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Book Review-The Quest for Identity

What is it like for an entire country to lose its identity?  That’s what The Quest for Identity is about.  It speaks of the identity of America in the middle of the 20th century.  The book documents a shift from one of personal responsibility and accountability to something else.  It makes sense, as Tom Brokaw wrote about The Greatest Generation – the one that Chuck Underwood called the G.I. Generation in America’s Generations.  Somehow, their focus made it easier for them to find themselves.  That is to say that they had the same struggles in identity formation – but it didn’t seem as severe or last for as long.  (See Childhood and Society for identity formation.)

Progress Democratizes

The first radio broadcast in the US was on November 2, 1920; in 1931, a majority of homes had a radio; and in 1937, 75% of homes had one.  Not even 20 years, and it radically changed music in the United States.  Prior to the introduction of radio, few people could hear an orchestra play – because they had to be physically present.  After the introduction of the radio, people anywhere within the reach of the station could hear the best that the United States had to offer.

Radio made good music available to everyone, just as the internet has democratized access to information.  Technological innovations necessarily democratize what used to be luxury items in the past.  The How of Happiness makes the argument that your current material comfort would have been the comfort of the top 5% of people just fifty years ago.

Changing Morality

Wheelis makes a few arguments about how morality works.  He believes that morality is derived from social mores.  This is slightly inconsistent with the view of Chris Lowney in Heroic Leadership and the approach taken by the Jesuits.  They, he explains, are aware of core beliefs and values as being nonnegotiable.  However, everything else was subject to the mores of the societies they were in.

Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind explains his belief that morality is based on six pillars.  These aren’t about mores but are written into our very being.  Certainly, the research starting with Darwin and continued by Robert Dawkins in The Selfish Gene point to a set of traits or drivers that reinforce survival of the species.  Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation demonstrated computationally that these advanced capabilities would have survived.  Does Altruism Exist? continues this work towards an understanding of how what we call “morals” may have been mechanisms of our survival.

Ignoring the Facts

Not liking a fact doesn’t stop it from being a fact.  When we ignore facts – or fail to look for them – we end up trapped in cults (see Terror, Love, and Brainwashing) or take extreme positions (see Going to Extremes).  We cannot ignore the changes to culture except at our own peril.

More Diverse but Less Variety

If you were to travel back to the early 1900s, you’d find a great deal more diversity, but less variety.  You wouldn’t find the consistency of large organizations and franchises that are indistinguishable from other franchises in other cities, states, and countries.  Each city would have family-run stores.  There would be diversity.

In 1924, a few hardware store owners in Chicago pooled their buying power into what would eventually become ACE hardware stores.  It wouldn’t be until 1926 that the Independent Grocers Alliance brought together the family-owned grocery stores in small cities and linked them in a way that gave them better buying power and better distribution.  These moves (and many others) reduced the diversity in the American landscape while increasing the efficiency.

This efficiency and the demands of the American public ultimately led to an explosion of options.  According to Daniel Levitin in The Organized Mind, the average grocery store in 1976 stocked 9,000 items.  By 2013, the average store had 40,000 different options.

The landscape changed to conformity while allowing for individuals to maintain or increase their individuality.

Protecting Memories

One of the first things that professionals do when they encounter someone who is suffering from trauma is to assess whether they’re alert and oriented.  Alert more or less means that they’re responsive.  Oriented is a bit more complicated; it involves their understanding of who they are, where they are, when they are (year), and some degree of awareness of current events.

Being connected to people, places, and time is a fundamental part of our psyche.  Our feelings of nostalgia invoke the desire to remain connected to people, places, and times.  Sometimes, this desire for connectedness shows up as a desire for mementos from our experiences.

No matter what tourist destination you go to, there will be some objects that have the name of the destination on it.  From keychains to kayaks, are things that you can use to remember where you were.  With clothing, you can even encourage others to comment on your travels and perhaps share stories if they’ve been there, too.

The mementos that we keep need not have the name on them as long as we can still remember where we got them from.  Some things that I have aren’t important because of what they are, they’re important because of what they remind me of.  Almost everyone has this tendency to some degree.

Public Health and Personal Approaches Differ

One of the real challenges in trying to understand how to make an impact is understanding the difference between public policy approaches and individual efficacy.  There are factors that are associated with the increased risk of suicide.  We know that from a mathematical point of view.  However, this information does little to help you when you’re speaking with an individual who is struggling and suffering and looking at suicide as an option.

