Cognitive Dissonance — The lies we tell ourselves


Webster’s dictionary defines it as –
 Psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously

Psychologist Leon Festinger first described the theory of cognitive dissonance in 1957. He said we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and behavior in harmony and avoid disharmony.
And in cases where disharmony occurs, we must change something to bring in harmony – which forms the principle of cognitive consistency.

Let me explain this to you with a simpler example.
Let’s assume that you have been a successful A+ student. All your life you have believed that talent and the right attitude makes people successful. But on the first day of your job, your colleague tells you, that sucking up to the boss is the way to be successful. And as days pass by, you realize this more and more. Because of your belief, you do not try to suck up to the boss, and sometimes, you even get into arguments with him. And you see others with lesser capacities grow while you don’t, while your boss is making your work-life difficult. So yielding to the system, you get into the business of pleasing your boss. And voila, you see yourself growing

And through this journey, you experience a discomfort, which begins in your head first. May be sometimes comes out as irritability or anger. That discomfort is called Cognitive Dissonance.
And the dissonance does not allow us to rest easy. Hence, it becomes imperative for us to find alignment. And that is the ‘Principle of consistency’.

What you believed - Talent and right attitudes lead to success
What you see – pleasing the boss makes you successful.

So, at this point you choose to do any one of these –
  • 1.    Change your belief to align with your actions - You stop believing that, ‘Talent and right attitudes lead to success’. You might in turn, talk against that belief now.
  • 2.    Change your actions to align with your belief – You get back to the belief that, ‘Talent and right attitudes lead to success’. And you stop doing things only with an intention to please the boss. And work harder sticking to your beliefs.
  • 3.    Bring in a third factor – Now that you have a need to justify your actions, you choose to say, ‘Well, sucking up to the boss is not ideal. But, it brings me better paycheck. I can afford more things now. So why not?’

Dissonance occurs when our Actions/Attitudes differ with the Belief system (morals, the idea of right and wrong)
Dissonance, in itself is not wrong. What you choose to do, to put your dissonance at rest is important.
Infact, dissonance is very important. It helps you become more self-aware. It tests your integrity and makes you the person that you are. It helps you change some beliefs, which you have consciously/unconsciously accepted. It also helps you correct your actions, which are not ideal.

But more often than you want to, you walk away from ideal behavior. You lie, because it’s difficult to tell the truth. You cheat in the exams, because you are afraid you will fail. You bring down your colleague, because you are insecure.

You do things that are clearly wrong or you have failed, as per your own standards. But instead of accepting your mistakes or failure, you choose to cook up a story. Stories to justify you are right, to yourself and the rest of the world. Though logic pleads against the explanation, but you mostly use emotion to shut it down.

You start telling stories, justifying your beliefs or your actions through and through. And then these stories become your new reality and you change as a person.

A cult believed that they have to perform a ghastly ritual to stop the world from ending in 2012. Others argued that the world would not end in 2012, and stopped them from performing the ghastly ritual. As we all know, the world did not end. However, the cult still strong in their beliefs justifies saying, ‘Someone else on this earth has done it on our behalf’.  And of course, they can’t say who.

Well that’s the story the cult-guy is telling you.

But what are the stories you are telling yourself?

Are you choosing comfortable lies over hard truths?