011: Long Live The Reasonabilists
Hey friends,
When I signed in today to write this week’s letter I realized that the previous one, meant to go out the first week of August, had never been sent due to a silly mistake on my end. So! You’re getting that one (er, this one) today and then the usual one on tomorrow, as planned. Enjoy!
If you know me, you know I have a deep and abiding interest in the human mind. I’m so curious about how each part works, how we make decisions, why we process things the way we do. I briefly thought about going into psychology, but research didn’t interest me (specializing in one small part of the mind forever?!) and I knew that as a therapist I’d just take home all my client’s problems and eventually traumatize myself. So instead, I just read about it a lot. And lately—given, you know, all of this *gestures widely at the world*—I’ve been especially interested in cognitive dissonance.
I have no idea if cognitive dissonance is a widely understood term, so here’s a quick and dirty definition: Cognitive dissonance is a theory (put forth by Leon Festinger in 1957) that says that humans do not like have inconsistencies in their minds/thoughts. When an inconsistency is encountered, people will modify something in their lives in order to have an internally consistent worldview.
Here’s a really dramatic example: Believers of a religion (any religion) believe that a certain event—the arrival of the Messiah, destruction of Earth, etc—is going to happen on a certain day. But then that day comes and nothing happens. Their worldview is being challenged, which results in cognitive dissonance. So what do they do? They really only have a couple of options—stop believing, or believe that they got the date wrong somehow. The lack of event happening is the dissonance, and their response is the modification they make to return their beliefs into alignment with reality.
Sound familiar? It happens in an episode of Parks & Recreation. The Reasonabilists (Zorpies, pejoratively) believe that their god Zorp the Surveyor will return to Pawnee in Season 4 Episode 6 “End of the World.” At the end of the episode, after Zorp doesn’t arrive, we see their leader Herb telling Leslie that he had gotten some crucial math wrong, and that Zorp would actually be arriving a few months later. (Then, when the park isn’t free that day, he has conveniently misspoken and it’s actually the next day.)
What’s incredible is that The Reasonabilists are fine with this. Throughout the show, we get these throwaway hints that the Zorpies have gone through this before. One town slogan was “Pawnee, Engage with Zorp,” and then the next was “Pawnee, Zorp is Dead, Long Live Zorp,” implying that either a rival cult had “killed” Zorp or that the secular part of town had taken back control from the cult. This sort of thing apparently happens often enough with the cult that Pawnee has largely gotten used to their ridiculous claims. And the group continues on.
But that’s just a dramatic (and fictional) example. Cognitive dissonance comes up in our lives all the time. Consider any time you said you were going to do something and then didn’t and had to come up with an excuse for why. That excuse—I ran out of time, I didn’t feel like it, it’s too far away, etc—is your brain modifying for the discomfort you were feeling after not doing the thing you said you would. (Some people call this rationalizing.)
I’m not trying to make anyone feel guilty, by the way! We all do this all the time. For instance, I keep promising myself that I’m going to write these letters a few days before I send them out instead of trying to write, edit, and send them before noon on Tuesdays. However, I continue to not do that! The discomfort of breaking this promise to myself twice a month is very real and I generally find myself trying to come up with reasons why it just wasn’t possible this time. I’m searching for a new place to live, I’m busy with Go Fund Bean, I didn’t know what to write, etc. These are all true statements (and all take up a lot of time), but they’re also not the reason I wasn’t writing! I was just procrastinating! Admitting that brings my mind into alignment with reality, but it doesn’t erase the unease I feel about it. And therein lies the issue—because admitting the truth is not erasing the discomfort, I’m disinclined to admit it.
Like the Zorpies refusing to acknowledge that Zorp the Surveyor isn’t coming back (/doesn’t exist), admitting that I’m willfully making my life more stressful by not doing something in advance is really dang hard. And there’s so much more psychology that goes into why that is. If you’ve been a member of any religion your whole life, you don’t just give that up, even if it’s been proven wrong in your eyes. Being wrong about a date is a lot more comfortable than being wrong about your entire faith, you know? Similarly, there’s something in my psyche that I’m not examining that is causing me to procrastinate on these letters, and the discomfort of rushing through them is apparently less uncomfortable than I think writing them in advance would be.
(This also delves into how procrastination is an emotional regulation issue, not a time management or a work ethic issue, but I won’t get into that here. Read the amazing New York Times article about it that legitimately changed my life, and I do not say that lightly.)
Naturally, since the 1980s psychologists have been pointing to cognitive dissonance as the key to moral development. We behave one way, find out it has caused pain to someone somehow, which causes us psychic pain, so we adjust. They argue that “moral growth is often motivated by the need to reduce cognitive dissonance,” which just means that the only way out of the pain is to position yourself in your mind as a better person. Whether that means you admit you made a mistake and learned from it, or deny that it’s a mistake you would have ever made and avoid it in the future, the result is the same: You become a more moral person.
