What Happens to the Brain During Cognitive Dissonance? (2015) | Hacker News Reader

What Happens to the Brain During Cognitive Dissonance? (2015)

scientificamerican.com

98 pointsbrahmwg62 comments

Tolerating some amount of cognitive dissonance is one of the best things that I was able to develop in myself recently. In coding for example, I used to suffer mental anguish over seeing inconsistencies in codebases I'm working on and have an OCD-like drive to fix them. Learning to live with those consistencies freed me up to work on what actually matters.

Furthermore the unforgiving drive for consistency is a reason why people don't update their beliefs when new evidence comes to light. Consider Superforcasting[1] (a book about people with an unusual ability in forcasting the future) the author says that one common trait among superforcasters is that they have a larger capacity for tolerating cognitive dissonance. The drive to avoid cognitive dissonance shackles you to your existing beliefs (see confirmation bias).

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Ph...

Furthermore the unforgiving drive for consistency is a reason why people don't update their beliefs when new evidence comes to light.

Only if you reject the evidence that does not fit with your beliefs. If you use the new evidence to examine and update your beliefs then you can be both open to new evidence and avoid cognitive dissonance.

What if the new evidence puts you at even (or close to even) odds? Then you have to live with the cognitive dissonance until further evidence.

There is a difference between managing probability mass and "managing" cognitive dissonance. If one of two events will occur, or only one of two hypotheses can be true, with equal probability according to the information you possess, it is not cognitive dissonance to hold that fact in your head. Cognitive dissonance would be more like formulating two hypotheses in logical contradiction to each other, and insisting they must both be true.

It is rare that an arbitrary function negates another for all possible inputs.

If it negates it for the majority of inputs, but you insist it negates it for very few or no inputs, I would call that cognitive dissonance as well. In other words, if it's highly unlikely that two things are both true, but you consider it very likely they are both true, that's probably cognitive dissonance even if the two propositions are not logical contradictions.

Do you disagree that given a bag of all functions which accept N inputs, it is unlikely that 2 chosen at random would negate each other across all N inputs?

Obviously I don't disagree with that. Where are you going with this? People don't formulate their beliefs by picking randomly from a collection of all theoretically-possible beliefs. To expand on your example, if you are selecting from a bag of beliefs according to some criteria (based on some combination of morality, desire, etc) which are themselves in conflict (e.g. "I wish to be feared; I wish to be loved") then I think you are more likely to pick some beliefs which happen to contradict each other (again, if not logically, then for most inputs) than you would just by selecting randomly. Or, probably, if your criteria are more in tune with one another.

How do people formulate their beliefs?

I don't think they are that different. First, the basic insight from Bayes is that belief of all kind can be represented as probabilities. Second, as @dancompton alluded to, most things are not as cut and dry as to say that they are logically in contradiction. There is usually a compatiblist view or a third alternative.

If you are presented with evidence that requires a Bayesian update, and you are smart enough to figure this out, yet you still do not perform the Bayesian update (or you calculate it incorrectly according to your whims as opposed to the evidence), then I would say you are cognitively dissonant in proportion to the change in probability mass you should have recalculated but did not.

Good enough?

So the problem is detecting when that update should be performed, right?

You keep replying to me with one-sentence posts that say little and have no point. If you have something to say or a point you're trying to make, I'd prefer you just do that rather than trying socratic-method everyone to enlightenment.

To (try to) answer your question, to the best of my ability based on limited information what your question even is: no, it is not about detecting when that update should be performed. Remember that we are talking about brain states, i.e. the-world-as-you-think-it-is, as it is represented in your mind, and perhaps if you want to push it, as you are consciously aware of it. If you hold conflicting beliefs but you are truly ignorant of the fact, then you can't really be said to have cognitive dissonance. In Bayes terms, I guess this is analogous to having priors, but not being aware of how to evaluate them based on evidence, and maybe even that you should do so in the first place. Cognitive dissonance, on the other hand, would be having priors, knowing how (and when) to update them, doing the update, and then ignoring the results. Alternatively, it would be performing faulty updates and being at least partially aware of the error in doing so.

If you are using a Bayesian approach then all new evidence does is adjust the probability of your belief being true. Only those impervious to new information have beliefs with 0 or 1 probabilities.

