Having been asked about Orwell’s doublethink
in 1984 recently, I started thinking about contradicting thoughts and beliefs. To me it seems that the most troubling (and
maybe the only really troubling) part of doublethink is that the person that
has two contradictory thoughts or beliefs in their head does not see a problem
with that. I am not at all against
contradiction and think that it is essential to entertain and hold contradictory
thoughts in your head in order to not become simple minded and dogmatic. After all, what in the world is actually
black and white, simple and clear, cut and dry?
Things are complex and contradictory, so entertaining contradicting
thoughts helps us keep that reality in mind—keep it real for us—, and keeps us actively
reviewing and evolving our ideas, opinions and beliefs.
I had heard the term cognitive dissonance
before but actually spent more than just couple minutes looking it up this
time. Cognitive dissonance is “the existence
of nonfitting relations among… knowledge, opinion[s], or belief[s] about the environment,
about oneself, or about one’s behavior.”
It is a nonfitting that causes psychological discomfort. This definition
comes from the first chapter of Leon Festinger’s book “A Theory of Cognitive
Dissonance.” It is the first book on the
subject (or at least the first to use the term cognitive dissonance), and I
finally received it in the mail yesterday and started reading it today. It will take me a while I bet, but it should
be worth it. It not only lays out the
idea of what cognitive dissonance is; it also explores the ways in which people
try to overcome it. The latter is what I
am really most interested in at this point.
The difference between doublethink
and cognitive dissonance, to put it simply, is that there is anxiety or psychological
discomfort about the conflict, the nonfitting, in the latter but not the former. It is the anxiety and discomfort that is key. I think that as a person tries to resolve
that conflict they have a chance to expand their thinking and understanding. It is in a way—thought I tend to dislike the
dialectic because it is binary and as a result too simple—a sort of synthesis
that can lead to new and better understandings.
A person experiencing cognitive dissonance is faced with a violation of
the logical law of non-contradiction and they need to reconcile it. Doing so is an opportunity to re-evaluate the
ideas that are in conflict coming to a fresher perspective and possibly deeper
understanding. Or that is my hope.
In the first chapter, Festinger
mentions some articles published prior to the book that talk about similar
ideas thought using different terms. In
one article, according to Festinger, after experiencing a conflict between an
opinion and a source of information “there is a marked tendency to change
either the evaluation of the opinion involved or the evaluation of the source
in a direction which would reduce the dissonance.” To me this seems fairly obvious and it is
something that I have observed in myself and in others often.
Here I want to depart from the book
(though I hope that as I go this issue or idea is addressed in it) and talk
about the authority of opinions and sources, especially in contemporary
culture. It used to be that when things
were printed they were fairly well vetted and checked, especially full length books.
It was not cheap to print a book, so
there was a financial risk if the material was later shown to be clearly
inaccurate, or at least more of a risk than when you simply post something on
the internet. There was also a greater
emphasis on reputation: the reputation of a publishing house, newspaper or
magazine. If you read something in print
from a reputable printer, you could be fairly certain that it was well
vetted. At least, more so than today
when you simply click on a link from a Google search and take in what could
have been composed and posted just as easily and simply as you found it and
opened it. This is an issue that is serious,
but I want only to mention it here on my way to another topic in the subject of
authority.
Today mere opinions (thought the
internet is flooded with these partially informed and half-thought opinions) are
not supposed to be taken seriously by serious people. In fact, opinion as a whole is given a very
bad wrap. The same is true of personal experience
and even tradition. These things hold little
authority because what is supposed to hold authority are facts, data and the scientific
discoveries based on facts and data.
In common culture these days, when
data, facts and science appear and there is a conflict, all else is supposed to
be re-evaluated to accommodate the facts, the data, the scientific discovery. To keep things simple, the ‘all else’ is
often just discredited and discarded.
This seems very dangerous for at least a couple of reasons.
The first is that this is not
really a synthesis or sublation (to use terms from the dialect, though I cringe
as I do so); it is a simple turning of the tables. Tradition, personal experience, etc. were authoritative
in the past and science was nothing. In
this new simple solution to dissonance, science rules (along with data and facts),
and the ‘all else’ is nothing to be taken seriously. It is a case of the slave becoming the master
and the master becoming the slave. This
is not a real change in thinking or understanding, it is only a change in positons.
This reason is based on a concern over
the structure of thinking or the methodology being used in common culture. People want progress and improvement. This method does not result in progress or improvement
in the long run, it simply moves the problems around.
The second is that facts, data and scientific
discoveries are never complete or irrefutable.
Any good scientist or statistician will acknowledge that there is never
really an end to the process of collecting and analyzing data or conducting
scientific experiments and formulating theories, laws, and explanations. The problem with the simple ‘throw out all
else’ approach here is that it is often done (and here I am speaking about in
common culture among everyday people) based on the newest data, facts or scientific
discovery, though it may be just one study among many conflicting or contrary ones. Facts, data and science are about collecting
and analyzing large amounts of input over a long period. To take the most recent and use it to trump everything
else is not wise and not really in the spirit of science itself. When there is nothing there—no opinion,
personal experience or tradition—to counter the newest authoritative information,
there is no progress there is only a tyranny of the new.
Festinger’s book is supposed to
explore ways that people tend to resolve dissonance. It is psychology, a science, so it will
provide descriptive theories on how people in general deal with dissonance. I hope those theories will give me an understanding
and provide me with some bearings. From
there I hope to be able to better think out and explain my idea of how cognitive
dissonance can be used as an opportunity to refine our understanding and deepen
our opinions. In other words, I hope to
be able to write about a prescriptive philosophy that uses cognitive dissonance
as a starting point for developing more refined and well informed opinions and
more accurate and complex understandings.
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