If someone says you suffer from cognitive dissonance, what does that even mean?
Many people are giving wrong answers. Cognitive dissonance is NOT simply holding two opposing ideas in your head. Cognitive DISSONANCE is the uneasy feeling people are supposed to get when holding discongruent ideas at the same time.
Some people do not feel cognitive dissonance at all even while openly voicing the opinions. Great examples are all over politics. If one is for women having the freedom to make their own medical decisions, but oppose abortion bejng legal, those are two opposing views that SHOULD trigger unease and make them reconsider one position or the other.
A better example is people that believe laws should apply equally to everyone, but then go on to say Trump should totally be immune. That SHOULD cause dissonance, but it doesn’t for far too many.
There’s a great comic by The Oatmeal that explains it more thoroughly, and it’s an amusing read.
holding two conflicting beliefs at the same time.
like you don’t believe in the death penalty, but you read about a child molester and want them to die.
Not just that. Cognitive dissonance is when someone realizes that they hold conflicting beliefs. Most people that hold conflicting beliefs have not yet experienced that dissonance.
I don’t think that article is correct.
I’ve never understood subsequent realization to be integral to the dissonance itself, which already exists regardless of one’s awareness of it.
It’s like insisting that you are not depressed unless you “realize” you’re depressed.
unless by “realization” that article simply mean experiencing conflicting emotions, which is the cognitive dissonance itself.
requiring “realization” of a feeling as a prerequisite to that feeling existing doesn’t check out.
A lot of people have given good answers but I’ll throw in an anecdote.
Growing up my dad would talk about how important it is to follow laws. Don’t do drugs, don’t drink and drive, etc, but even the smaller ones like don’t jay-walk and never litter.
On a car ride I noticed he was going like 5 mph over the speed limit and I pointed it out. Something like “if its important to follow every law why are you breaking the speed limit”.
And he responded something about how it’s not an actual law but a recommended speed or something. But I kept saying it was a law and he was breaking it. He got pretty upset and finally said if I didn’t drop he’d take away my Gameboy for a weekend or something.
It could’ve been he was just annoyed his kid wouldn’t shut up but it seems like textbook cognitive dissonance that he couldn’t reconcile the two ideas that every law should be followed and it’s ok to break the speed limit a little and it got him upset.
The thing with cognitive dissonance is also a bit more subtle than just the duality of conflicting beliefs. It can often arise from unidentified conflicts that are outside of your conscious self awareness.
One that I am familiar with is religion. I knew a whole lot about the bible and christianity growing up. From an early age I halfway knew things like how, when I looked at road cuts through bedrock, those layers hinted at deep time and held a story that wasn’t well alined with my beliefs. Then there was my love of dinosaurs as a kid and that too did not mesh with my religious narrative. Each little element of conflict was present on some subconscious like level, and my life became partitioned between this narrative belief system and evidence based reality. I had lots of peripheral consequences in life due to this building conflict, but I never allowed the core issue to come to a head in an attempt to rectify the disparity until I was around 30 years old.
Cognitive dissonance can also be dangerous and is a contributing factor in many crimes and heinous acts humans commit. Alternative expressions of individuality may also have an origin in cognitive dissonance. Identification of these underlying conflicts is reflective of a person’s self awareness and can help one improve one’s mental health by taking productive action to resolve inner conflicts after identification.