It’s the core behind the myth that we can predict who will and won’t attempt suicide in the near term.  The factors that operate in aggregate don’t operate at the individual.  Consider the example that Craig Bryan used in Rethinking Suicide.  We know what risk factors cause automobile accidents.  However, we can’t say which people will be in accidents.

Follow Through

I picked up this book because Roy Baumeister in Willpower spoke of Wheelis’ claim for greater insights during therapy but less follow through work on resolving the issues.  I didn’t see these statements play out in any major way through the work, but I developed an understanding of how societal shifts shape The Quest for Identity.

This Giving Tuesday

Robust Futures has done so much this year to move forward the goal of wellness for everyone so that they don’t want to consider suicide – but there is much more to do.  That’s why we’re asking for your support and partnership in this critical endeavor to reduce suffering and suicide.  We’re proud of what we’ve done and want to share our successes and our plans for 2025.

This past year, we were able to launch our first international project to reduce suicide.  SuicideMyths.org is different than other suicide myths and facts pages that people have posted.  Every page is evidence-supported.  We don’t call it a myth until there is research to indicate that it is one.  We’re resolving persistent concerns and discussions about items that should be settled.  We are moving forward public discourse and research priorities in more productive ways.

Our research continued as well, as we added another 28 books to our growing library of reviews on suicide prevention.  In total, we’ve reviewed 71 books about suicide prevention since the start of this journey.  We continued to spread the word with new conference presentations and work to understand how to get further upstream from suicide prevention to the reduction of suffering.

For 2025, our major investment will be in the development of a website with short (<5 minute) videos to help people learn a little bit about suicide at the time they need it most.  Whether it’s a teacher who hears a student say that they’re considering suicide, a friend’s broken voice when they call to tell you a mutual friend has died by suicide, or any of the countless ways that people realize they suddenly need to know more about suicide – and what to say – than they’ve ever had to.  At the end of each video, we’ll encourage the person to stay to learn a bit more about other important aspects of suicide that may be helpful to them.

In addition to the upfront development on this project, we’ll be relying on search advertising to connect people who need help with the website.  This transactional cost means that, as our resources expand, we’re able to connect with more people – and prevent more suffering and suicide.  Every $3 reaches another person.  Today and next week, on Giving Tuesday, we ask that you consider supporting our mission. This year, we’ve accomplished so much with our suicide prevention. With your support, we hope to accomplish so much more in 2025.

Book Review-Social R&D: Research and Development in Human Services

It was 1980 when Jack Rothman wrote Social R&D: Research and Development in Human Services.  His big idea was the application of knowledge from industry into social services.  Specifically, he was focused on approaches and patterns that resulted in new solutions to problems.  His insight was the application of these approaches to human services when people didn’t believe that human services could have innovation.

Scientists and Practitioners

The walls have come down somewhat between the ivory towers of academia and the gritty reality of the way things get done.  Schools have learned that all the valuable wisdom and studies that they’d been developing weren’t what industry wanted – and it’s not what they’d pay for.  The result was a focus on what might be called implementation science or application research as opposed to primary research, which was purer.

Despite this narrowing gap, there’s still a bit of disdain that reflects the different values and focuses between the pure researcher, who is interested in controlled environments and predictable results, and the practitioner, who just needs to solve a problem – even if the answer isn’t pure.

Social Science

Another gap that must be addressed to get to social research and development is to accept that the two terms are compatible.  While science seems to have clean edges and rigorous proof, social interactions appear to be messy, unstable, and beyond reduction to the levels of science.  However, this perspective ignores the chaos that the physical sciences had prior to the introduction of the periodic table of elements.  Marie Curie received Nobel prizes for both physics and chemistry, but her work with radioactive materials likely led to her death.  It’s not that the “hard” sciences were without complexity, it’s that through hard work, dedication, and persistence, we continue to peel back the complexity to reveal the obscured rules of operation that govern the field.

Decades after Rothman published his work, we still struggle to find the core patterns in social work that drive towards science.  Rothman reminds readers that 90% of all scientists who ever lived were alive at the time of his writing.  Obviously, there’s no statistical measure here.  His statement is likely as true today as it was then not because people haven’t died but rather because the rate of expansion in the number of scientists far exceeds the number of previously living scientists.

