Book Review-Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – And How to Think Deeply Again

One of the benefits of learning software development early is that I got a chance to learn how to pay attention.  Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again, argues that our ability to pay attention has been stolen from us as a society by forces of technology and media companies’ incentives that lead us away from focus.  To understand how I got to this book, I need to acknowledge Jonathan Haidt’s reference in The Anxious Generation and my recognition of Hari’s name from Chasing the Scream.  It pulled the book to near the top of the stack as I wondered what Hari would have to say on the issue of attention.

Partial Immunity

Before I dive into Hari’s narrative, it’s worth explaining that my life is – and has been – largely immune to the pressures that both Haidt and Hari share.  It makes me no less aware of the problem, but it does change it from a largely personal problem to one of those I love.  Hari himself credits his realization through his godson, Adam, and his desire to see Graceland being stolen from him.

Even today, I spend a generous amount of time in flow.  (See Flow, Finding Flow, and The Rise of Superman.)  It can be its own addiction, as I ask my family to give me space for focus – but those boundaries are carefully negotiated and renegotiated.  (See Boundaries and Beyond Boundaries.)  So, I start with having periods of focus that are autotelic (self-rewarding).  Because I’m so aware, and my periods of flow are already protected, I didn’t have to start from a deficit.

Second, I pay little attention to either the mainstream news media or social media.  Part of that is disposition.  Part of that is a conscious decision to see what bubbles up to be the most important.  Chuck Underwood, who wrote America’s Generations, is focused on the news (or at least he was when we spoke).  I’ve never really been that way.  When I started researching what made people effective and how to handle the barrage of information we are subjected to, I realized that turning down the noise from the outside world was necessary.  (See The Information Diet, The Age of Overwhelm, and The Organized Mind for more.)

In my conversation with Underwood, I recognized that I was much more concerned with fundamental truths than social fads.  Much of what pulls people into the swirling pool of commentary (by professionals and professed experts) is distant and dull for me – and has been for a very long time.

Disconnected in Provincetown

Hari’s experience started with his own form of digital detoxification in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  He arrived without internet access and a “dumb phone,” capable of making calls but not connecting to the internet.  He describes his withdrawal symptoms as he gradually unwound the rules that had governed his life.  Instead of being distracted by the latest like, he’d listen to the lapping of ocean waves.

He’d disconnect from reality in a way that most of us couldn’t.  Not because we can’t survive without a connection to the internet –but because we can’t afford to leave behind our day-to-day for a month let alone the three that Hari took.  He admits that his grandmother (who raised him) and his father couldn’t possibly do what he was doing.  Their lives simply wouldn’t allow it – and to suggest it would be disrespectful.

Still, this detox was the first step to understanding what had been lost in the shuffle.  It was a way to hear the inner voices that called to social media for a sense of instant gratification from the new follower, share, or like.  It was a way to avoid the water that we’re all swimming in every day.  It teams with distractions and currents trying to pull us towards others’ aims.

The Need for Speed

For over a century, we can track the increased pace of life.  In my talks, I trace it back further.  I attach it to the way that we receive, generate, and share information.  If we look at content creation, we see the ever-increasing pace of our ability to create, copy, and distribute information.

If that weren’t enough, we expect that information isn’t just available but that’s available now – and that even pushed to us immediately (or nearly immediately).

Whether it’s mass media or personalized, individualized messages delivered to us, we live in a world that both generates more information and delivers it faster.

Moving beyond the technologies that enable our increased expectations, we can see that trends and fads move with ever-increasing speed.  Topics simply come and go at a pace unimaginable to our grandparents.  The problem is that this pace of change creates downstream effects that we didn’t anticipate.

We’ve seen the rise of misinformation and the difficulty in quelling it.  There are still people who believe the MMR vaccine causes autism – a lot of people.  The Data Detective reports that less than 50% of people believe that it doesn’t cause autism.  This is despite the retraction of the original article and that Andrew Wakefield (the lead author of the study that purported to show the link) has had his medical license revoked.  (See also Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology.)  We know that people can – and often do – “flood the zone with shit,” because it works as a strategy.  (See After the Ball for more strategies that can be used for good or evil.)

Secondarily, the onslaught of information has made it impossible to focus on any of it and to consider it deeply.  There are better techniques for managing your time that can help, but they’re like trying to put out a house fire with a dixie cup.  There are strategies for consuming faster – like speed reading – but they come at the cost of comprehension and understanding.  Your eyes can scan the lines of text faster – but your brain can’t consider what you’re reading any faster than it already is.  (Which is still about 3-4x the speed of the spoken word.)

We’re already shrinking the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth, and we’re at the limits of how we can shrink it.  (See Thinking, Fast and Slow and Sources of Power for more.)  We can, with time, develop more complex schemata (models) that allow us to more efficiently process the incoming information – but it’s context-sensitive and very time consuming.  (See Efficiency in Learning and Learning in Adulthood.)

Fragmentation and Flow

Today, multitasking is all the rage.  The ability to do multiple things at one time is seen as an essential skill for the high potential employee.  The problem is that it’s fiction.  Humans can’t multitask.  Humans can task switch quickly, but each switch takes time and increases the probability of mistakes.

As mentioned above, I still am granted large periods of flow in my world, and it’s the opposite of the fragmentation that most people experience either because they’re trying to multitask or because they’re getting interrupted.  We’ve known for decades that recovering from an interruption when you’re in flow takes ~20 minutes to recover.  If you don’t believe me, check out Peopleware – which was originally published in 1987.  It discusses the problem of recovering from an interruption to flow.

Fragmentation and flow are opposites.  Flow is focus.  Fragmentation is anti-focus.

Economic Growth Fueled on Sleep

Economists have long expected that our economic output will increase.  Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century explains that, for most of our time on the planet, our output increased by a paltry one-tenth percent per year.  Since the industrial revolution, the rate has increased substantially.  The estimated compounded per capita growth in output was 1.6% per year.  The problem, according to Hari and his sources, is that this system ran out of gas, so we started feeding it sleep.  We get less sleep, and we’ve become more sleep-deprived.  To correct this issue would cause the assumptions of the economic growth engine to unravel with untold consequences on our societies across the planet.

