the timboucher experience

I find this whole theory of cognitive dissonance to be very interesting and enlightening. The theory talks about what happens when people are forced into a state where they have to entertain two conflicting states of cognition at once. Cognitions, in this case, can be defined as an attitude, emotion, belief or value.

Leon Festinger first pioneered research into this area in the late 1950’s. He considered cognitive dissonance to be a “negative drive state,” along similar lines to hunger, thirst or tiredness. In a negative drive state, you seek to ameliorate the condition. If you’re hungry, you eat; thirsty, drink; tired, sleep. If you have cognitive dissonance you seek renewed balance or consonance.

One of the elements of the theory states that it is easier to retain your previous cognitive state (inertia, basically) than to accept the new state of cognition. People have a variety of techniques to accomplish this, as well as to avoid it altogether in the first place. Two of the most interesting to me are selective exposure and selective retention.

Selective exposure is the process whereby, “individuals actively avoid information and situations which conflict with their existing attitudes and beliefs.” Selective retention, on the other hand, says that, “individuals do not actively avoid conflicting information, but instead choose to only remember information that agrees with their ‘prevailing frame of mind.’” The practice of either of these techniques does not necessarily occur on a conscious level, although it may.

A related concept, though not part of this theory explicitly, is the idea of a cultural immune system. A person’s cultural immune system will be activated when they are confronted with information which is dissonant to what they already know or believe. Rather than integrate new information, which might cause them to re-evaluate their thought-system, they will apply a sort of catch-call to it. Examples include reflexively calling something “evil” among Christians; or, for followers of the mainstream media religion, they may call something a “conspiracy theory.” Both of these techniques allow them to perceive new information, while at the same time categorically ignoring it, or dis-allowing it from changing how they think.

• Dissonance, Fundamentalism & Syncretism
• Sci-Fi: Cognitive-Dissonance Buster!
• Leap of Faith
• Building a universe that does fall apart
• Conspiracy Theory & Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder