Cognitive dissonance isn't discomfort

I’ve never written an article about the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance before, even though I reference it a lot. Everybody references it a lot. The only person who didn’t reference it a lot was the guy who came up with it.

Leon Festinger is famous for two important social psychology theories—social comparison theory, and cognitive dissonance theory. He wrote a monograph in the late 50’s that kicked cognitive dissonance off as a thing, did a couple of big experiments to elaborate on it, then sort-of just left social psychology for a while and did other stuff.¹ When he came back a handful of years later, he famously took a look at the cognitive dissonance research that had proliferated wildly in his absence, and said “It’s not exactly what I had in mind.” Glorious. But it makes one wonder what he did mean.

Festinger’s original idea comes in two parts. First, he noticed you could grab any two cognitions you might have—any two things you think or know—and find that they’re relevant or irrelevant to each other.

So, you might know that you like fantasy novels, and you might know that you eat heaps of vegetables. Two cognitions. Completely irrelevant. But if you also know that you want to be healthy, now you’ve got a cognition that is relevant to the veggies thing.

Festinger didn’t really care about irrelevant cognitions. But he was interested in the fact that if cognitions were relevant, then they might be either consonant—follow from each other—or dissonant—oppose each other.

So, knowing you eat vegetables and knowing you want to be healthy follow each other—they’re consonant. But then, maybe you finish your veggies and start hucking your butterscotch-pie-flavoured vape, bringing your attention to the fact that you suspect vaping isn’t actually very good for you. Now you have a dissonant pair of cognitions. You know you want to be healthy, and you know you do unhealthy things.

That’s the first part—the dissonance. The second part is how uncomfortable the dissonance makes you, psychologically. The more dissonant, the more psychological discomfort. Or the more cognitions that are dissonant, the more psychological discomfort.²

So, knowing you want to be healthy, and suspecting vaping isn’t that good for you wouldn’t really cause that much discomfort, because you don’t even really know how dissonant those things are. Certainly it doesn’t cause me much. But if you knew you were smoking cigarettes instead, it might cause more discomfort, because while people are still confused about how bad vaping is, no one is confused about how bad cigarettes are.

And if you also knew that you rarely exercised, and that you skipped your medical appointments, and that you mainlined fast food, then your discomfort is going to be even higher. You have a collection of cognitions that aren’t particularly consonant with your desire to be healthy.

Now, this discomfort is usually what people are talking about when they’re talking about cognitive dissonance these days, because it’s the active part of the theory. The more discomfort, the more likely you are to try and reduce the tension between the dissonant cognitions. So we call the discomfort, or the tension between cognitions dissonance, and the fact that the cognitions are dissonant we call cognitive discrepancy or inconsistency or something like this.

I’m not going to call the discomfort dissonance in this article, because we need to talk about dissonant and consonant cognitions, and it’ll get confusing. But I do do it elsewhere, and so does everyone else, and I think it’s stupid too, but there’s nothing we can do about it.

So, we have this discomfort, and we want to reduce it. We can do that by eliminating dissonant cognitions (e.g. stop vaping). Or reducing the importance of the dissonant cognitions (e.g. pay close attention to the fact that the literature on vaping is really not very sure if it’s bad for you, and certainly other things I do are more dangerous—like driving). Or we can increase the number of consonant cognitions (e.g. learning that vaping nicotine is neuroprotective and speeds up cognition) and their importance (e.g. I vape because I enjoy it, and I might decide having an enjoyable life is very important to me).³

That’s cognitive dissonance theory, in a nutshell. And people use it to explain everything, for better or for worse, although there are some interesting details that have come about since the late 50’s.

¶Not everything is pure cognitive dissonance

Elliot Aronson started wondering whether the discomfort from dissonant cognitions was due to some kind of conflict between a behaviour and our concept of ourselves. We feel like we’re a healthy person, but we’re vaping! So maybe we’re optimising for some other aspect of wellbeing—the enjoyment of the vape. Reframing things this way makes what we’re doing consistant with our self concept again. Fritz Heider has a very similar idea as a part of his Balance theory, called our ‘constancy motivation’. There are a handful of others too—self-affirmation theory, self-discrepancy theory, and so on. I don’t know how useful it is to delineate the theories, but each looks at how uncomfortable it is to view yourself one way, and notice thoughts or behaviours that don’t match that view.

And, indeed, one of the two major alternatives to straightforward cognitive dissonance hoveres around this idea. It’s called Self-Perception Theory, coined by a researcher famous for kicking off the replication crisis with his attempts to prove psychokinetic and extrasensory perceptive were real psychological phenomena.⁴ But the self-perception thing is sound enough—that sometimes we smooth over our internal inconsistencies by observing what we’re doing and working backwards. So you might recycle because you have the recycling bin outside, and everyone tells you you should, but not because you particularly care about it. But over time, you find yourself doing lots of sustainable practices, and that you actually do care about sustainability, but you can’t quite work out why or when that happened. The reason might be that your mind noticed you being sustainable and started to build mental infrastracture around that fact. You care about sustainability because you started doing sustainable things, not the other way around.

It seems like some of the stuff you could call cognitive dissonance, in the sense of reducing psychological discomfort, could equally come from this alignment of self-perception with action. But the literature isn’t sure where the line is—how much of you eliminating dissonant cognitions and elevating consonant ones are because you’re uncomfortable with the difference between who you think you are and how you’re behaving, and how much is just your mind going ‘oh, are we doing this now? Here, let me help you’.

The other theory that touches on elements of dissonance is Impression-management theory. It’s not very complicated—we present ourselves in a certain light when we’re with certain people. But some of our ‘dissonance reduction’ is often us just trying to fit in with others. I talk about this elsewhere:

When it comes to groups, this process of resolving dissonance plays out in a very interesting way. See, when you factor in groups, you don’t just have little pieces of yourself competing with each other, you also have your different group identities competing with each other. Like, you probably can’t bring the kind of corporate jargon you speak at the office to the gym, because no one will know what the fuck you’re talking about.[^5] Crossfit might be a disruptive way to train, but that’s not a phrase that’s going to get over the net at your post-exercise coffee. You’ve got to code switch—pick up a completely different in-language. Probably, there are a bunch of other things you need to switch too—behaviours, clothes, norms.

So, you bias yourself to be more like the group. It’s not really discomfort here, so much as it’s trying to be a part of the group. But it’s still a process of resolving conflicting cognitions, so where do you draw the line? Sometimes you do this just to fit in, but often your social identities are just as much who you are, so eliminating aspects of yourself to elevate others seems identical to cognitive dissonance.

Other times, it’s simply that the value of a group makes the dissonant stuff less salient. One of Festinger’s classic papers demonstrating cognitive dissonance has him and a couple colleages infiltrate an apocolype cult. When the apocolypse fails to come about, the cult members appeared to re-align their expectations of the apocolypse to fit the new reality (that it hadn’t happened yet), rather than give up on the cult. But as a more recent paper points out:

Beliefs may withstand the pressure of disconfirming events not because of the effectiveness of dissonance-reducing strategies, but because disconfirming evidence may simply go unacknowledged [by a group]

As Festinger himself predicted, the influence of group and culture buffer against dissonant information, almost making dissonant cognitions less relevant by simply writing them out of the collective consciousness. And of course a cognition has to be relevant to be dissonant or consonant.

Is it really cognitive dissonance if everyone just pretends the dissonant thing isn’t real?

¶Outro

When Leon Festinger said “It’s not exactly what I had in mind”, he was referring to the wild explosion of literature on cognitive dissonance over the 30 years since his monograph. I’ve skimmed over the core of it, but it might be one of the most voluminous bodies of literature in social science before the advent of the internet. And much of it is academic in-fighting for the most parsimonious theory.

I don’t think that’s what Festinger was hoping for. His theory was broad-brush. So this article is broad-brush. And hopefully the takeaway is too. When we hold dissonant cognitions—thoughts or observations about ourselves and our thinking and our behaving that are in tension with each other, whether it brings us discomfort or not, we will often reduce the dissonance. We might eliminate or downplay competing cognitions, or introduce and elevate consonant ones. It might happen to make us feel better, or to make us see ourselves in a better light, or simply because the mind is very efficient and will clean house when you’re not looking.

That’s, more or less, what cognitive dissonance is. I wouldn’t worry too much about the finer detail. Your mind certainly isn’t.

Edit: I have a follow up article that I think is good to go on and read here.