The failures of attention, which are the subject of Stolen Focus, are just roadkill on the road to continued progress.

Life in 280 Character Chunks

It started with the short message service (SMS).  It was a side effect of the telecommunications industry reaching level 7 of the signaling protocols.  It created space for small amounts of bandwidth for short messages.  It defined the limit as 160 characters.  This was never intended to be a primary communication channel.  When Twitter (now X) launched with 140-character message limits, it felt similar to the short messages that teens had “hacked” to provide longer messages by using a dizzying array of acronyms.  It was the human equivalent of the compression tools that had been in use on computers for decades.  Just like those compression tools needing to be present on both ends, the receiver of your message needed to decode the acronyms.  Many older adults failed.

Twitter ultimately doubled the size of the message to 280 characters, and now we expect that we can express our lives in 280-character chunks.  You can’t get deep in 280 characters – or even sets of 280 characters.  The medium limits what can be done – and it doesn’t allow for depth.

Instagram and TikTok moved us to images and movies; though they consume substantially more data transmission resources, they are snippets of lives that still can’t convey depth.  In fact, the evidence points to the idea that we’ve made people shallower.  We’ve become obsessed with our appearance.  Six pack abs and bikini lines refocus us on the surface and the temporary.  We know everyone (who doesn’t die) will age and their body shape will change.  Images are richer than 280 characters – but only in surface dimensions.

Attention Economy

While many still report that we live in an information economy, the truth is more sinister.  We don’t live in an information economy.  We live in an attention economy where the most valuable commodity is the attention that people can demand of us.  Sure, we need the information to pull the attention, but the game isn’t the information itself.

It’s like magic.  No, really.  It’s like a magic trick.  The goal is to control the attention so the audience doesn’t realize what is really going on.  Controlling the attention is what can get the audience to react with a wow – or advertisers to write big checks.

Controlling attention is a series of distractions to draw you in the direction that they want you to go.  Distractions are how they pull you to the things that they want from you.  Who are “they”?  It’s the social media companies – and anyone hoping to sell you a product or service.

Another unwanted side effect of the distractions – beyond the loss of focus – is the sense of mania it creates.  There’s always another thing to check or alert to respond to.  Click by click and tap by tap, we’re drawn into the web of mania so that we don’t even realize that we’re there.  We believe that each notification is an indication that we’re recognized, special, and important.  Having the notifications makes us feel important.

It’s Not Your Fault, but It Is Your Responsibility

It’s a bait and switch maneuver.  When the problem becomes undeniable, you don’t accept responsibility for it, you transfer the responsibility to the consumer.  Smoking isn’t about addictive chemicals, it’s about your lack of self-control.  The obesity epidemic isn’t about portion sizes and calorie counts.  It’s about your inability to control your desires – at least, that’s what they want you to believe.  The truth is that the forces are aligned to make it hard for you to succeed.  Some can do it – but only through unrealistic forces of willpower and determination.

While it’s not fair for someone to have to fight these forces, it is what is required.  Just like an injury that isn’t your fault – like a broken bone – you must heal yourself.  Who or what caused the problem doesn’t matter after it happens.  It only matters when we want to help others not experience the same injury.  That’s why even if the world is structured in ways that make it hard to focus, we must fight back for our individual lives – and band together to change the forces that make it hard for all of us to focus.

Play in Genes

There’s a fair amount of work that’s been done to try to determine what percentage of our traits and behaviors are genetically driven.  This research is almost exclusively done with twin studies, a strategy that has limitations.  In Judith Rich Harris’ works about how children turn out differently, No Two Alike and The Nurture Assumption, she shares that the findings are tentative – and that the drivers are somewhere in the 40-50% range.  Hari and his sources suggest that the results may be lower when additional factors are taken into account.  SNP (Single Nucleotide polymorphism) heritability studies are finding that some of what we assumed were genetic traits are likely attributable to the increase in similarity in the way that identical siblings are treated rather than their genetic factors.

Genes, it turns out, may be less impactful than providing the right environment for growth to children when they need it.  We know that there are regions of the brain that need stimulation at specific periods of time, and, if deprived of this input, they won’t develop correctly.  We also know that animals play.  They learn by the low-risk situations created by play.  (See Play and also The Anxious Generation.)  Despite both general and specific information about our needs as humans to learn through play, we’ve all but deprived our children of play via recess at school and free play.

We’ve become more fearful and protective of our children – even if the statistics show that we’re safer now than at almost any time since the 1950s.  Both children and adults are safer since the violent crime peak in the early 1990s – but we don’t behave that way.  (See The Anxious Generation for more on safety vs. perception.)

We’re being overprotective, but we don’t want to find our loved ones suffering – including from Stolen Focus.

Book Review-The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves

We like to believe that we’re rational creatures, but we’re not.  In The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves, Dan Ariely explains what we know about managing our dishonesty in ways that allows us to still believe we’re good, honest people.  This continues on the work in Predictably Irrational.  It follows in the line of Daniel Kahneman’s work in Thinking, Fast and Slow and the work of Robert Cialdini in Pre-Suasion and Influence.

Economics and Criminal Justice

Economics isn’t the study of money.  Likewise, criminal justice isn’t really the study of crime.  Both are really about understanding human behavior.  Economics is human behavior related to money and criminal justice is about human behavior related to crime.

The strict economic model fails to explain why, in the ultimatum game, people would elect to get nothing – as long as they can ensure the other participant gets nothing as well.  (See The Evolution of Cooperation, The Selfish Gene, SuperCooperators, and Does Altruism Exist? for more on why this might develop and The Righteous Mind for how justice is a foundation of morality.)  The ways that we’re willing to accept a cost to ourselves breaks that standard self-interest economic model.

There’s a similarly naive model called the Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC).  It posits a cost-benefit analysis that includes the probability of getting caught and the degree of penalty placed against the backdrop of the value of the crime.  The problem is that we know this doesn’t work.  There isn’t a cost-benefit analysis in effect.

