Imagine you had a belief. Something like "The world will end on November 3rd."

Now, Nov. 3rd comes and goes and the world doesn't end.

What you might think would happen is you would realize you were mistaken and admit you were wrong and move on. However, if the original belief was something very important to you, or something that you had made part of your personality, then you may have a great deal of trouble letting that belief go. You are in a state of cognitive dissonance.

It should be noted that cognitive dissonance is an almost entirely subconscious thing. If you were fully aware it was happening, it would be easier to resolve.

What can cognitive dissonance lead to? Well, in my example above the person could deny they made a prediction, insist they didn't mean the current Nov. 3rd but some future Nov. 3rd, or maybe insist the world really did "end" but in a spiritual or metaphysical way that only special people like them have noticed.

Note: my example above is (loosly) based on a real study published in a book called "When Prophesy Fails" written in the 1950's that popularized the term "cognitive dissonance."

It’s when you have conflicting views that distress you.

Example: you love animals, and also love meat. If you think about where your meat comes from, you may be distressed because an animal died. But you still love animals and meat, even though they “contradict” each other.

Another example: you are a pacifist but also extremely nationalistic. If you are drafted into a war, you’re going to want to fight to defend your country, but also don’t want to fight, as it involves killing.

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It’s basically when someone acts or believes something contrary to their other values and then internally ignores or rationalises the contradiction somehow.

Like, claiming to love all people equally and then saying something discriminatory and trying to justify it in line with loving all people equally.

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Cognitive dissonance is a scenario where you have some sort of conflict in your views and beliefs. This is usually (a) a disconnect between your supposed beliefs and your actual actions, or (b) two or more conflicting beliefs.

These days it seems to be commonly used in political type debates and arguments: e.g. you passionately support party/candidate X, but then they say or do something you strongly disagree with. You are a strong believer in some sort of policy or idea, but it will disadvantage many people or cause some negative side effect. You condemn 'The Other Side' for doing something but then dismiss/downplay/whitewash 'Your Side' for doing the same thing.

The dissonance occurs because deep down, you know all this is 'wrong' on some level, which may cause you great distress, confusion, disappointment or anger.

In some cases, this may cause you to temper your beliefs and ideals "OK so this isn't as clear cut and perfect as I thought, there's all these conflicting things in there, maybe I need to think about this more". This is mostly a normal healthy response.

But it can sometimes lead people into denialism and extremism. "I believe passionately in something, this challenges my belief in this something, therefore it must all be a lie!". This is often how conspiracies and similar crazy theories can develop; people don't know or don't want to deal with their cognitive dissonance, so dive down increasingly narrow and extreme rabbit holes to keep from having their views challenged.

He’s an example I remember from my textbook. Let’s say you are really passionate about protecting the environment. But after a picnic outdoors you don’t take your trash to the garbage can, you just threw it on the ground. You feel guilty for doing that. The guilt you feel from discrepancy between your values (environmental protection) and your actions (littering) is cognitive dissonance.

The question is, how does this dissonance motivate you to alleviate that guilt? Do you change your behavior, for example, by going back and picking up after your trash properly? Or does it make you change your underlying belief system (“maybe protecting the environment wasn’t so important to me after all”).

State of stress due to holding conflicting views/attitudes/behaviour at the same time. A textbook example of cognitive dissonance is the fable of the fox and the grapes. Fox desires grapes hanging high from a tree. After attempts to get the grapes and failing , he says that they are sour rather than admitting he has failed. In doing so he reduces his cognitive dissonance (his stress for a) desiring grapes and b) frustration at not getting them). he has reduced cognitive dissonance by trying to give rationale for his failure.

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To add to the examples: let's say you hate how your roommate leaves dishes everywhere. But you decide to plonk your plate on a chair instead of loading it into the dishwasher. You feel like a hypocrite because you've criticized your roommate doing that -- does it mean that you should also criticize yourself? This is only your first time doing it, it's a stressful week, etc. But now you're wondering why you're allowed to excuse it for yourself and not allow your roommate to excuse when they do it.

All that discomfort you're feeling as you're trying to resolve two conflicting viewpoints (it's bad for your roommate to leave dishes around, but it's fine when you do it) is cognitive dissonance. You'll see a lot of people on Reddit misuse it to refer to you simply having conflicting opinions, but that doesn't quite capture it. Cognitive dissonance should encourage you to resolve your conflicting viewpoints, either by adjusting a viewpoint (it is also bad when you leave dishes around), or abandoning it (it's not bad to leave dishes around, period).

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Cognitive dissonance is when two or more thoughts or feelings you have are in conflict, or a thought/feeling and an action. Our brains like consistency, and our egos especially like self-consistency, so this conflict feels unpleasant. Its like if you pointed out something someone did wrong, and someone said "well you do that too". All of a sudden your brain is like "shit, i think doing that is wrong but i did it", and that feels uncomfortable. Often times the solution is to justify the conflict by pretending there isnt one, for example by saying "its okay when i do it because..."

It is having an ingrained belief that is challenged by reality or an experience but still cannot be changed - as in, your brain cannot overwrite what it thinks it “knows” no matter what is presented to you, so you reject or twist new information to make it make sense in your reality.

So like everyone else is on reality 2.0, but your brain stays in beta, rejecting crucial updates.

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abstract: Finding it difficult to reconcile a fact contrary to long held beliefs.

Cognition: Cognition is your way of processing and thinking about information. The way you think comes with inherent biases they have been trained into you through various socio-politico-cultural media.

A simple example is your culture training you into believing Santa Claus.

Bias: Over time, with enough information training, peer-review and reaffirmation, your biases get entrenched into you. Understand that the word bias here is being used technically, not negatively. It's a bias, for example, to want to know more about a story you read somewhere because you've trained yourself to not accept a story for it's headline. Or it's a bias for you to start indicating a turn when driving way earlier than most people because you once witnessed an accident that you thought could've been avoided with a timely turn signal.

Mental model: The important point here is that the mental map of the world you're forming is not based on what you see but how you've come to interpret it. The same news story can be interpreted differently across the political spectrum, despite all having lived the same experience. This mental model is fairly robust and can interpret or rationalize most information thrown at it.

Dissonance: Just because you have a mental model of how you think the world works doesn't mean the world works that way. Every once in a while, an event, a discovery or a new learning is irreconcilable with your long held beliefs. This is extremely inconvenient for you because this new information is not resonant with your mental model; it is dissonant.

"Santa isn't real. Dad takes the gifts out at night from the car trunk and puts it under the tree"

A fact is irrefutable. Therefore your entire mental model must be retrained to now fit this new data.

This is called cognitive dissonance.

Long held beliefs in religion, politics, personal romance and alliances, society, and causality in general all popularly get challenged. A cheap shot is providi g irrefutable evidence to a flatearther that the planet is an oblong spheroid.

Side story: In statistics, when designing stochastic or bayesian models that are sensitive to disruptive data, we often try to filter "noise" away. But if the signal is prominent a d recurrent enough, you're going to have to recalibrate your model to incorporate this new signal/observation as well.

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