I was talking to my friend M yesterday about her mental health project, and I excitedly said, “Did you include cognitive dissonance?” She had! I was thrilled. Few things bring a gleam to my eye faster than the opportunity to wax eloquent on a pet theory.
You see, I have long believed that most pathologies and addictions, as well as plain old poor judgment, can be traced back to cognitive dissonance. It seems to be a facet of human nature that, once having decided on a course of action, we will do everything possible to convince ourselves that it wasn’t a bad idea.
- Example: smoking. If you keep smoking, then you weren’t a TOTAL idiot to start in the first place.
- Example: continuing to work in a job you hate. If you keep working there, then obviously it was a good decision to hire on.
- Example: serial killers (I skipped to the finish here). If you don’t keep slicing and dicing, then it might have been a poor idea to begin with.
It can become extremely dangerous (see “serial killers” above). Once the mind begins to chase its tail in a loop of cognitive dissonance–driven behavior, the rationalizations for bizarre behavior can assume truly bizarre proportions.
For further cases in point, I present to you the military and also the nursing education system. “They” indoctrinate the military to “go over there and bomb the shit out of some brown people who are only trying to watch the evening news and eat their lentils.” Then these GIs come back here and are overcome with despair because on the one hand it occurs to them that the killing of brown people might not be the right thing to do; however, cognitive dissonance takes over. Killing brown people CAN’T be wrong, because then they would have done something wrong. Therefore, it’s the right thing to do, and they’ll argue to the death with anyone who suggests otherwise. Similarly, educators display extreme reluctance to change course (“it CANNOT be that I have been behaving improperly for the last 30 years! So I will keep doing the same damn thing!”).
No, I’m not equating nursing education with war. Those are just the two examples that have come up in discussion with others lately.
