Guest post: Discomfort at cognitive dissonance is not universal
Originally a comment by G Felis on The caucus has become a mob.
An interesting fact about cognitive dissonance development theory: From the start (Leon Festinger in the late 50s), it was more or less just an article of faith that the unpleasantness of cognitive dissonance is a spur for people to resolve it, and so a direct cause of cognitive developments such as attitude or belief change. Eventually, someone came along and asked the obvious question: whether cognitive dissonance is actually unpleasant for everyone, or if it’s variable like most psychological phenomena. It turns out, it’s the latter. Discomfort at cognitive dissonance is not universal, it’s distributed across the population in slightly skewed bell curve, just like nearly every feature of psychology, with some people feeling very high levels of discomfort with dissonance, others feeling none at all, and most falling somewhere in the middle (with what appears to be a slight skew towards more rather than less discomfort). Many people simply experience no discomfort at all from believing A and not-A simultaneously, or even from contradicting themselves from one breath to the next. Claire’s comment recognizes the variability by noting that cognitive dissonance is agonizing “for most people,” but I want to add that Senators simply aren’t “most people.”
The connection between a lack of discomfort with cognitive dissonance and the Cluster B personality disorders is pretty obvious if you’ve ever had experience with Cluster Bs: Narcissists especially not only feel no discomfort at all with cognitive dissonance, they will deliberately inspire cognitive dissonance in others through gaslighting. And narcissism, sadly, is an all-too-common pathology among career politicians. So I don’t think Republican Senators are unable to back down due to cognitive dissonance or any sort of moral “sunk cost” of the dark road they’ve come down; they’ve all deliberately courted and encouraged the darkest impulses of their electorate for decades for their own benefit. The “southern strategy” of aligning the Republican Party with white supremacy dates back to Goldwater and Nixon campaigns in the 60s, after all. Even Republican politicians who haven’t actually drunk that Kool-Aid have been serving it up for their entire career at this point, and they clearly have no compunction whatsoever about it. Thus, their fear is almost certainly a matter of prosaic calculating self-interest, not any sort of cognitive dissonance. They know that a majority of the Republican base is highly invested in their racist authoritarian hero, and they fear the electoral consequences of not toeing the Trumpist line. With regard to everyone who ISN’T a part of the Republican voter base, they also fear the electoral consequences of covering up for a transparently corrupt and incompetent president, which is why they’re trying to make the whole impeachment trial go away as quickly and with as little fuss and attention as possible. Happily, that strategy doesn’t seem to be working very well.
It makes sense that psychopaths and clinical narcissists won’t be troubled by cognitive dissonance. But I don’t think politicians (or others) have to be personality-disordered to choose to spread lies over truth; they just have to believe that ends justify means. I suspect plenty of non-“Cluster B”s believe that.
A knowing liar won’t feel cognitive dissonance. Nor will a bullshitter–per Harry Frankfort, a bullshitter simply doesn’t care about what’s true.
The habitual bullshitter is likely to be Cluster B.
Another related matter is complacency, and the desire to preserve that complacency by ignoring uncomfortable realities or trying to pretend that they don’t exist; a common failing among, at least, the British middle classes. I do not know how anyone with a modicum of sensibility could begin to vote for the Conservative Party after ‘The Windrush Betrayal’ (the title of a book, which arouses mingled grief and rage, by Amelia Gentleman), whereby British citizens, merely because they were black, were treated in the most abhorrent manner by the Conservatives – they were either of the generation of West Indians who, as British citizens, had come to Britain after the war (the first ship that brought some of them was called the ‘Windrush’), or they were the children of these immigrants. The were harried by the Home Office, and a large number of people’s lives were destroyed. When the story of what was happening came out, Mistress May and her cohorts offered tepid apologies in the House of the Commons for the ‘anxiety’ that had been caused. It was a great deal more than anxiety that was caused. And of course the Home Office persists with cruel policies towards immigrants and refugees – the most recent obvious example being the refusal to allow in a bill a clause that would allow the children of refugees to be re-united with parents who are now legally in Britain. There is also the matter of prisons in Britain – overcrowded, understaffed, with a great many suicides, in consequence of the punitive temper that seems to pervade AngloSaxondom, the US, Uk & Australia being the worst offenders. But these are not matters that greatly exercise the Tory voter. It’s not us, so out of sight out of mind. And the ‘gig’ economy – in which connexion, I recommend Ken Loach’s two recent films, ‘I, Daniel Blake’ & ‘We’re Sorry We Missed You’, the last of which won the Palmed’Or at Cannes las year – deservedly.
I think this has to do with cognitive dissonance:
“In the hard game of love I’m the last one to fall
But I gave it my heart and I gave it my all
I didn’t know that she played a game with no rules
So I climbed aboard the old ship of fools
And it’s a lonesome old world, my sweetheart is gone
I can’t sleep at all. And I pray for the dawn
It’s the last time I’ll hurt, it’s the last time I’ll cry
When I lay down tonight, gonna lay down and die.”
(IMHO American bluegrass does not get much better than this.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO8jgMm1S64 DOYLE LAWSON & QUICKSILVER VERSION
https://www.bluegrasslyrics.com/song/hard-game-of-love/ LYRICS Dailey and Vincent