To understand why this isn’t true, consider the work of Gary Klein with firefighters and the realization that they don’t make decisions based on some sort of normal, numeric approach to the problem.  Instead, they use recognition-primed decisions to simulate what’s happening and make a working solution.  (See Sources of Power.)  To believe that we make rational decisions based on the impact of getting caught ignores what we learned about D.A.R.E. (see Unsafe at Any Speed) and Scared Straight! (see Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology) being potentially harmful.

What Leads to Cheating

In The Ethics of Encouraging Dishonesty, I explained some of the things that we know about what causes more cheating.  Ariely expands this to explain how decreasing the chances of getting caught – by eliminating the checks and disconnecting the cheating from direct financial reward – will increase cheating.  However, he also reports curious responses to testing.

One would assume if the reward were higher, there would be more cheating.  However, that’s not what Ariely found.  He found that the degree of cheating went down when the reward went up.  The proposed reason is that people need to feel like they’re honest, so their cheating has to be considered small – by them.  The larger the reward, the harder it becomes to maintain this perspective.

Also, Ariely found that if someone were cheating to help someone else – i.e. they’re partners, and the cheating will help the other person as well – that cheating increased.  Obviously, neither of these results make sense when we evaluate the cheating from a rational model – but they were the results of the testing.

The Cashless Society

Ariely expresses some concern that the move to a cashless society may increase cheating; in his research, when there was an intermediary to money, the cheating increased.  If tokens were exchanged for money, they were seen as somehow not the same as cheating for the money directly.  Certainly, the financial scandals that we’ve seen from organizations (see Moral Disengagement) and the home loan crisis (see The Halo Effect) support Ariely’s concerns.

Grandmother Mortality

Mike Adams is concerned for your grandma while you’re going to college.  He collected data over the years and ultimately demonstrated that grandmothers are ten times more likely to die before a midterm and nineteen times more likely to die before a final exam.  The odds are even worse if the college goer is not doing well.  Students who are failing a class are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother when compared to non-failing students.

His work is intended to highlight the lying that goes on – and how, while under pressure, students are more likely to make the grandmother death claim.  The obvious sampling error is that Adams data was sourced from student communications – which almost always came with a request for an accommodation.  If grandma dies at a time when the student doesn’t need an accommodation, he wouldn’t get the note.

Still, it might be worth some added protection for grandma if she has a grandchild that’s struggling in their college coursework.

Self-Signaling

The way that we signal ourselves matters.  If you think that you’re wearing genuine designer clothing and accessories, you’ll behave differently than if you believe you’re wearing a knockoff.  It’s not uncommon to find people selling knockoffs of designer clothing and accessories in large cities across the world.  I’ve personally seen them in New York and San Francisco.

The argument for those who buy the knockoffs is that they’re not harming anyone because they can’t afford – and therefore would never buy – the real thing.  This ignores the fact that part of the reason for the high price is exclusivity – something the knockoffs deteriorate.  However, the real problem isn’t the knockoff itself even when considering the brand effects.  The real problem is that it makes you more likely to cheat overall.

Rationalization

In Jonathan Haidt’s view, our consciousness is like a press secretary explaining our behaviors post-hoc.  (See The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis.)  That’s make sense when you consider that Richard Nisbett and Tim Wilson laid out four identical stockings and then asked people which ones they liked better.  People made up lots of reasons why they liked one pair over the other – despite the fact they were identical.

In a set of experiments, Michael Gazzaniga studied patients whose corpus callosum was severed.  He found they’d make up stories when shown images in their left eye (processed in the right side of their brain).  The left side of the brain initiated the story creation process and fabricated a post-hoc reason for behaviors triggered by the right side of the brain.  (See The Blank Slate, Noise, and Incognito.)

Gangs

Ariely states, “The act of inviting our friends to join in can help us justify our own questionable behavior.”  This squares with the research of Albert Cohen in Delinquent Boys and Cas Sunstein in Going to Extremes.  The presence of others tends to reinforce and amplify our behavior choices.

Essay Mills and Generative AI

At the time of Ariely’s writing, academia was concerned about the introduction of essay mills.  For a few hundred dollars, one could ask for a paper to be written about basically any topic.  Ariely tested this process by asking for a 12-page paper on the topic of dishonesty.  Ariely’s team paid a few places between $150 and $216 and the results weren’t impressive – such that they decided they weren’t a concern for academia at the time.

Today’s concern is the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in the form of large language models.  I fed a slightly modified prompt from Ariely’s original instructions (as recorded in the book) to Bing’s Chat function (based on GPT-4) and received a response that it couldn’t help – but it proceeded to provide a quite useful outline.  I then provided the same prompt to Microsoft Word’s Copilot function.  The result was a 10-page paper – with a few problems.

On the first attempt, it failed to generate, ironically after displaying a reference to The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.  The second attempt, which generated the 10-page paper, also failed to get the references right.  It didn’t make them Word references, and it didn’t supply a complete reference for Leon Festinger’s 1957 title, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.  It also generated a reference to Albert Bandura’s work on moral disengagement – but the specific reference wasn’t relevant to the topic.  (However, Bandura’s Moral Disengagement might have been.)

That being said, academic institutions have a valid reason to be concerned about the degree to which they can measure a student’s understanding based on papers.  GenAI solutions can take a lot of the burden off and leave it to the student to do a bit of cleanup instead of a lot of writing.

Congo Is Watching

In the 1995 movie, Congo, the viewer is exposed to the idea that gorillas were watching as other gorillas were mining diamonds.  The idea that someone is watching matters for more than diamond mining.  It matters for honor boxes.  That’s what Ariely and colleagues found as they alternated pictures above an honor box setup between flowers and eyes.  When the pictures of eyes were up, the honor box contained three times more money.

We don’t have to have real people watching us – we just need to be reminded that we could be watched to trigger our honest behavior.  Maybe if you believe you’re being watched, you’ll find The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.