Cognitive dissonance is not picking X sometimes and !X sometimes, because they're both around 50%.

Cognitive dissonance is saying that X is 90% certain and that !X is also 90% certain.

Like a benign version of doublethink?

The ability to deal with uncertainty is not the same as cognitive dissonance. There is no cognitive dissonance involved in accepting that mutually contradictory propositions P and Q could be true, you just don't know yet which is. Cognitive dissonance is when you believe that both P and Q are true at the same time. Humans have a tendency to jump to conclusions because they don't like not knowing something, and any answer is better than no answer. It's precisely those people who can't deal with uncertainty who must deal with the most cognitive dissonance when the conclusion they jumped to turned out to be wrong, particularly when they've turned that conclusion into dogma.

Everyone must jump to a conclusion at some point -- you can't possibly collect all the evidence in the world. I think it is also a case of cognitive dissonance in believing that you can believe otherwise.

You never have to decide that something is absolutely true regardless of any new evidence.

If you are only thinking about it, yes. If you want to take a decision based on the thought process, you have to pick a side at one point, knowing that it might not be the right side.

Only if you think your decisions purely based on fact, rather than thinking of your decisions as based on the best facts you have at the time.

Cognitive dissonance is believing that two contradictory theories are most likely true based on the evidence you have. Since the evidence of the truth of one is also evidence for the untruth of the other, it means that when evaluating the evidence for one, you discount a different set of evidence than you do when evaluating the evidence for the other.

This is never rational, and never something that you have to do. It's usually done to avoid conclusions that would force you (according to your own ethics) to give up something that you have, or not take something that you want.

> This is never rational, and never something that you have to do.

Not sure I agree with that.

The real world is full of mutually exclusive moral problems, like when "do unto others" runs directly into "first do no harm" when deciding to give help to someone whose bad behavior you might be enabling.

The problem is continuing to hold both beliefs. You can't have two prime directives. You can't say "never do harm to anyone" and "always defend your children." You have to explicitly prioritize beliefs that have the potential to cause dilemmas.

You can make decisions in the face of uncertainty based on an assessment of the risk and the probabilities of the possible outcomes. If you get in your car you put your seatbelt on without knowing whether you're going to need it for that particular ride. There's no need to "pick a side" on the question of whether you're going to have an accident on that ride. Being uncertain about something is almost the opposite of cognitive dissonance, which comes from being quite certain about contradictory propositions.

You can pick a conclusion without acting like it's certain.

"I decided X but these pieces of evidence induce doubt" is not cognitive dissonance. It's capacity for uncertainty.

Shure with only anectodical reference...

During an interview one of my answers was: "for me - it sounds shit to live ambitions !"

And the answer was like the old adam and eve thingy: "But shit is a super fertilizer, it gives a filmsy plantlet growth and thriving.

"Because i have seen where you're going with this", i answered, "let me tell you that some people think, you can make every stand - when you only ground it"

wink

For the most part. Cognitive dissonance is the stress that results in believing P and Q are true at the same time, along with a few other scenarios such actions contradictory to one's beliefs or being confronted with evidence that is contrary to one of your beliefs (belief disconfirmation paradigm). We then engage dissonance reduction to arbitrate the difference and lessen the stress. One of the easiest methods of which is ignoring or rejecting the conflicting evidence or ignoring the voices that are--literally--causing you mental pain.

Socially, belief disconfirmation is arguably the most problematic because it turns rational discourse into something very, very ugly. Instead of persuading people, evidence and debate can further entrench a given belief instead. When certain issues became almost identity and lifestyle statements (climate change denial, the anti-vax movement, GMO hysteria, etc.), contrary evidence is perceived as a personal attack instead of a weighing of scientific evidence to determine fact. Unfortunately, overcoming this isn't easy. And it's made that much harder when people are able to retreat into their preferred echo chambers rather than be forced to directly confront the dissonance.

Yeah.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

I've also noticed something about the term "cognitive dissonance" in popular discussion. It's used as a pejorative explanation when the speaker can't figure out how someone else harmonizes two apparently inconsistent or contradictory positions. But when it's a speaker responding to someone else's accusation of cognitive dissonance, something like Fitzgerald's line usually comes up.