This gives us enormous capacity to pursue social sciences and better understand the drivers that create the richness of life.

The Role of Technology

Rothman explains that when Everett Rogers wrote Diffusion of Innovations, he did so using manual indexing and research techniques.  By the time he co-authored Communication of Innovations with Floyd Shoemaker, the process had already converted to being electronically supported in 1971.  In the intervening 50 years, we’ve seen the rise of personal computers, the internet, search, and artificial intelligence that make the problems of conducting secondary research (discovering primary research) more about being able to consume the overwhelming amount of research being done and synthesize it into a coherent whole.

Where databases were complicated and access to research was severely limited, we can now find mountains of data while sitting in our offices by merely flicking our fingers across the keyboard.  We can find rare and out-of-print books – like this one.  The world of research that I live in would have been unimaginable to Rothman and his contemporaries.  Fredrick Kappel of Bell Laboratories said, “I would say that the prime need in modern technology is for wiser, smarter thought and action about what we have…”  His comment is a stark balance against the concerns today that AI will somehow take away jobs and livelihood.

Profitability

The hidden force that drives research and development is profitability.  Organizations (and individuals) make investments, which means short-term sacrifice is made with the hope of long-term gains.  There is, of course, the opportunity for great rewards, but those rewards are not guaranteed.  This game of chance is what underlies all investments in corporate research and development.  Academic research based on pure science is based on curiosity about a topic.

In a sense, the payoffs for the academic are even longer term than the corporate research and development team.  The academic researcher may find something useful – or they may not.  Largely, they’re not expecting their gambles to pay off.

One of the challenges as we bridge the gap between the earliest forms of research and the corporate world is the need to find good probabilities for future returns.  We can’t blindly explore every interesting path – it must be connected to some prediction of future success.

This means that the best academic researcher, who is able to find great things, may be lousy at corporate research and development when that future focus must be held.  It also means that, in social research and development, we must remain cognizant of the desired outcomes and how we believe we can achieve them through the work being done.

Better Research and Development

The goal is better research and development in the social space.  To get it, we can lean on what we know about innovation (see The Art of Innovation) and creativity (see Creative Confidence).  We know that there are multiple components to creating results.  It starts with psychological safety (see The Fearless Organization) and it is better when people come from diverse backgrounds.  (See The Difference.)  Collectively, this creates an engine for innovation.

To really make a difference, we must interact with the world to do what would today be called implementation science.  What we know about this is, when it comes to efficacy, experts are naturally drawn to high-intensity interventions that completely immerse the recipient in a new mindset.  (See The Art of Explanation.)  However, what is often much more effective are low-intensity easy interventions that can be deployed more widely.  Like all generalizations, there are exceptions, but by-and-large, we need to find interventions that are just good enough – not excellent.

Ultimately, when we’re working with social sciences, what we need is to leverage what we know about other industries and areas of study.  It’s through integration that we get to Social R&D.

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.

Discussions on Cognition

Our brains are powerful machines that allow us to process the world around us, translating the chaos we see into a perceived order.  How it does this is a bit of a mystery, but we’ve discovered some clues to why we think the way we do, how we can change how we think, and what can go wrong.

In the last of the themed weeks this year, I’ve put together some books on how our minds work.  The first three book reviews are about cognitive dissonance, what our brains do when we encounter conflicting beliefs, attitudes, or values.  From there, we take a visit to dishonesty and how we’re all dishonest sometimes – even to ourselves.  We’ll finish with a focus on what makes us unable to focus.  We’ll tease apart focus concepts from one book that might cause you to think differently about why you can’t focus.

Book Review-Communication of Innovations: A Cross-Cultural Approach

There are a few people whose name is synonymous with the study in a field.  For me, Everett Rogers is that name for change.  Communication of Innovations: A Cross-Cultural Approach is a follow up to his Diffusion of Innovations book that many people quote without even realizing it.  If you’ve ever talked about laggards or the adoption curve, you’re speaking of his work.

Roger’s career took him many places, from Iowa to Ohio to Michigan, California, and New Mexico with brief stints of lecturing in Columbia, France, Mexico, Germany, and Singapore.  While Diffusion of Innovations was focused on the US and the adoption of farming innovations, this work is focused on how the lessons learned in Iowa cornfields might apply more broadly to farming across the world.