Book Review-Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology

There’s a lot of research that has been done on cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology is a guide to evaluate the research and what we’ve learned over the 60+ years since it was first proposed.  (See A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance for Leon Festinger’s original work.)  The perspective of the editor is to provide differing points of view to allow readers to draw their own conclusions.  Contrast this a bit with Joel Cooper’s views in Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory, which doesn’t include criticisms of his proposed revisions to the model – some of which are relatively serious concerns.

The Cases

It’s convenient to speak of cognitive dissonance as a single unified theory as Festinger originally formulated it.  However, since his initial formulation, several special cases have appeared:

• Free-Choice – People reevaluate their choices after making them, and often show a greater preference for the choice they’ve chosen.
• Belief-Disconfirmation – Rather than changing a belief that has been contradicted by the evidence, a person works hard to protect that belief.
• Effort Justification – The more effort a person puts into something, the more likely they are to like it.
• Induced (Forced) Compliance – One can justify their behavior by claiming that their compliance was forced, thereby eliminating the dissonance between their actions and their beliefs.

The Theories

There are several variations of the theory that have emerged as well:

• Self-Perception – Proposed by Daryl Bem, this revision states that people form their attitudes from their behavior. Bem proposed that people cannot access their mood and cognition to develop their attitudes.
• Impression Management – The intersection of Erving Goffman’s work (see Stigma) on impression management and cognitive dissonance, this theory proposes that the dissonance is due to the impact on our ability to manage the impression of others about us.
• Self-Affirmation – People want to affirm themselves.
• Self-Consistency – People want their experiences to be consistent with their self-view.
• Aversive-Consequences – People experience distress when their choices lead to adverse consequences. This is Joel Cooper’s perspective as fully described in Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory.

Misattribution

One of the ways that developing cognitive dissonance can go awry is if the person has another way to attribute their discomfort.  If they believe that a situation is inherently discomforting, then they may misattribute the dissonance created by their conflicting cognitions to the situation.  This “resolves” the dissonance, but only in a short-term way, as it’s likely the discrepancy will arise again in different circumstances.

When trying to make people aware of their inconsistencies, it’s important not to give them an easy “out.”  If you do, they make take that easy exit and neutralize the power the dissonance has to help them change.

The Role of Commitment

The power of dissonance comes from the difference between ideas and the degree to which those ideas are difficult to move.  Cognitions, which are not difficult to move, will not arouse much dissonance, because the cognition will be changed before it registers much dissonance.  The commitment to the ideas can be that they’ve communicated their beliefs to others (see Change or Die) or that it seems fundamental to who they are.

Lack of Choice

Another danger when trying to rely on the effects of cognitive dissonance for behavior change is the risk that you may accidentally trigger a reinforcement effect.  Cognitive dissonance only occurs when the person believes that they have a choice.  If they feel that they are directly or indirectly being coerced into a behavior, they’ll generate no dissonance.  Instead, there may be a reinforcement of their opposition to the behavior.

The tricky bit is visible when we look at some of the classic experiments in psychology which failed to replicate.  Walter Michel’s marshmallow test hasn’t replicated well.  (See The Marshmallow Test for the core experiment.)  Maybe there’s something to the fact that the nursery was connected to Stanford.  Asch has said that his conformity effect may have been a sign of the times.  (See The Upswing for more.)  The experiments of Stanley Milgram on people’s willingness to inflict seemingly lethal electrocution were powerful on the Yale campus (even in an unimportant basement room) but failed to replicate when moved down the street to a strip mall.  (See The Lucifer Effect and Moral Disengagement for more on these experiments.)  Even the Stanford Prison Experiment performed by Phillip Zimbardo has controversy about the degree to which Zimbardo coached the bad behavior he wanted.

What these have in common is a variable (which wasn’t replicable) that subtly influenced the results and therefore it made their experiments not replicate.  The introduction of a lab coat, title, or something about the environment led people to believe that they didn’t have a choice – or that led them to a different choice.

Justification for Behaviors

At the time, it was heretical.  Classic learning theory said that the stronger the reinforcement, the greater the learning.  Economists predicted that if you gave people $20, they’d change their behavior more than if you gave them $1.  Greater rewards led to greater results, but cognitive dissonance predicted something else.  Cognitive dissonance predicted that people would use the $20 they got as justification for their behavior.  It was enough to make most people decide they weren’t doing the behavior – they were earning money.

Those who received the paltry offering couldn’t often complete the mental gymnastics to believe they didn’t do it of their own accord.  The result was greater cognitive dissonance and therefore greater long-term behavior change.  This counter-intuitive hypothesis was confirmed.  People who were offered little for a variety of behaviors seemed to have more dissonance and more attitude and behavior changes.

Another pitfall that we have when using cognitive dissonance to motivate change is that if we offer too much in the way of incentives, we’ll break the effect.  This is like Edward Deci’s observation that explicit rewards often break intrinsic rewards.  (See Why We Do What We Do.)

Organizing Stories

The work of James Pennebaker is clear that allowing people to write down their stories has a positive effect on their ability to process their trauma.  (See Opening Up.)  Lisa Feldman Barrett speaks of her own challenges with decoding what she was feeling in How Emotions Are Made – including how she confused illness with love.  What this says is that our grasp of how we feel and what our body is doing is more tenuous than we’d like to believe.

When people are asked about their feelings before giving them a chance to build a narrative, we see amplification of feelings – and distorted perceptions.  That is to say that if we want the effects of cognitive dissonance to work in the right direction, we have to create space for people to process their experiences into their autobiography before asking them about their feelings.

Discrepancies Without Consequences

As was mentioned earlier, Joel Cooper proposed a revision that has cognitive dissonance only occurring when there’s a negative outcome.  The outcome didn’t need to be predictable, only foreseeable.  The requirement for free choice remains in Cooper’s revision.  The real challenge to this is where cognitive dissonance effects seem to occur when there are no discernable consequences.

While this is problematic for Cooper’s theory, it’s important to remember that all models are wrong – though some are useful.  Cooper’s revision captures a non-trivial percentage of the space of cognitive dissonance and provides a useful thought framework for trying to trigger cognitive dissonance.  It may be that it is wrong, as the evidence implies, but it may still be a good framework for creating action.

