Contents
It’s understandable why we lie when we’re caught doing something wrong: to save a job, a marriage, a reputation; to avoid a fight, a fine, a prison term; to shift responsibility and justify themselves in the eyes of others. Why resort to self-deception? In order to continue to consider himself a good person, social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson are sure.
The mechanism that underlies our reluctance to be proven wrong or change our attitudes and behaviors is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we feel when two opinions or actions contradict each other. Like hunger, for example, dissonance is unpleasant, and just like hunger, we have a desire to reduce it. For example, the understanding that “smoking is bad” conflicts with the idea of themselves as a heavy smoker, so smokers resort to many rationalizations that help ease this dissonance and maintain their bad habit: “it helps me deal with stress”, “It helps me lose weight.” Our brain loves harmony and tries to maintain it with the help of all sorts of perceptual tricks. One of them, the confirmation bias, consists in the fact that we fix and remember information that is consistent with our beliefs, but ignore and forget information that contradicts these beliefs.
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- Our decisions: who (what) makes them for us?
Dissonance is most painful when new information undermines our self-image as intelligent, competent, kind, and well-mannered, namely when we have to face our obvious mistakes. Then we have two options: accept the fact that we were wrong and learn some lesson (“Yes, it was stupid, unethical and unprofessional to do so”) or justify ourselves and continue to do so (“Everyone does it”, “ In addition, I had incorrect data”, “It’s not my fault”). Guess which way is more popular?
Coping with dissonance is a largely unconscious mechanism that allows us to lie to ourselves in order to maintain self-respect and a positive self-image. “I’m kind. And the fact that I hurt you, you yourself deserved it. “I am a responsible parent. I know better what is good for my child. These vaccines do more harm than good.”
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- Desire to be right
The theory of dissonance is of great value because it shows that many problems arise not because bad people do bad things, but because good people, when making mistakes or meanness, justify them so as not to doubt their “goodness”. It may be physicians who refuse to accept that it is time to replace outdated practices with more modern ones. Prosecutors who refuse to admit that they imprisoned an innocent man. Couples who hurt each other in an argument under the flag of their own rightness. The more time, money, effort, and reputation we put into something, the harder it will be to admit that we made a mistake, and the more we will justify ourselves.
The need to reduce dissonance can take us very far from our original intentions. Imagine a person who is faced with an important choice: stay in an unhappy marriage or leave; talk about the illegal activities of your colleague or not rock the boat; believe in sensational allegations on TV news or wait for the outcome of the investigation. As soon as a person makes a decision, he will immediately begin to justify it. And because of this, he will stop first looking for, and then noticing any facts that contradict the accepted point of view. With each next step, the commitment to the chosen path grows, no matter how many arguments showing its fallacy.
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- Why is it difficult for us to make a choice?
All of us in our private lives, as professionals and as citizens, often face situations where we have to make difficult choices. Your well-founded opinion, of course, is worth sticking to and not changing it every day. But it is equally important to have the courage to change our mind or decision if we see overwhelming evidence that we are wrong. We are, of course, programmed to reduce dissonance, but this does not mean that we are not able to recognize our mistakes or become more open and less self-confident. It’s not easy, but it makes sense to try.
Подробнее см. в книге C. Tavris, E. Aronson «Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts» (Mariner Books, 2015).