Carol Tavris, social phycologist and co-author of the University of Idaho 2017-18 Common Read, believes cognitive dissonance is responsible for people justifying when they are wrong.
“Cognitive dissonance — the discomfort we feel when any two cognitions, or a cognition and a behavior contradict each other,” Tavris said.
Tavris, co-author of “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts,” said the book relies on the theory of cognitive dissonance and its implications.
Carol Tavris, co-author of Mistakes Were Made, presents her keynote address Monday night in the Bruce Pitman Center International Ballroom.
A classic example of cognitive dissonance, she said, is a smoker who knows smoking is bad, unhealthy and dangerous, yet smokes cigarettes anyways.
“That state of discomfort needs to be reduced in some way,” Tavris said. “Being in a state of dissonance is as uncomfortable as being hungry or thirsty — you just can’t stand it and so you have to reduce dissonance in one of two ways — the smoker has to quit smoking or justify smoking.”
Tavris presented an example from a reader of the book who sent her a story in which they recognized what dissonance feels like. The reader explained a long time friend of theirs — a police officer — unfriended them on Facebook because they shared posts on the Innocence Project about the exoneration of men and women who spend time in prison for crimes they did not commit.
“My friend could not — or would not — believe or even conceive that they could be innocent because that would mean the system of which he is a part, and to which he is committed, failed,” Tavris’s reader wrote her.
The collision of his mental narrative with contradictory facts is what the reader described as cognitive dissonance.
The dissonance theory has been supported by many different biases that occur in the mind, Tavris said. She presented three biases in particular — the bias that people are unbiased, the bias that people are smarter, better, kinder and more competent than average and the confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is what Tavris called the “most important bias,” which directs people to notice or observe information that confirms beliefs and tells them to ignore or dismiss any information dissonant with their beliefs.
An example of confirmation bias, she said, is when drug enforcements were sent into airports and asked to keep notes to profile of people they found suspicious drug courier.
“Acted too nervous — acted too calm,” Tavris said were some of the examples of lists of things officers found as suspicious behaviors.
“What this tells us is, if I think you are a drug courier, anything you do confirms my belief that you are a drug courier,” Tavris said. “That’s where it starts — what’s in your perceptions, not in what these people are doing.”
Savannah Cardon can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @savannahlcardon