Belief Intensification

What if, rather than changing beliefs to match the reality that you’ve observed, your beliefs morph into a more virulent and intense form?  That’s what seems to happen when cults that make predictions are confronted with the reality that their predictions are wrong.  Their beliefs become even more extreme.  The dates move, and the reasoning becomes more complex.

Sometimes, people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their resolve that they’re right –and that can be problematic if your goal is to change their perspectives.

Weak and Strong Reinforcement

The forces that drive cognitive dissonance to change are like the slingshot effect that NASA uses to fling satellites into outer space.  The slingshot effect works because of the proximity of the satellite to the source of gravity.  It’s the proximity that does the work.  Similarly, it’s the degree to which two options are of equal strength that powers the cognitive dissonance-driven change.  As a result, the more even the options are, the more they’ll be driven apart by cognitive dissonance.

Sometimes, the learning behaviors that should be more highly coupled to bigger rewards show the reverse results with reinforcement working better when the reward is small.  Even pigeons seem to favor the treats that require more work.

Forced Reevaluation

In the end, dissonance forces the reevaluation of beliefs.  This is something that we rarely do as humans.  While we know that the Earth isn’t flat and it’s rotating, we speak of sunrise as if the sun is rising above a flat earth.  While this is a simple linguistic aspect of our world, it surfaces a deeper awareness that the things we learned as children – or that our ancestors learned as children – are rarely tested.  The need for consistency and the awareness of this inconsistency can force us to reevaluate our beliefs in ways that allow us to more accurately represent reality in our minds.

Many speak of meditation and downtime to allow for reevaluating life’s priorities, but nothing has a focusing effect like knowing that two beliefs that you hold dear are utterly incompatible.

Dissonance Reduction Strategies

As we’ve seen above, there is an alternative to resolving the discrepancy.  Here are some of those alternatives:

• Ignore – Simply failing to recognize the discordant belief.
• Discount – Providing a reason why the belief isn’t that important.
• Provide Alternate Explanations – Providing alternative explanations that don’t require the beliefs to be in conflict.
• Exception to the Rule – Viewing the data as a fluke or exception, thereby discounting it or limiting the degree to which is should be considered discordant.
• Blame – Blame someone else so that the results can be explained away without internally discordant beliefs.
• Numbing (e.g. alcohol) – Temporarily delaying awareness by numbing, often but not exclusively through alcohol or drugs. Binge-watching television, surfing the internet, and chronic business can all be forms of numbing.

Protecting Beliefs

Often, we will protect our beliefs so that we don’t realize conflicting beliefs, or we process them in ways that prevent falsification of our cherished beliefs.  Some of the strategies for protecting our beliefs are:

• avoiding exposure to such information,
• reducing negative feelings arising from inconsistency,
• actively discounting the inconsistent information,
• generating alternative explanations for the contradictory information,
• deeming it as an exception to the rule, or
• reinterpreting the status of one’s beliefs in a manner that makes them unfalsifiable.

Cognitive Dissonance Comes from Sense Making

As humans, we’re constantly trying to make sense of the world around us.  (See The Righteous Mind.)  We experience cognitive dissonance, because we can’t find a way to represent reality to ourselves.  We’re forced to find new ways to think and new beliefs to form.  Maybe it’s time to make sense of Cognitive Dissonance.

Book Review-Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory

We do not like inconsistency.  That’s the fundamental driver behind Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory.  Joel Cooper provides appropriate nods to Leon Festinger – and those he studied with.  (See A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Festinger’s book, for his direct perspective.)  Cooper’s perspective is one that isn’t fully embraced across all the research on cognitive dissonance.  However, there is some research supporting his perspectives and lots of confusing results.  Cooper does a good job of summarizing what we’ve learned and acknowledging some of the challenges in the results we’ve seen.

Best Rewards

One of the great advancements that was brought forth by cognitive dissonance is a push back against classical operant conditioning, which suggests that the greater the reward, the better the learning.  What cognitive dissonance research discovered was that smaller rewards actually create a bigger change in behavior.  This counter-intuitive answer changed the way that people thought about learning.  If there’s too big a reward, the change is minimal.  This is similar to Deci’s discovery that external rewards break intrinsic rewards.  (See Why We Do What We Do.)  What we “knew” about motivation and how to change behaviors was broken by the reality: experiments proved that classic behavioral modification therapy couldn’t explain these results.

It’s described as “inverse linear relationship between incentive magnitude and attitude change.”  In short, the larger the reward, the smaller the change.  It mattered.

Suffering

Another curious finding appeared with connections to cognitive dissonance.  The greater the struggle to obtain something – particularly membership in a group – the more people liked the achievement.  The groups were better, and the awards were more meaningful.  All of this served to minimize the occasional torture that was endured to get there.  Hazing rituals are officially forbidden for Greek organizations (fraternities and sororities), yet there are still news stories about how these rituals have gone awry and people are injured.  Members of these organizations frequently stand by these rituals that they themselves endured.

Classical theories of change and conditioning cannot explain the transformation from pain and self-questioning to assurance that these goals were worth the effort.  However, cognitive dissonance posits that the gap between the memory of the hard work and the reality of the result must be resolved.  We have to think the work was worth it to address the effort we put in.

Threats and Punishment

Every parent wants to know how to teach their children right from wrong.  They want to shape their behaviors in ways that lead to productive and happy adults.  Here, cognitive dissonance and the research that tested the theory have another surprising suggestion.  Make the threats and consequences mild rather than severe.  When the threats are mild, the child can believe that the desired behavior was their idea, and cognitive dissonance can slowly but steadily change their attitudes and motivations in the desired direction.

Practically, it means offering a subtle reprimand for eating candy before dinner rather than an explosion.  The severe threat or punishment absolves the systems that drive cognitive dissonance from their need to engage.

