Cognitive Dissonance: A Collision course to Extinction By Mark Miller © 02/13/2014 I recently discovered an extremely and relevant revelation about the effects of Cognitive Dissonance, or Motivated Reasoning, one that I had already known, but, had not appreciated the severity and role it plays in negatively affecting our species as a whole. First of all what is this Cognitive Dissonance? I have written several other related posts about this important, viable, and, detrimental process of our unconscious actions, but not in detail. In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the excessive mental stress and discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, and/or values at the same time. This stress and discomfort may also arise within an individual who holds a belief and performs a contradictory action or reaction. 1.The existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance 2.When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance Those who believe in holding on to firm held beliefs and the benefits of past experience, in spite of counter-intuitive evidence, should consider this pearl wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship captain: “But in all my experience , I have never been in any accident...of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreak and never have been wreaked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.” E. J. Smith, 1907,Captain, RMS Titanic Captain Smiths ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked about shipwreck in history. A classic illustration of cognitive dissonance is expressed in the fable The Fox and the Grapes by Aesop (ca. 620–564 BCE). In the story, a fox sees some high-hanging grapes and wishes to eat them. When the fox is unable to think of a way to reach them, he decides that the grapes are probably not worth eating, with the justification the grapes probably are not ripe or that they are sour (hence the common phrase sour grapes). The Moral that accompanies the story is Any fool can despise what he can not get. This example follows a pattern: one desires something, finds it unattainable, and reduces ones dissonance by criticizing it. Jon Elster calls this pattern adaptive preference formation Why would someone go through such deceiving and devastating lengths of defending and protecting an idea, argument, or belief in something in spite of reason or counter-intuitive evidence? Well, it has to do with the two major elements of our brain and mind. Our most recent evolved component of the mind is our extended consciousness. This is where our analytical, reasonable, logical, and abstract thinking comes from. An evolutionary achievement which nature has never before seen on this planet. This is also where we perceive our identity and personality to come from, which it does, but only a small portion of it. It also contains our ethereal, artistic, and imagination abilities, but, together with the unconscious. There is nothing that occurs in the conscious portion of our mind without influence and effect from our unconscious. This has created huge advantages for us in tool making, communication, process and logical thinking, and give us an ability to thwart off decisions which come from our unconscious. We can choose not to choose to “act”. Not free-will, but free-wont. So far we have not discovered any other species on the planet with this high of level of consciousness. And the apex of our consciousness is called our conscience. Our unconscious part is the oldest part, and most involved and influential process. It involves the limbic system and all structures associated with it, even our conscious aspect. However, this connection is a one way communication station, it gives signals to our conscious aspect but refuses responses from the pre-frontal cortex. Our unconscious mind is really who we are, although we under the illusion that the “I” is our conscious part, and it is to an extent. This is where our emotions, thoughts, ideas, feelings (though feelings come from the conscious part too)and perceptions come from. Though we are unaware of this as it all occurs behind the scenes and for good reason. Our unconscious part also performs all of our learned skills of operations by way of parallel processing. Or our repetitious activities; like driving a car, performing your job, and all routine activities that occur without you even being aware of it. Without this ability we could not survive. The conscious part can only concentrate or pay attention to [one] process at a time called serial processing. There is no such thing as multi-tasking, this is a misnomer. However, we can alternate decisions making abilitys extremely fast with practice to make it seem like we are multi-tasking. But we can only pay attention to one thing at a time, until we have done it enough times then designate that activity to our automatic unconscious part. But what is at stake here is our species existence. Marcus Aurelius most eloquent and meaningful statement know to mankind was; “If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in ones own self-deception and ignorance.