Please stop using the term 'Cognitive Dissonance' until you understand what it really means.

I rant a lot. In 25 years, I'll be that old man at the mall who won't stop complaining and whining about some grievance that happened 50 years ago. Be nice to me and make sure I am not lost. Check my pocket for some laminated identification card.

Cognitive Dissonance: One of the most sophisticated-sounding social psychology buzzwords that are dropped by people who have no clue what it really means. What makes me qualified to rant about this? I have four degrees in Psychology, including two in Forensic Psychology, so there's my flex. You may put your shoe back on, sit down now, and read on.

Dropping poorly-understood or misunderstood terms is not new. In the tech industry, I hear people drop terms like AI or Machine Learning or Cloud... just to make what they are talking about sound more interesting or spicy. When I hear 'cognitive dissonance' used in a sentence, it does irk me more because 19 out of 20 times, it is used as a synonym to confusion, contemplation, confliction, dilemma, or indecision.

That's just a third of what cognitive dissonance is.

Yes, cognitive dissonance, as studied and possibly coined by Leon Festinger in the 50s, has a concept of a mental state that is causing the person some, let's call it, "stress". That's the first part. I won't go into his classic experiment because others do a better job. Let's say that Festinger's contribution to psychological science wasn't that people often get their underwear in a knot. The real insight about this poorly-understood theory is what people choose to do or change to address the dissonance. That's the second part.

Have you ever seen once of those squishy slime ball popular with kids? Depending on how you squeeze it, excess parts of the ball grotesquely oozes out like a giant alien pimple about to pop. Our mind is like that ball at resting unharassed state: not deformed, not pressured, no stress. When competing values, facts, or feelings are forced coexist in our tiny brain, there is dissonance and the mind has to find an outlet to relieve that pressure. If and when we find what to contort, extent, deform, destroy, etc., the dissonance will be alleviated.

Simple example: You have a boring job and you get paid very little for it. That's a bad situation I know. Unfortunately, the job ain't gonna change and you're not getting a raise. Wait, no cognitive dissonance yet :) Your boss wants you to talk to candidates to recruit them for the same low-paying boring job - and you are to tell them that it is a really cool gig. Let's say you don't have a choice.

According to Festinger's theory, if you want to address the cognitive dissonance, you will start to alter your perception or cognition about your lousy job. That is, you begin to tell yourself and feel that the job is not boring after all, or that you are paid fairly when you consider the economy, etc. Here's the kicker: If you were well paid for the same boring job, according to the theory, you may not have any dissonance - but you will continue hate the job.

So, what's the third part? Thank you for reading.

I submit that the final part of this theory is the most powerful and significant, and that is the predictive power of the theory. That is, what behaviors or decisions can we predict given a set of parameters - some of which are (real or perceived to be) mutable and movable, and others not. This becomes incredibly interesting for extreme contexts like cult groups, but also more benign contexts like consumer behavior, parenting, conflict resolutions, etc.

Thought exercise: What current situation can you identify where a group of people might soon be (or have been) presented with information, data, facts, etc. that will conflict with what they already held in their heads as the absolute truth? How will they choose to address the cognitive dissonance? In other words, what will these people perceive as immutable and what is mutable? The theory predicts that if the person (or group of people) want to resolve the cognitive dissonance to "balance things out", they will distort, reject, or somehow change a mutable behavior or thinking.

If you want to go read up on Festinger's work, things get really really interesting when he studied a UFO cult group in the 1950s using infiltration to collect data. Look up When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. I won't spoil it for you :)