Disengagement

Albert Bandura wrote a guide for how to bypass some of our built-in morality.  In Moral Disengagement, he explains the mechanisms that would separate people from their morality with striking regularity.  They essentially come down to ways that a person doesn’t need to accept responsibility – or complete responsibility – for their actions.  Der Führer ordered me, so it wasn’t really my decision.  Cognitive dissonance faces the same forces that disable its power for resolving inconsistencies in our lives.

By being able to claim that the decision wasn’t ours, or that we had no choice, cognitive dissonance is disabled and rendered helpless.  That’s why it’s important to consider how we may be subtly or overtly creating “outs” for people when we’re trying to leverage cognitive dissonance for positive change.  Many research efforts have been undone by subtle coercion that the researcher didn’t intend.

Learning

Not every result in the study of cognitive dissonance has yielded clear results – even those where the confounding problem of coercion has been eliminated.  One such set of experiments is around the impact of dissonance on learning.  The theory – coupled with learning theory – predicted that simple learning should be enhanced by cognitive dissonance while complex learning should be inhibited.

Conceptually, simple learning is enhanced by motivators.  Malcolm Knowles et al. explain the forces that drive learning in adults in The Adult Learner, and one of those factors is the need to know.  Cognitive dissonance can provide that reason.  This amplification of simple learning was what the research found.

However, contrary to what the coupling of cognitive dissonance and learning theory would predict, complex learning tasks weren’t inhibited.  The distinction between simple and complex learning may seem abstract, but the line is drawn, because we’ve recognized that stress and fear inhibit complex learning.  There are many perspectives and theories about the gap between the two.  Often, we’re reminded of the apparent division between lower-level, implicit types of learning from the more complex, prefrontal cortex types of learning.  Kahneman uses the analogy of System 1 and System 2 in Thinking, Fast and Slow, and the model holds up for learning.

The question remains why researchers didn’t see a reduction of complex learning in scenarios of cognitive dissonance.  My answer is that cognitive dissonance is a different kind of stressor that’s not about short-term survival and therefore may influence learning differently.  Researchers will argue that the mechanisms they use for stress are often completely arbitrary and fake, but they still seem to have impact.  A classic approach is to create a time pressure either in the form of instruction or as an incentive for time-based performance.

Complicating the situation is that other research results indicated precisely the opposite – with no effect on simple learning and an inhibitory impact on complex learning.  Clearly, the forces at play in the intersection of cognitive dissonance and learning are nuanced.  While I’m convinced that simple learning is encouraged with dissonance with no ill effects for complex learning, that may not universally be the case.

Fear

In Emotion and Adaptation, Richard Lazarus explains fear as a cognition.  He explains the evaluation process and how that process works.  Ultimately, he proposes that we evaluate a situation to determine the degree of appropriate fear.  Cooper recounts research by Schachter and Singer, which proposed that fear is a label we can apply to arousal.  In other words, we have a biological, unconscious response to something, and we label that arousal with the word fear.

This explains a curious result of research, where cognitive dissonance’s impact was disabled when participants were provided with an alternative explanation for the arousal that dissonance created.  When injected with a placebo and told of expected anxiety, participants attributed their dissonance arousal to the drug – and then failed to change their attitudes to resolve the inconsistency of thought.

This finding shows us that we need to be careful to not provide an excuse for the arousal that cognitive dissonance provides lest we nullify its effect on changing attitudes.

Curiously, it was discovered that the valence of arousal could be experimentally manipulated.  Participants in research could be encouraged to lean towards excitement or anxiety with the subtle manipulation of prompts and responses.  This suggests that the way people interpret cognitive dissonance may be subjective.

Amphetamine

When the placebo mentioned above was changed to an amphetamine, a stimulant, the results changed.  In the placebo research, people attributed their arousal to the drug and therefore didn’t change.  However, when given an amphetamine, people in every group showed more attitude change.  One potential explanation for this is the arousal was of greater magnitude and therefore demanded a greater response.  Even low-choice participants, who could have claimed that they didn’t have to address their behavior discrepancy because they weren’t given options, changed.

Perhaps the low-choice condition failed to generate arousal and therefore there was no need to change, but the addition of amphetamine caused an arousal that needed to be addressed.

Commitment

Another interesting factor at play in cognitive dissonance is the degree to which someone commits to the behavior.  People with stronger commitments seem to have greater moves towards consistency.  Commitment is a bit of an odd word, because it implies an internal state, but that state can be driven externally.  Write an essay that’s destroyed afterwards, and the commitment is low – even if you passionately believe in what you’ve written.  Write it and share it to a disinterested party, and it goes up slightly.  Write it and have it shared with a decision-maker, and it goes up again.  Deliver a public speech, where we believe the audience can be persuaded, and commitment soars.

The greater the commitment to the position, the greater the forces at play and the more attitude or behavior adjustment we’d expect to see from the forces of cognitive dissonance.

It’s important to note that the effect seems to be eliminated if the person or people we’re speaking with seem to be unmoved or unmovable.  If we believe that our counter-attitudinal statements were rejected, no attitude change occurs.  Our perceptions of efficacy matter.

Unwanted Consequences

The major revision to cognitive dissonance proposed by Cooper and his colleagues is the idea that cognitive dissonance requires a consequence, and it only appears when that consequence was foreseeable.  Foreseeable is a standard less than predictable; it’s only reasonably possible.  (See The Suicide Lawyers.)  Even if there’s a 10% chance that something can come as a result of a behavior, it may be sufficiently foreseeable and therefore something that causes cognitive dissonance.

While this perspective is partially supported, it limits the scope of cognitive dissonance and requires us to stretch the limits of consequences to their maximum extreme.  We’ve got to believe that the consequences can be very small – like someone forming a negative impression of us.

As a framework for story telling and converting a desire to change into a framework for action, it is useful.  You simply expose someone to the potential negative consequence as a result of their actions and then you allow those consequences to happen.  This should be sufficient to cause an attitude shift – presuming that none of the ways that cognitive dissonance can be subverted are present.

