PsychMyths and Applying Psychology To Everyday Life

Your Brain and Dissonance - How You Distort The Information You Come Across, and Why You Don't Look For Information That Conflicts With What You Believe

Leon Festinger was the first to coin the phrase "cognitive dissonance" within the field of Social Psychology.

The gist of his work on dissonance is that:

Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions.[2] Dissonance is also reduced by justifying, blaming, and denying. It is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology.  (wikipedia)

The key part in this definition is that which begins with [2] which describes the process by which we strive to MAINTAIN what we already believe, by justifying, blaming, denying, or otherwise discounting information that conflicts with what we already believe.

There is even some neurological/brain scan evidence to support the theory.

Why Does The Brain Do This?

Once again, we return to the idea of the brain as an information reduction machine that seeks to process information as efficiently (that is with least load).

When you hold a belief, and come across information that conflicts with those beliefs, the conflict or "dissonance" requires that you somehow reconcile the two. If you don't reconcile, you have a situation where:

1) You have to continue to process information to come to an end point, and that adds load.

2) You also have a sense of incompleteness, which is a problem for a brain that seeks out completeness.

3) You have an uncertain situation which your brain seeks to resolve.

If you are catching on to the idea that these three things overlap considerably, you are correct. They all work together and are tied together by the information processing load issue.

The Implications of Reducing Dissonance

So what happens? You will tend to discount any information that conflicts with your already held beliefs, and that gets interesting in a number of ways, because, in effect, you lose the process of learning  and you exhibit the symptoms of closed-mindesness. But don't worry. It's not you. It's just how your brain works.

So, you get things wrong. Or partly wrong.

If you want to apply this to everyday life, think about discussions about religion, politics, sports, or any other thing that has controversial and opinon attached. One reason why these conversations are so difficult is that each person discounts the validity of the others' information, even if the validity is unknown, or even when there is a factual basis for the others' positions.

As you'll see when we discuss specific things you probably believe in that are in fact, wrong, (ie. things about learning styles, personality styles, MBTI), you'll see more specifically how your brain causes you to "get stuck".

And There's Research On Information Seeking

People have the tendency to seek out CONFIRMING information, and NOT to look for DISCONFIRMING information. Thus they reinforce their current beliefs, often at the expense of being wrong. Not only do they throw out or discount information they might come across as a result of cognitive dissonance, but they don't even look for that information, since once found, discomfort ensues.

I recently bought a guitar, as an impulse buy. I've been wanting to play again after a twenty year absence, and came across a music store that had a huge and seemingly wonderful set of instruments, but the thing was, they had brands on them that I'd never heard of.

Anyway, I bought one. I liked the sound, and the price was right. So then what did I do?

I got on the Internet to do a search for the brand/make of the guitar I bought. But did I want to find the information that would tell me I just bought something over-priced and at the low end?

Of course not. I deliberately set out to find reviews, or any hint that I'd actually made a good purchase. That's how we seek out information to confirm our decisions, to validate what we believe.

To complete the story, what did I find? Well, absolutely almost nothing. With guitars, when a company makes really great ones, it's easy to find information about the company and the models. In this case I could find almost nothing (Uh Oh).

So THEN, what did I do? I stopped looking. I didn't want to put myself in a state of cognitive dissonance by finding information that would conflict with my belief that this purchase was "a good guitar". I rationalized this by saying: "Well, it has really good sound, and it's really good looking", so it doesn't matter.

Now I don't know whether this brand is made in China and uses inferior types of wood and construction. Odds are that's the source.

But you know what? I don't want to know.

And that's how both cognitive dissonance and seeking out confirmatory evidence works. I simply don't want to know I did something dumb.

And the same applies to you.

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