, unconsciously, means something different from this “official” meaning. Furthermore, we know
that he may attempt to harmonize certain contradictions in his own feeling by an ideological construction or to
cover up an idea which he represses by a rationalization that expresses its very opposite. The understanding of
the operation of unconscious elements has taught us to be sceptical (sic) towards words and not to take them at
face value.” (The Fear of Freedom, London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984, p. 56)
[7] As Chomsky has observed: “Walter Lippmann, a major foreign and domestic policy critic and also a
major theorist of liberal democracy has asserted in his essays that a ‘revolution in the art of democracy,’ could
be used to ‘manufacture consent,’ that is, to bring about agreement on the part of the public for things that they
didn’t want by the new techniques of propaganda. He also thought that this was a good idea, in fact, necessary.
It was necessary because, as he put it, ‘the common interests elude public opinion entirely’ and can only be
understood and managed by a ‘specialized class’ of ‘responsible men’ who are smart enough to figure things
out. This theory asserts that only a small elite . . . can understand the common interests, what all of us care
about, and that these things ‘elude the general public.’ This is a view that goes back hundreds of years. It’s also
a typical Leninist view. In fact, it has very close resemblance to the Leninist conception that a vanguard of
revolutionary intellectuals take state power, using popular revolutions as the force that brings them to state
power, and then drive the stupid masses toward a future that they’re too dumb and incompetent to envision for
themselves. The liberal democratic theory and Marxism–Leninism are very close in their common ideological
assumptions.” (Chomsky, Media Control, 1991, pp. 10, 11)
[8] Case on point: “moral dimensions are certainly rejected in the social calculus of capitalist society.” (Ho-
Won Jeong, Peace and Conflict Studies, 2000, p. 88)
[9] I cannot say anything about Nehru because I don’t know anything about him.
[10] Even though a volume can be produced so far as Wilson’s crimes are concerned, suffice it to say that he
was the one who called for conquest of the Philippines between 1899 and 1902, which left around 200,000
dead. There was no legal or moral justification for that, nor could there ever have been any. It was not a war; it
was simply massacre and murderous butchery. Carter’s record was equally if not even more shameful. For
some details, see Paul D’Amato, The Crimes of Jimmy Carter: Democrats and Other False Friends,
http://www.counterpunch.org/damato01182006.html. See also Chomsky, The Carter Administration: Myth
and Reality, in his Radical Priorities. For an outstanding analyses of all US military and CIA interventions
since WWII (showing that the US is, in fact, a leading terrorist state), see William Blum, Killing Hope. For
less complete albeit still compelling accounts, see Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder;
Edward Herman, Real Terror Network; Alexander George, Western State Terrorism; Chomsky, Pirates and
Emperors, and Fateful Triangle; Michael Parenti, Against Empire; Michael McClintock, Instruments of
Statecraft; and John Cooley, Unholy Wars.
[11] Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, A Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics,
http://www.zmag.org/books/5/5.htm

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 [12] For insightful, detailed discussions about the hows and whys of this fundamental depression and its
unconscious social manifestations, see Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, passim; The Dogma of Christ and
Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture, chapter 2: “The Present Human Condition,” and The
Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, chapter 10: “Malignant Aggression.”

Sources Cited

Books
Chomsky, Noam, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, NY: Seven Stories
Press, 1991.
Fromm, Erich, The Fear of Freedom, London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984.
___________, The Sane Society, London: Routledge, 1955.
Jeong, Ho-Won, Peace and Conflict Studies: Introduction, Hants: Ashgate, 2000.
Vertzberger, Yaacov Y.I., The World in Their Minds: Information Processing, Cognition, and Perception
in Foreign Policy Decisionmaking, Stanford University Press, 1990.

Internet sources
Cohen Joshua & Rogers, Joel, Knowledge, Morality and Hope: The Social Thought of Noam Chomsky,
New Left Review, 187, May/June 1991, www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/199105--.htm
Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, A Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics: A NEW WELFARE
PARADIGM, http://www.zmag.org/books/5/5.htm
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

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