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations I really thought hard about this for a while and came to the conclusion that this is the most difficult achievement known to mankind. It cannot be compared to any of mans creation of any technology or Scientific discoverys Theorys, other than Evolution . Why evolution you say? Because it created our brains functions and adaptations. If consciousness did not prove highly advantageous to our survival it would have already been disposed of immediately. Lest I digress. What the great wise Roman Emperor was conveying is that the truth can be the most distressing and disturbing finding on the planet. When people refer to ignorance is bliss, I refer them to the 400 to 700 years of the Dark Ages. Im sure anyone of them would just love to have lived in those times. Well guess what? As of right now that is our future course and destination, if a total annihilation of our species doesnt happen first. And what does this all come down to? Cognitive Dissonance and an unwillingness to “know thyself”. I have confronted numerous individuals on philosophical sites who recognize this most important aspect of philosophy, yet are so ignorant to not have even practiced it. In fact most of these, so called philosophers, are fakes that are only there due to their lack of identity and personality. So lets get into the gist of why this cognitive dissonance is so powerful and significant. And how the truth is at the core. As the psychologist Jonathon Haidt put it, there are two ways to get to the truth: the way of the scientist(our conscious part) and the way of the lawyer ( our unconscious part). Scientists gather evidence, look for irregularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want to convince others of and then seek evidence to support it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesnt. The human mind is designed to be both a scientist and an attorney, both a conscious seeker of objective truth and an unconscious, impassioned advocate for what we want to believe. Together these approaches vie to crate a worldview. Believing in what you desire to be true and then seek evidence to justify it doesnt seem like the best approach to everyday decisions. For example, if you are at the races, it is rational to bet on the horse you believe is fastest, but doesnt make much sense to believe a horse is fastest because you bet on it. But this is how many individuals support their decisions. This does not make much sense but the mind usually opts for a decision or support of a decision to produce a feeling of happiness. The “casual arrow” in human thought process consistently tends to point from belief to evidence, not vice versa. As it turns out, the brain is a decent scientist but an absolutely outstanding lawyer. This makes sense form an evolutionary standpoint. Motivated Reasoning helps us to believe in our own goodness and competence, to feel in control, and to generally see ourselves in an overly positive light. This was an evolutionary adaptation as I imagine our ancestors ,fifty thousand years ago, anyone in their right mind looking toward the harsh winters of northern Europe would have crawled into a cave and given up. So with so many seemingly insurmountable barriers in life, nature provided us with the means to create an unrealistically rosy attitude about overcoming them-which helps us do precisely that. This way of thinking also gives our ego a boast, we feel better about ourselves (because we always see ourselves better than we truly are and with enough belief can truly be better than we are), and makes us less depressed. It is a survival mechanism. The thing is recognizing this process and understanding it better how the mind works you can prime your unconscious with your conscious part and make it even better. This is what I believe the main purpose of the conscious is for, to understand its own self. However, people these days are too afraid of themselves or just to damn lazy to place the effort in reading about the mind, which you can find in any classical literature novel. Literature was here long before psychology or neuroscience. There are many benefits by holding positive “illusions” about ourselves, but I believe we have went too far beyond just making ourselves look better than who we are. We have passed through a psychological twilight zone of fantasy land and make believe. This process was meant to go so far and then we have to have some illumination of reality and truth; real truth-about ourselves. We can still seek the truth and be happy and content by understanding this process. People believe in anything they are told these days, being lead like animals to the trough. We need to use our conscious part a little better and work on knowing our true selves if we are going to survive a a species. People see Jesus in there cereal, believe in mediums talking to the dead, that there is a being floating in the sky looking after them, whatever you can imagine the Americans are buying. We are ignorant and arrogant two extremely dangerous attributes when placed together and with no support at all for it. Ive met some great people on Facebook and they do recognize this and have read their own posts about it, they understand because they work for it, but this is a minority. The majority I encounter engage in hypocrisy at an unprecedented levels like I have never seen in my 46 years of existence. It is amazing the amount of Americans who completely brain dead. Its like living in The Night of The Living Dead movie but it never ends and grows worse everyday. Frightening to say the least! We will lose our conscious ability if it is not needed; evolution will see to that. In fact in my opinion it has already begun. People, people please read, seek the truth, look within yourself and stop being so afraid of the truth, the truth is all that differentiates us from every other organisms, listen to someone who seems to have a sense of reason and logic it may do you some good. Let us not be E.J. Smiths Ship that sank in 1912.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 16:12:31 +0000
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