It's probably a useful concept in the context of doing actual psychology (either science or therapy), but I've come to believe that in an argument it's often a form of ad hominem attack, like most stories participants in arguments tend to spin about each other.

Sadly enough, cognitive dissonance is also one of the coping mechanisms that keeps people captured in a cult. I've been raised in a high control religion/cult. I've been out now for a while, but I was in for 24 years. The cognitive dissonance was very high at times, and I'm not the only one [1]. Looking back at it, I almost can't believe it took soo long to realize consciously what was happening to me.

It's a weird thing, alarm bells going off everywhere in your head, but you still tell yourself: It's alright, I'm ok this is what I have to do, it's the best life choice, it's not that bad, everyone else is wrong, ...

For me personally, the subconscious reason why I acted that way is that I knew the repercussions when I would try to leave. My whole family, friends, everyone I cared for would start shunning me. I would've been kicked out of my the house by my parents, completely on my own, no contact at all. That's a scary though when you've been thought the world is a wicked and evil place. This year, the group has even become more aggressive when it comes down to shunning, showing emotional propaganda videos on their conventions [2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/search?q=cognitive+dissonance&...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxDAY5lVwuI

Cognitive dissonance is everywhere. It was massive during the slavery period of the USA. Or now, when billions of non-human animals pollute the planet and trillions dying every year.

Cognitive dissonance makes life bearable. If I were to know that the flesh I'm eating is dog flesh, I'd probably puke. Or if my mind always had burden of how much I contribute to the environmental destruction with my life choices, I'd probably commit suicide.

But with cognitive dissonance I can live a life worth living.

Or you could not eat meat.

What part do you think cognitive dissonance plays in the fact that you conclude that without it, you could not "live a life worth living"?

Well, an argument of taste comes into mind. If my life is based on daily enjoyment in my meals then giving up flesh is lowering my happiness.

The enjoyment, the participation in a carnivorous human culture is integral to my existence. Food being a major part of it. Dogs in China, chickens in the rest of the world, calves, lambs and other babies. Factory farming makes their life miserable (or maybe the fact that dog flesh is "magically better" if you torture it before harvest, absolutely disgusting practice) and if I am aware of that I might not enjoy it anymore. Therefore I participate in cognitive dissonance, provide arguments which make no sense but soothe my conflicted mind.

Organic farming, humane slaughter, cage free, all lovely cognitive dissonance. It's always there. When slavery was actual, we tried to give them better rights, just like we do for animals - instead of abolishing the practices that make our minds conflicted.

Of course I can live without meat, dairy and eggs - I've been doing that for more than 20 years.

Just love speaking from the other perspective. :D

So animal slavery is the same as human slavery?

Should animals automatically be assigned the same rights as humans?

I feel for you, bro.

(I mean neither sarcasm, nor condescension)

I'm not saying it is the same.

It's just that our reactions to the cognitive dissonance are the same.

For example, you had attempts at laws of humane handling of slaves during the US slavery period. Slaves were disposable creatures, just like animals.

Our handling of the cognitive dissonance was attributing inferior characteristics to slaves (intelligence, different skin, can't learn to read etc.). Same thing is done with animals to argument their handling and disposability.

Then you try to add "humane" into your reasoning. Which is filled with oxymoron terms like "humane slaughter", "humane rape", "humane electrocution".

Justification of having the right to a slave's life because you feed him and give him the right to live is absolutely mirrored in the argumentation when it comes to non-human animals.

Nice thought experiment to confirm your cognitive dissonance is to think of what you would do with homo neanderthals or homo erectus or maybe australopithecus genus? Would you keep them in zoos? Have them as disposable servants? Of course you wouldn't.

Cognitive dissonance is present because you've been raised in a certain environment that starts to have (or you start to recognize it having) characteristics that go against your moral stands.

If you try to have thought experiments similar to the one above (the environment in which you didn't grow) you can think more in line with your true positions, and leave the faulty argumentation behind.

Of course, you might try to skew the argumentation for the homo/australopithecus case to be consistent with your actions in your non-human animals case, but that wouldn't come natural, that would come through cognitive dissonance (you spot the connection between the two, it distrubs you, and instead of admitting that environment conditioned you - cognitive dissonance comes to play).

