Cognitive dissonance: why we like to fool ourselves

Ana has applied for a postdoctoral fellowship to spend the next two years in the United States. She’s thrilled: it’s her lifelong dream, and her gut tells her they’ll choose her. Her supervisor, however, has told her it’s a long shot, because there are candidates from all over the world and only five places. Funnily enough, ever since she applied, Ana keeps seeing American flags everywhere, which she reads as “confirming signs” that she’ll get it, and that keeps her hopes up and makes her feel more secure.

Yesterday two good friends of Carlos told him they’d seen his girlfriend walking hand in hand with another man. Carlos is absolutely convinced his friends saw someone who looked a lot like his girlfriend, but it definitely couldn’t have been her, because she told him she’d be spending the whole afternoon studying for her civil service exams. And she would never do that to him; it’s impossible. He thanks his friends for their loyalty, but they must be wrong.

Luis wants to quit his job, but he’s afraid of making a mistake and regretting it. He keeps telling himself he’s still young, he has a good CV, someone is bound to hire him sooner or later, he has lots of contacts who can help… All this inner talk Luis keeps repeating helps him convince himself that leaving is the right thing to do.

Maya lies to her parents every weekend, telling them she’s sleeping over at her friend Cristina’s when she’s actually going to her boyfriend’s. She feels guilty for lying, but she justifies it to herself by thinking that some of her friends lie to their parents too, and the world doesn’t end because of it.

Cognitive dissonance (a term coined by Leon Festinger, in case you fancy digging deeper) is the discomfort or inner tension we feel when some of our own ideas, beliefs or attitudes clash. It also happens when the way we think clashes with the way we behave. When this happens, we tend to “adjust” our mental schemas to find some balance or harmony again between our thoughts, attitudes and behaviour. It’s something like: “Hmm, I don’t like this, it doesn’t fit. Hang on, let me rearrange it my way so everything adds up again and I can feel comfortable and calm.”

When we try to resolve cognitive dissonance, what we’re basically doing is fooling ourselves. Why do we do it? Sometimes to protect ourselves from realities we don’t want to, or can’t, swallow. Carlos, for instance, is protecting himself from the possibility of infidelity, which would wreck his plans for the future with his girlfriend and the image he has of her, someone he adores. Resolving cognitive dissonance also helps make life more pleasant, keeps our hopes up and lifts our mood, as with Ana, who reads certain events as signs that what she wanted was on its way. It can also help motivate us to do something we find hard, as in Luis’s case. And at other times it serves to justify something we simply feel like doing but feel bad about, like Maya.

In short, we resolve the inner tension these cognitive dissonances create so that we can “believe what we want to believe” and get on with our lives. In this way, we try to stay consistent with our own identity, shifting it as little as possible. If you think about it, it’s ultimately a way for our mind to save effort and energy. In other words, we bend reality so that the result suits us and gives us a sense of calm and stability. Sometimes circumstances allow us to keep up the self-deception, and it can even be adaptive because it helps us. Luis, for example, dared to quit his job and soon found a better one. Other times, circumstances force us to realise we were interpreting reality unrealistically. In Carlos’s case, if he caught his girlfriend cheating, he’d have no choice but to admit he’d been fooling himself and start working on accepting reality.

Cognitive dissonance, and our attempts to get rid of it, don’t only happen in everyday life; they also appear within different psychological disorders. Obviously, in these cases it’s usually not adaptive, because the patient uses it to justify distorted ideas. Here are a couple of examples so you can see what I mean.

Take a case of superstitious OCD, in which a patient believes that the more often she thinks about her obsession (for example, “my son is going to get ill this week”), the more likely it is to come true, because in her view “thoughts have power in themselves and send energy out into the universe”. When we run a behavioural experiment to test this and nothing happens to the child, the response is: “I didn’t think it hard enough”; or “I thought it many times, but still not enough”; or “I didn’t focus on it being this week, so maybe he’ll fall ill in a month”. What is she doing? She believes thoughts alone can create situations, but the result of the experiment tells her that her belief is wrong. She resolves the discomfort of that dissonance (two contradictory pieces of information) by looking for justifications that let her keep her original idea (the OCD idea: the power of thoughts) and so dismiss any other possible explanation with complete conviction.

Another example: a case of pathological jealousy, in which Juan has believed for a year that Pilar is cheating on him, although there’s no evidence whatsoever. The other day she had to go to a meeting that ran very late and, suspecting she was with someone else, he called Pilar’s boss, who confirmed they were in a meeting. Instead of dropping his original idea of infidelity, Juan decided that Pilar and her boss were in on it together. Once again, Juan resolves the inner tension created by information that doesn’t fit his original idea of infidelity.

These are two cases in which resolving the dissonance leads people to hold on to and perpetuate mistaken ideas that harm them; as a result, the disorder is maintained and gets worse. I’ve given you just a couple of examples, but situations like these are very common, and resolving cognitive dissonance in psychological disorders is never adaptive, because it harms the patient. This shows us that the same psychological phenomenon can be adaptive in some cases and highly dysfunctional in others. For the latter, behavioural experiments and Socratic dialogue are two good cognitive therapy options for working on this, as they help the patient identify and change irrational interpretations. And once that’s achieved, the next step would be to explore the underlying irrational beliefs that led the patient to interpret reality that way.