Emotions First!
What is cognitive dissonance?
"Sirmione - Castello Scaligero - drawbridge" by ell brown is licensed under CC BY 2.0
First of all, I would like to thank my family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances for their support for the Sharpen Your Axe project. The reception when I announced it earlier in the week was amazing! I feel honoured!
The reason I decided to publish my book on critical-thinking tools for free on the internet is that I want the information to circulate freely, without a paywall slowing down its spread. So, if you enjoy this material, please feel free share it widely on social media or with friends who might enjoy it. Also, I strongly suggest you take a moment to check out my friend Johannes Koch’s excellent project, which is very complementary to this one.
In the first post, I said Sharpen Your Axe would involve developing greater awareness of our emotions. What did I mean by that? Imagine two friends who have a disagreement on social media about their understanding of the world. They start to argue. They barely read each other’s posts, before responding with another blistering attack. The tone gradually gets shriller. Inevitably, they start to insult each other. Anyone watching knows that one of them will accuse the other of fascism any second now.
Let’s be honest: Most of us have done this. I plead guilty! However, it is truly a terrible way of learning about the world. What the members of the social media debate squad are doing is doubling down on their starting position. But what if our starting position was wrong?
The technical term for doubling down on your starting position is called cognitive dissonance. It is one of the key concepts in modern psychology and deserves to be much better known by the general public. Think of it as a drawbridge and our identity as a castle. As soon as we perceive a threat to the castle, all of us tend to bring up the drawbridge and retreat into a defensive position.
Cognitive dissonance is based on the feeling of irritation. It is an unpleasant sensation. Nobody likes it very much, but some people can cope with it a little better than others. It is very easy to spot in others, but very hard to spot in ourselves. If you are arguing with someone on social media, you can always see that the other person is riddled with cognitive dissonance. It is much harder to realize that you are too.
The idea behind this project is that if we want to improve our understanding of the world, we need to watch out for cognitive dissonance in ourselves. It is easy to imagine someone offering you some friendly criticism or advice; only for you to react badly and raise your drawbridge. But, what if the other person has a better understanding of the matter at hand than you?
What would happen if you could catch your breath, pause for a second and suspend judgement of the criticism and your own worldview? Wouldn’t that give you some space to think of an appropriate methodology so you could investigate further? Cognitive dissonance tends to stop us learning, growing or changing, which is why we need to begin any debate about the world around us by looking at our emotions.
The flipside of this approach is that we need to avoid triggering cognitive dissonance in others as much as possible. It isn’t always possible, but a little transparency on cognitive dissonance can go a long way if you are going to present information that contradicts someone else’s starting position.
You can find much more information about this issue in Chapter One of Sharpen Your Axe. Stay tuned for Chapter Two next week! Also, if you haven’t subscribed to my newsletter, please do so.
Update (25 April 2021)
The full beta version is available here
[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.