Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "cognitive-dissonance"

Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishinig Company, 2007.

Written by social psychologists, this is an in depth description of how we deceive ourselves and how we can set ourselves right. It is a must-read eye-opener because the authors describe clearly and carefully how much harm self-justification does to our lives, how our memory can be warped, how science can be compromised, how our legal system has been corrupted, and how marriages fall apart.

At first it seems unbelievable that “...when directly confronted with proof that they are wrong, [people] do not change...but justify it even more tenaciously.” Even politicians might admit “error, but not responsibility. Such is the power of self-justification, “...more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie.”

The authors’ explanation for the source of this power is “cognitive dissonance”—the mental tension that results when “...a person holds two cognitions [beliefs or attitudes]
That contradict each other. The book is full of extensively detailed examples, including some generally accepted theories in economics and psychology that are obviously not supported by evidence or everyday experience.

Most disturbing are examples the authors describe taken from legal situations or psychotherapy, where dissonance was reduced by minimizing damage or blaming victims, as in the use of the notorious Reid Technique for gaining confessions.

The most obvious cases of cognitive dissonance are climate change deniers as they watch Arctic ice and glaciers melt and classical economists who don’t recognize the limits to Earth’s resources. But the most egregious and dangerous dissonance must reside in the minds of those who imply that the Earth can support its projected population with a reasonable standard of living.

Such denial is a trap easily sprung, for there seem to be no workable solutions. How do we reach a sustainable consensus to stabilize all human populations? How do we curb our appetites or revise the mantra that growth and fossil fuels are necessary?

We can preserve resources for the future and protect the precious diversity of life on Earth. The tasks seem overwhelming, but to allow ourselves to sink into despair or denial is to become part of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The difficult way out is quite clear: we simply can’t have our cake and eat it too. Understanding self-justification and cognitive dissonance is a good first step out of the trap.

This book is a treasure for anyone interested in growing as a responsible individual, true to both self and reality.

A Primer On Decision Making: How Decisions Happen, by James G. March, New York, The Free Press, 1994, from his lectures at Stanford University.

This is a treasure trove of timeless one-liners—for anyone who is involved in making decisions, which is most of us. Jim March challenges us with a plethora of ifs, ands, buts, and might-have-beens, if we would only step back from our assumptions and take a good look at what we might be missing.

Based on lectures given while a professor of political science and sociology at Stanford University, the book is divided into six sections—the limits to rationality, problems with decisions based on rules, and on “multiple actors” working in teams and in politics, problems with “ambiguity and interpretation” and problems with “using knowledge.”

March begins by noting the role of ignorance in decision making and ends the book with the role of knowledge and power. He keeps our feet to the fire by listing all the ways we manage to avoid difficult decisions, even when making contracts. Among our limitations, he pays attention to cognitive dissonance (without naming it), environmental limits, bio-constraints, and the future.

Read this book with a pencil and notepad in hand, so that you can write down all the examples that come to mind when reading his summary observations. The world will be made a better place when you act on those notes.