Personal Responsible

One of the predecessors, then, that comes as a part of this proposed revision is that for a person to experience cognitive dissonance, they must accept some level of responsibility for their action having caused the negative consequences.  A failure to take personal responsibility because of one of the previously discussed ways or other, less common ways eliminates the need to address the dissonance – because they won’t experience any.  When perceived as random events, there is no need for someone to modify their beliefs or behaviors.

Self-Consistency and Self-Affirmation

Two other proposed revisions to Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory are a theory of self-consistency and a theory of self-affirmation.  Self-consistency says that we strive to resolve how our behaviors don’t match our values.  Self-affirmation proposes that our attitudes and behaviors should be self-affirming (positive).  Both revisions have mixed but ultimately negative evidence.

Self-consistency struggles with the challenge of articulating a single belief system for an individual.  As Reiss’ work in both Who Am I? and The Normal Personality and the work of Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind point out, our behavior is driven by a set of conflicting values and fundamental beliefs that we must constantly reconcile.  This means it’s hard to believe that people are recognizing their inconsistency.

Self-affirmation struggles when we realize that affirmation may be discordant with how a person feels and therefore may make the inconsistency and discrepancy worse rather than better.  (See Compassion and Self-Hate.)  Fundamental structural problems like this, in addition to the evidence, has made it difficult for either of these revisions to the theory of cognitive dissonance to be accepted.

Distraction

While not a permanent strategy, it is possible to defer processing of cognitive dissonance by means of distraction.  This can be either intentional, purposeful distraction, or by simply being too busy to take a step back and reflect.  Dangerous conditions can occur where people are too busy to recognize dissonance for long periods of time: when they suddenly have time, they end up processing all of the dissonance at once – with sometimes tragic results.

We’ve all heard stories of the people who take a vacation and suddenly have an identity crisis.

Comparing Self vs. Other

One of the challenges in developing an irrefutable theory for cognitive dissonance is that it’s an internal, mental process that is therefore not subject to direct observation.  There are simple differences in how you evaluate yourself – whether you use a progress milestone like a growth mindset (see Mindset), or you judge yourself against those around you.  The research on happiness seems to imply that people always want more than their peers.  They want 10% more than they’re currently making – but more than that, they’re also looking to do better than their peer group.  (See Thinking, Fast and Slow and The Righteous Mind.)

Group Salience

Cognitive dissonance is also influenced by forces beyond the individual.  Their group memberships and the social norms created as a part of those groups can have a profound impact on cognitive dissonance – if they’re primed.  In Influence, Robert Cialdini explains how priming people to see themselves a particular way or as a part of a particular group dramatically changes the degree to which they’ll behave in ways that are consistent with their prior statement or with the perceived preferences of the group.

If you want people to behave more like a group, make sure that that group is more salient in their minds while they’re making the decision.

Public Separation

Bill Clinton was known as the Teflon president, because the scandals never seemed to stick to him.  Even when he had to admit to his extra-presidential interactions with Monica Lewinsky, his approval ratings climbed.  Though most admitted that they didn’t approve of his actions, they still approved of him as a president.  This odd response makes sense when people disconnected his personal ethics from what they perceived to be the skills necessary to run the country.

These odd pathways can confound attempts to predict what effect – if any – cognitive dissonance will have.

All Theories Are Wrong

George Box, an economist, said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”  This statement captures the core of the discussions about cognitive dissonance and proposed revisions.  The original model has its limitations, and the revisions attempt to get at resolving them.  Ultimately, we need to remember that though Cognitive Dissonance may be wrong, it probably is useful.

Book Review-A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

It’s a classic.  A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance lays out Leon Festinger’s theory about how and why we change our attitudes.  More than 25 of the books that I’ve reviewed contain a direct reference to “cognitive dissonance.”  It underlies theories of change at personal, organizational, and societal levels.  The fundamental core is simply that individuals strive for consistency in themselves.  They want their behaviors to match their values and their values to match their words.  From this simple premise, research has tried to explain the conditions under which we’ll change to reduce discrepancies.

Competing Cognitions

Festinger’s word for inconsistency is “dissonance.”  Dissonance, he argues, is an unpleasant state for humans; as a result, we’d take actions to reduce the dissonance.  The strategy would depend on the cognitions in conflict.  He describes cognitions as congruent or dissonant with one another and can be placed on a scale from important to unimportant.  He proposes that only important cognitions in dissonance with one another would provide sufficient drive for change.

There are several things that can make thoughts incongruent (dissonant) to one another.

1. Logical Inconsistency – Logically, the two thoughts cannot both be true.
2. Cultural Mores – The culture may not accept our thoughts.
3. Specific Encapsulation – Specific thoughts may be included within generic thoughts. I mentioned in my review of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) that Al Campanis considered Jackie Robinson a good man and a great baseball player – and yet would have been seen as a racist today.
4. Past Experience – The way that we’ve acted is inconsistent with who we want to be.

Resolving Dissonance

The degree of dissonance is influenced by the number of related cognitions.  Cognitions don’t exist in isolation.  There are many related thoughts and beliefs.  When we experience dissonance, we experience it as the gap between clusters of thoughts.  The greater the number of thoughts and the greater their importance to us, the more likely we will experience dissonance – and change.

Festinger proposes that we’d only move one of the dissonant thoughts (or block of thoughts) to resolve the dissonance.  We’d move whichever seemed easier.  However, changing an opinion isn’t the only approach that we have to resolving the discrepancy.

The truth is that we can change the importance of the cognitions.  For instance, if we see ourselves as a generous person, and we walked past the panhandler without making eye contact, we may decide that not being generous in that situation doesn’t mean we’re not generous – we can decide that they weren’t really in need.  Allowing us to deemphasize our behavior and reduce the pressure of the dissonance.

A different approach is to simply forget.  We know that the more salient things are in our attention, the greater we experience discomfort associated with dissonance.  By reducing our ability to recall the situation – by forgetting – we reduce the dissonance and discomfort we feel – and thus reduce the pressure to change.