I actually couldn’t find a lot of recent studies about cognitive dissonance and its relation to moral development. I think the field of psychology considers it settled. But I wonder—how does society’s changes around us impact this relationship? I was born in 1990, so I didn’t experience the 70s and 80s at all, but I think something about our digital echo chambers has made this process harder. If we have to experience dissonance and then admit we were wrong to ourselves in order to grow morally, then does the documentation of all the times we behaved out of alignment with our new values impact our ability to change? Does the echo chamber of everyone who believes the same thing as us hinder our ability to admit we made a mistake at all?
One of the most interesting things about the brain is how immensely adaptable it is, but also how incredibly resistant we as humans are to change. Think about how quickly we adapted to having internet in our lives, or even how quickly companies adapted to remote work during this pandemic. We can make changes, and we can make changes very quickly… When we absolutely must. Discomfort isn’t enough. It has to be extreme discomfort; discomfort so uncomfortable that changing, that accepting an unknown, is less uncomfortable. If it’s only minor discomfort, we seek to alleviate it, sure, but we do so by rationalizing instead of changing ourselves.
The most obvious place this happens—and I think where are a lot of us are struggling in this Global-Pandemic-Election-Year-Police-Brutality-Hellhole—is politics. People would rather believe what they already believe about masks, or what they already believe about Trump, or what they already believe about Black Americans and the police, and convincing them of anything else has proven to be extremely difficult. Impossible, even. You can present people with facts about how masks reduce transmission of covid-19, you can show people how Trump is undermining voting rights and election accessibility, you can tell people about the disproportionate killing of unarmed Black Americans by the police, but it might not do anything. It’s not that those people are heartless, or don’t care about democracy, and hate everyone that’s not them, it’s that their brain isn’t uncomfortable enough. I firmly believe they feel some discomfort, and I believe that because I have friends and family members with whom I disagree on all these topics. All of them are decent people, and none of them like seeing Trump’s remarks about women, none of them like seeing videos of people being murdered by the police.
But they can rationalize it. They can rationalize that Trump said those things a long time ago, and maybe he’s changed (lol), they can point out that some of those people killed by police were criminals, etc. And the fact is that they’re going to keep rationalizing it in a way that fits the worldview they already have until the dissonance is so unbearably uncomfortable for them that the only option is to change their worldview. Because what are the consequences of admitting they’re wrong? If they’re a lifelong Republican or Conservative, it’s like changing your religion! They might be going against their entire families! Admitting that Trump’s behavior is bad enough to elect someone else, means not only admitting they were wrong in 2016, but also sacrificing other values in the Republican platform that are important to them for the Democratic platform. If they are very against gun control or socialized medical care or international financial aid or publicly funding schools, then the discomfort of voting is Democrat is huge. So they can (and do!) rationalize away Trump’s behavior they don’t like because the cognitive discomfort of voting Democrat is bigger. They can be personally devastated watching videos of police brutality and still show up to the polls and vote to say that the current status quo is better than the unknown.
What’s hard about realizing this is that you start seeing it everywhere. Rationalizing away cognitive dissonance has its role in addiction, in any sort of domestic abuse, in anything we become complacent in… We can always say we’re not the type of people that would drive drunk, that would tolerate an abuser, that would just let ourselves slide into not eating well, etc. And then when we do do those things, we have to reconcile the discomfort between who we hoped we would be and the actions we took (or didn’t take). Sometimes that looks like saying it wasn’t as bad as we thought, or it only happened the one time, or it’s because of some reason outside our control.
(And if it sounds like I’m victim-blaming, I’m not trying to. Leaving an abuser is scary for a survivor, because they don’t know what will happen after they leave. Often survivors will try to leave more than once before actually successfully get out of the situation, and the moments when they could leave and don’t are marked by some kind of rationalization that it won’t happen again, that they’re overreacting, that this is the best they deserve, etc, which is a result of the abuse. The human brain is layered! Many things are happening at once!)
The worst part is that it can be very difficult to be on the outside and try to change someone’s mind. Getting uncomfortable with reality is the only way to dig out an entrenched opinion, but the risk of misfire is high because no one knows what any person’s individual threshold for rationalizing away cognitive dissonance is. We can try to have conversations, we can try to show data and videos, we can try to be emotionally supportive, we can try to show “tough love,” etc, but psychology can’t predict with any kind of accuracy a person’s changing point. It depends on how entrenched the idea is, who is presenting the conflicting evidence, and what the consequences of accepting a new reality are. Sometimes the consequences never seem worth it to us.
Things I’ve Read and Loved Lately:
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Stay healthy, friends!
xx,
Valorie
Image by Stiva.