Slavery, nationalism, fascism, heterosexual supremacy, male dominance, all are ideologies spawned from existing environments whose supporters suffer from cognitive dissonance. All of these ideologies share the same characteristics as those of enslaving animals, massively killing them, poisoning the environment etc. In that particular way, these ideologies are the same.

I feel for you, and in many ways the hardest part is that everyone involved is so reasonable and loving if you don't contradict certain beliefs.

All the best.

Thanks, but please don't feel for me. I'm out and I'm kind of ok. I'm feeling for the people still in the organisation, it will only get worse for them. They are the real victims. Sadly enough they are used to victimize other people and they don't even notice.

The 'reasonable and loving' part is called conditional love. It's a tool used by most cults.

Re [2], well, shit. It was a while since I was in touch with what's going on there. I didn't see that level of playing on emotions coming. I guess I'll have to ask my family what's going on there...

Well, there's more:

They've made a bunker video for their convention, made me think of the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt [1]

A while ago, they also made a propaganda animation, made specially for children which teaches that being gay is wrong and can be cured [2]. They compare gay people with terrorists at the airport, going through TSA.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wackkicmf4k

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag_dXO6HUSY

Interestingly enough, Leon Festinger first developed the theory of cognitive dissonance after looking at the behavior of doomsday cults. His book, When Prophecy Fails is fascinating: it looks at a doomsday cult in the 50s that believed aliens were going to rescue the cult from the world's end on a specific date. The members went all out preparing for the end, selling their belongings and gathering in one place. The date came went, but instead of accepting that they were wrong, the members justified it by saying "the force of Good and light" spared humanity and became more fervent as a result.

While I can't speak to your experience, I will say that it's amazing that as many people manage to leave JW as they do. Out of curiosity, what do you think was your last straw if you don't mind sharing?

The last straw for me were the huge conflicts with science and Jehovah's Witnesses literal interpretation of the Bible:

- Adam & Eve vs DNA & archeology: JW's believe Adam was created about 6000 years ago, 4026 BC to be exact [1] and he was the root of humankind. - The Genesis flood narrative: JW's believe that all known kinds of animals survived a worldwide flood in 2370 BC [2], in a boat made from wood. - Destruction of Jerusalem (607BC vs 587BC): JW's use the wrong date 607BC [3] as a base of a dooms day prophecy, which is supposed to point to 1914 but streched and streched over time. Still waiting.

During the research of these things, I noticed quite some manipulative writings in their literature, presenting only the facts they agree with and misrepresenting the others. They also misquote and twist the words of scientists A LOT! [4]

Another thing was there their involvement with the UN. For an outsider this might look as a none issue, so let me clarify. This is what JW's are teached about the UN:

  "No, the UN is not a blessing, even though the religious clergy
  of Christendom and the rabbis of Jewry pray heaven’s blessing
  upon that organization. It is really “the image of the wild beast,”
  the visible political, commercial organization of “the god of
  this system of things,” Satan the Devil. So the UN will soon be
  destroyed along with that beastly organization."
  Watchtower 1984 Sep 15 p.15

  "The United Nations is actually a worldly confederacy against
  Jehovah God and his dedicated Witnesses on earth."
  Watchtower 1987 Sep 1 p.20

But the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (this is how the JW organisation is officially called) joined the UN as an NGO and signed their charter, telling them they agreed with their ideas. [5] That's being dishonest and hypocrite about what they teach and what they do.

I could continue for a while, but you get the idea :)

[1] http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200000089#h=7

[2] http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200001150#h=2

[3] http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2011736 and http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2011810

[4] http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/misquotes-deception-lies.p...

[5] http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/united-nations-association...

I strive to have one idea in my head, because having one idea feels like being on a motor-way and visiting one of many ideas feels like being on a small road. When I'm coding in a new domain or field I am sometimes flooded with options and I reach cognitive dissonance and my pace takes a halt, for minutes, hours, sometimes months, because of this dissonance, until one idea has become more like a high-way an the journey proceeds. I feel that because I'm a programmer I have to deal with and have achieved a quite healthy approach to what is cognitive dissonance, a state that outside of work sometimes makes me feel a bit schizofrenic.