Meeting People Where They Are At

When you’re trying to change behavior, you can’t start from the position where you want people to be.  You must start from where they actually are.  Experts want to share their knowledge with the uneducated, and in doing so, they expose their differences.  As we gain experience, we build more elaborate and higher fidelity models of how something works.  (See Sources of Power.)  The problem, as Efficiency in Learning and The ABCs of How We Learn explain, is that the learners cannot process the messages, because their model isn’t sufficiently complete and nuanced.  They get lost quickly, and as a result, they disengage.  (See also The Adult Learner.)

As change agents entered villages that had become disconnected from the rest of the world, they tried to teach germ theory to the villagers – and it was too much for them to process.  They couldn’t understand how tiny bugs could impact them.

Another, related problem, is a failure to understand and account for the local customs.  Boiling water is a simple intervention that will kill the microbes that can harm people.  It’s a place where you can avoid the discussion of germ theory and simply describe the behavior – unless the culture has a hot-cold distinction.  In another case, the innovation of boiling water was rejected, because the culture associated hot with sickness.  Thus, it made no sense to make something hot to make it healthy.

Difficult situations like this may require the gradual teaching about pathogens in ways that are visible to the people you’re trying to change the behavior of.  Don’t forget that Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was an accident because he saw mold growing.

Berlo’s SMCR Model of Communication

Rogers shares Berlo’s model of communication, built on four steps:

  • Source – Sender
  • Message – The content
  • Channels – The medium of the communication
  • Receiving – The receiving individual

Important to this model is that every component can interact with the others to produce desirable – and sometimes undesirable – results.

The model itself has limitations, including the lack of feedback.  It’s treated as an isolated event devoid of context or patterns.  It doesn’t explicitly address noise that may occur in any component and simplifies the process to a simple linear progression.

Many of these objections can be addressed by recognizing that this communication is much like the packetization of messages that happens on computer networks.  Each SMCR can be considered a packet that travels linearly through the system in one direction.  When we consider multiple packets of communication happening, we can see non-linearity, feedback, and the complexity that the model itself doesn’t surface.

Consequences

The consequences of a successful change will fall somewhere inside of three separate classifications:

  • Functional/Dysfunctional – Will the overall consequences to the social system be desirable or undesirable for the system? Will they move things forwards or backwards?
  • Direct/Indirect – Will the consequences come as a direct result of the change, or will they come from the results of the results?
  • Manifest/Latent – Will the members of the system recognize the consequences or not?

At some level, the results will be a roll of the dice.  It’s possible to influence some of the outcomes, but the outcomes still are just a probability.

Opinion Leaders and Change Agents

As change agents are deployed to their jungles – even if they’re a corporate jungle – they are necessarily somewhat different than their target audience.  They clearly are more educated in the target innovation.  But they differ in other ways as well.  Effective change agents have developed skills for empathy and listening either because they come from the target group they’re trying to create change in or through techniques designed to develop understanding.  (For example, see The Ethnographic Interview.)

Opinion leaders are generally more exposed to communications both from the mass media and through relationships with diverse groups.  They tend to have higher social status – either because of their position or because of the respect they’ve earned.  They also, perhaps by nature of their relative affluence, are more open to innovation.

The relationship is symbiotic in that opinion leaders need to show their ability to innovate to be perceived as a leader, and change agents are often incapable of the change without the support of the opinion leader.  One of the tensions in the relationship is the rate of change.  Opinion leaders can be stripped of their ability to lead if their constituents believe they’re no longer enough like them or interested in their interests.  Change agents can overuse opinion leaders and thereby remove the power that they were engaged for in the first place.

Diffusion Research Traditions

Rogers outlines what he believes are seven major diffusion research traditions:

  • Anthropology
  • Early sociology
  • Rural sociology
  • Education
  • Medical sociology
  • Communication
  • Marketing

The reason for making these categories is to be able to identify the way that the researchers approached the problem of innovation.  Often, the methods of data gathering differ, as does the unit of analysis.  Communication of Innovations is a synthesis of what has been learned from these traditions.

Teaching the Innovation

One of the key catalysts for learning is an understanding of the big picture.  In information architecture and learning alike, we need to be able to understand how the information is structured.  (For information architecture, see Infonomics; for learning, see The Adult Learner.)  One of the common problems with change approaches is that they fail to show the big picture of how the change will be positive for them (relative advantage) and what must be done (at a high level) for those benefits to be achieved.