The other way to resolve the dissonance, the one that makes it so interesting, is to make a change.  Change or Die explains how difficult it is to create change in an individual: 80% of people don’t change their behaviors after a heart attack, and we have 66% recidivism rate after two years.  (Recidivism refers to previously incarcerated people being convicted again.)  So, while the forces of cognitive dissonance can be powerful, they’re only valuable when harnessed properly.

Why We Don’t Change

With a powerful psychological force driving us towards consistency, why don’t we change our inconsistent beliefs?  The first reason is because once you believe something, it’s hard to “unbelieve” it.  It’s like trying to not think about white bears – it’s not possible.  (See White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts.)  If we believe that grass is green, it’s hard to not see the grass as green.

Another factor is the “freezing factor.”  Kurt Lewin proposed that change required unfreezing, changing, and freezing the change.  That is, there’s a certain inertia around the way we do things today.  To accomplish change, we must break through this inertia, make our change, and ultimately recreate inertia around the new, changed, behaviors.  (See Lewin’s change model for more about this change process.)  Following the model, another reason we don’t change is because the freezing effect is overly powerful over time.  Aspects of cognitive dissonance reinforce the decisions that were made and approaches that are in use by amplifying their benefits or minimizing the benefits of the alternatives.

The mere fact that we’ve made a decision creates dissonance at some level.  For everything we’ve decided, we’ve said no to something else, whether directly or indirectly, because of a limitation of resources.  The degree of dissonance seems to increase substantially the more similar the weight and utility of the options are.  The closer the options are, the greater cognitive dissonance will cause them to spread.

Cognitive Disengagement

It is, however, possible to disable the power of cognitive dissonance.  Simply removing the perception of choice eliminates the power of cognitive dissonance to help reinforce the change.  A judge orders a person to attend a rehabilitation program.  The result is the person feels forced, and their perceptions of their abuse of a substance is likely to change less than had they made the choice on their own.  But more importantly, it’s not the degree of coercion that matters, it’s the perception of it.

“But there really wasn’t a choice” is a phrase that indicates the person either sees the decision as not close, and thus doesn’t induce cognitive dissonance, or outside of their control, which also neutralizes any cognitive dissonance forces.  Free choice remains an essential part of the formula for leveraging the power of cognitive dissonance.

Memory

We forget that memory is subject to revision.  We ignore the fact that memories aren’t like film, nor are they immutable.  In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to support the fact that our memories are reconstructed in the moment and incorporate details from our current attitude and mood that weren’t in the original memory.  One of the techniques used to eliminate dissonance is to adjust our historical memories to support our current world view.  For instance, if we previously had seriously considered alternatives to the car we purchased, our decision will reduce the degree to which we can recall having seriously considered those alternatives.

Our memories are wiped clean from our ability to recall them, they’re deemphasized in importance, or we simply rewrite the narrative of the memories to comply with our overall decision.

Mere Ownership

There’s a measurable effect that owning something has on the degree to which we’ll like it.  Barry Swartz shared this in The Paradox of Choice.  However, Festinger explains that the effect, while measurable, isn’t particularly strong.  That is, the ownership effect is something that’s real, but it doesn’t seem to sway our opinions that much.  There are a number of other smaller biases and motivators that are discussed in Influence and Pre-Suasion.  While individually they may not have much impact, collectively they may be a way to motivate change.

Just Enough

There’s a bias in trying to generate change that we should overwhelm the target with reasons why change is the right answer.  It requires a lot of energy and is therefore exhausting.  What cognitive dissonance proposes is that we should provide just enough motivation.  Overwhelming them with evidence is, on the surface, the right answer, but if any of our evidence cracks or is invalidated, the whole commitment can crumble.  If we can find ways to create difficult decisions that demonstrate that there is choice, we can leverage the power of cognitive dissonance to anchor the change – just like Lewin recommended.  (See Resolving Social Conflicts and Field Theory in Social Science.)

Loose Lips Sink Ships

During World War II, there was concern that individual information held by individuals could be assembled into useful information.  The result was a campaign to discourage people speaking about what they did know that might be assembled into useful information.  The problem was the campaign wasn’t particularly effective, and research was done on how people viewed the information that they had.

They didn’t think that mentioning their child had moved from one base to another useful.  Nor did they believe that indicating an order or a shipment of some material could be useful.  However, this is exactly the kind of information the campaign was designed to prevent being shared.  Pamphlets were generated and approaches attempted.  The result was that most people didn’t change their perceptions of whether they had information to keep secret.

The problem, in this case, is that there was no cognitive dissonance, because the idea couldn’t be generated that individuals did have information that they shouldn’t discuss openly.  The desire to be friendly couldn’t be brought into conflict with the need to protect our interests.

Discounting the Individual

One of the ways that we resolve dissonance is the internal equivalent of shoot the messenger.  We discount the information by invalidating the person who delivered the message.  This is a logical fallacy but one we trick ourselves into none the less.  This is one of the drivers for why we are all Going to Extremes.

Reality

Ultimately, one expects that reality will change people to be more in line with what they experience.  However, reality’s power to change beliefs of people is limited.  There is no end to the capacity of the human mind to come up with theories for an experience.  Geocentricism required complex corrections to account for the fact that it was fundamentally wrong, but it didn’t stop people from believing it – vehemently.  Reality was the same.  It was sending clear messages, and these messages were being interpreted incorrectly.

Science has a long history of scientists who believe things that have been long disproven.  Despite clear evidence, some people remain unmoved.

Immovable Beliefs

A portion of Japanese nationals who requested repatriation during World War II were held in camps and ultimately shipped back to Japan.  Despite being told repeatedly that the US had won the war, they returned on the ships hoping to hear the “truth” that Japan had conquered the US.  These beliefs persisted even after they landed and were told by Japanese nationals of the devastation and the surrender.

Similarly, numerous cults have made prophesies about the end of the world.  Their dates come and go, and instead of accepting that the prophecy was false, they invent elaborate stories about how they were wrong about the date – or how their faithfulness has saved the world.  So, while reality can be a powerful force, it’s not an all powerful force that can combat all delusion.  Sometimes, we need to recognize that we can’t get everyone into the conflict position required to recognize the power of A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.