You should take value from those options rather than letting any one of them define value. Then trust yourself to move forward. Software is writ in water.

I do often continue working but then with a nagging sensation of not executing a task in the most optimal of ways, which is what I meant by having a healthy approach to cognitive dissonance, performing a task in a way you know or feel is not optimal but not being confused by feelings of cognitive dissonance, instead just see it as part of the learning process. In the end, the dissonance dissapear as soon as the learning process has finished, and I'm no longer anxious about that option.

Which in itself is not very interesting but might be in the context of building an AI. Apart from a NN, what else do you need for an AI? Perhaps you need mechanisms such as "cognitive dissonance" in order to acheive "effective learning" through coping with that dissonance. What we have today are clever NNs. Nothing close to a talking bear (you know, the one from A.I. Artificial Intelligence).

A strikingly shallow and pointless article. TL:DR; We did some trivial, questionable, narrow tests, and turns out cognitive dissonance is what you thought it was and can be thought of as OK / survival instinct.

I wonder why you dismissed it as shallow - I thought the opposite. I found it very interesting that they can actually identify areas in the brain that are probably responsible for the cognitive dissonance.

..but also see consistency bias and commitment effects (e.g.: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4e/cached_selves/)

As far as I know the actual cognitive dissonance involves ideas, beliefs or values. Note that these three categories do not belong to the same class. Beliefs and values involve an emotional component, along with wishes, desires and all actions carried out for any sort of emotional gratification whereas ideas do not. It is clear that we can hold contradictory ideas in our mind. There can be no progress without that ability. Holding contradictory emotional states is very different however. It is akin to the ability to tolerate ambivalence, of which it is a general expression. This can drive some people crazy (literally). The authors seem to wave at the insula (the emotional component in that instance) to focus on the cognitive, executive component, thus not really localizing dissonance but rather the areas involved in the brain’s efforts at neutralizing it. A sort of homeostatic mechanism unknown to Vulcans...

This is very interesting research. In my opinion, consistency is very important in politics because, while consistency doesn't guarantee correctness, it does place some bounds on what can be true. Often smart people go to extremes in politics because they are able to see more clearly the inconsistencies in the mainstream political parties or ideologies. But being extreme usually just means being consistently wrong, which is not very helpful either.

Cognitive Dissonance seems like a mechanism to moderate rate of change, plus a weak form of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

If you have strong beliefs (regardless of how you got them) it takes repeated exposure to contrary evidence over time to change those beliefs.

Does someone really believe that cognitive dissonance is a bad thing, as the article suggests at the end? I've just always imagined that feeling bad for poor decisions is how you learn not to do poor decisions.

The article says it's a good thing

>Although people may think cognitive dissonance is a bad thing, it actually helps to keep us mentally healthy and happy.

Think about something you wanted and couldn't have. You probably tried to convince yourself you didn't want it anyway, and it was better for you that you didn't have it. It certainly keeps me more happy! But I also try to be conscious of it and use it like a tool more than a crutch.

So is "sour grapes" simply a manifestation of cognitive dissonance?

Yes! It is often distilled to this aphorism. But from my reading of it "sour grapes" is only one aspect. It is a more general concept that deals with how we resolve tensions between our beliefs and facts as we see them.

I don't think cognitive dissonance is a bad thing. I don't see why should add a coping mechanism to acheive inner peace. If you instead saw that sometimes you win a grape, sometimes you loose one, you would have taught yourself a lesson, which should be bettar than denying facts about the world and yourself, if you are a man of science.

It's a bad thing when you instead choose to pretend you made the right decision and go on to continue lying to yourself.

the cost to pay at the end of the road is exorbitant. with this in mind, would anyone like to commit to a culture of holding fast to 'wrong and strong'? show me where i am wrong and may you be rewarded. people compete to build the best tools. fix the solution before the solution fixes you. prepare the answer before you are prepared by the answer. the task is great. you may describe the problem in any language you wish, veneered depravity is worse than dealing with what it is.

Given the volume of knowable information vs potentially possible information, cognitive dissonance is probably when you're paying the best attention to the actual world.

I know there have been scientific studies, but I think there is no such thing cognitive dissonance.

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