If you’re trying to persuade someone to adopt an innovation, start with the big picture benefits, and then help them understand how those results are achievable.

Dissatisfaction

When a change agent approaches someone with an innovation for adoption, there’s a desire to create some dissatisfaction in the mind of that person.  It’s the dissatisfaction with the status quo that will provide the energy for the change.  However, sometimes the dissatisfaction doesn’t stay channeled in the way that change agents might prefer.  The dissatisfaction may exceed the capacity of the person for change.

One form of dissatisfaction, when “wants” outrun “gets,” is hard to manage.  The person will alternate between overcommitment and overwhelm, making the process of adoption more difficult.

Underlying Conditions and Relationships

Sometimes, the first work of a change agent isn’t to propose a change or share the change they’re interested in getting people to adopt.  Sometimes, the first step is working to change the general attitude, so that people more favorably view any kind of change.  It may involve the introduction of some smaller changes that can be successfully implemented with less resistance and greater initial reward.  These kinds of approaches are particularly necessary when previous innovations and change attempts have failed.  Trust must be built as a starting point.

It’s all about the relationships that people have with change – and the relationships they have with each other.  Taking the time to build a bit of trust can go a long way to improving the chances for change to be successful.

Immunity to Change

It’s quite common for someone to say one thing and then do another.  It’s entirely possible for someone to profess their commitment to a change and for them to fail to make the changes necessary.  Sometimes, there are unconscious beliefs or counter-commitments that prevent the change from happening.  (See Immunity to Change.)  These counter-beliefs are difficult to identify because they’re not subject to conscious control.

Noise and Discontinuity

We’ve experienced a global pandemic that radically changed the adoption of many things.  Work from home jumped.  Telemedicine became accepted.  Some school systems did away with snow days (because kids can just do their work at home).  These big events create discontinuities in the adoption of technologies, repressing some and jump-starting others.

These discontinuities can’t be anticipated or relied upon.  Instead, we need to plan for the mundane immediacy of reward and the relative advantage.  In these spaces, our changes must find ways to demonstrate clear value.  The longer between the change and the result, the more impactful it must be.  If it’s not a substantial advantage, it may get lost in the noise floor of random results.

Failure Is Necessary

The innovators must accept that their super innovativeness must be paid for by the occasional failure.  If we’re going to make something new, we must accept that sometimes we’ll fail.  Sometimes, those failures will hurt.  The innovators must plan for failures, because without failures, we can’t create anything meaningful.

Homophily

The degree to which people in the target for change are similar the greater the likelihood of success and, generally, the faster the rate of change.  As Richard Hackman points out in Collaborative Intelligence, homophily has both advantages and disadvantages.  It tends to have fewer creative ideas – but that is what most adoptions need.

Adoption and Decision Units

Often, the people making an innovation decision differ from those who will implement the decision when the decision is being made from an authority rather than optional or collective decisions.  The gap between those who will implement the decision and those who make the decision opens the innovation up to subversion.  Those who are asked to implement the decision may, rightly, decide that the invention was “not invented here” and rebel against it.  (See Advice Not Given and Collaboration for more.)

Subversion is a powerful force that can derail the most well-intended change.  As a result, it’s a good idea to ensure that both the adoption and the decision units are in concurrence about the implementation of the innovation – including the changes it will mean for them.

In one example shared in the book, programmed instruction was introduced to schools to allow students to work at their own pace.  However, the teachers expected to be leading instruction and subverted the innovation so they could control the pace of learning in their classrooms.  The result was worse performance, not better.

Form, Function, and Meaning

Change agents can command a great deal of technical knowledge about the innovation itself, including the mechanisms it operates on and the way that it functions.  But ultimately, it’s the person implementing the innovation who must decide what the innovation means to them.  Rogers recounts Lawrence Sharp’s Steel Axe Heads for Stone-Age Australians research as he used in Diffusion of Innovations as well as other examples where the effects of an innovation were not predictable.  In some cases, the long-term impact of implementing an innovation was worse results – the opposite of what was initially experienced.

While there is a substantial overlap with Diffusion of Innovations, there’s something to be said for how one approaches Communication of Innovations.