2016: A Year Beyond Reason

Psychologists define Cognitive Dissonance as the anxiety (dissonance) felt when people are confronted with information that is inconsistent with their beliefs. If the dissonance is not reduced by changing one’s belief, the dissonance can result in restoring consonance through misperception, rejection or refutation of the information, seeking support from others who share the beliefs, and attempting to persuade others.

In other words, humans can often carry two completely conflicting ideas in their consciousness at the same time. This is a stressful condition, and to alleviate it, we resort to rejecting contrary information, or try to persuade others of the consistency of our viewpoint.

We saw a lot of this condition in 2016!

This is not some liberal psychological plot to disparage the far-right of our political spectrum, but an objective fact of how our brains work. Researchers using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) have found that cognitive dissonance activated specific brain regions called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insular cortex. They also found that the more the anterior cingulate cortex signaled a conflict, the more dissonance a person experiences. During decision-making processes where the participant is trying to reduce dissonance, activity increased in the right-inferior frontal gyrus, medial fronto-parietal region and ventral striatum, while activity decreased in the anterior insula. Researchers concluded that rationalization activity, where you are trying to reduce the stress caused by cognitive dissonance, may take place quickly (within seconds) without conscious deliberation, and that the brain may engage emotional responses in the decision-making process.

The problem is that CD leads to other kinds of things that are sometimes harder to discern objectively. Confirmation bias refers to how people read or access information that affirms their already established opinions, rather than referencing material that contradicts them. This bias is particularly apparent when someone is faced with deeply held beliefs, i.e., when a person has ‘high commitment’ to their attitudes. People display confirmation bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position.

We saw a lot of that, too, in 2016.

An interesting study of biased interpretation occurred during the 2004 U.S. presidential election and involved participants who reported having strong feelings about the candidates. They were shown apparently contradictory pairs of statements, either from George W. Bush, John Kerry or a politically neutral public figure. They were also given further statements that made the apparent contradiction seem reasonable. From these three pieces of information, they had to decide whether or not each individual’s statements were inconsistent. There were strong differences in these evaluations, with participants much more likely to interpret statements from the candidate they opposed as contradictory. The participants made their judgments while in an fMRI scanner that monitored their brain activity. As participants evaluated contradictory statements by their favored candidate, emotional centers of their brains were aroused. This did not happen with the statements by the other figures. The experimenters inferred that the different responses to the statements were not due to passive reasoning errors. Instead, the participants were actively reducing the cognitive dissonance induced by reading about their favored candidate’s irrational or hypocritical behavior.

The bottom line is that, thanks to evolution, we have been blessed with a brain that suffers from many different kinds of reasoning pathologies. These may have had survival value in the remote past for making quick judgments in our social groups, or mistaking a distant shadow for a tiger, but now they are liabilities in our far more rational world of science and technology. Scientists spend a lot of time trying to weed out CD and CB from their analyses, and the result is that for 400 years of observing Nature as dispassionately as we can, we have created a marvelously accurate model of our world.

Sadly, CD and CB have at the same time been used to manipulate voters and consumers, with amazing negative consequences. The dissonance is that we fully realize that we are being manipulated by biased information, yet we seem powerless to resist its sirean call. In the current election, voters supporting Trump steadfastly refused to use his frequent and documented lying as grounds for not trusting him.

Some of the worst cases of CD and CB occurred during the 2016 election, and psychologists will be writing papers about it for decades. It all comes down to how people were convinced not to vote in their own self-interest.

How is it that voters whos only insurance came from the ACA voted for a GOP ticket that promised to repeal it? How is it that so many students voted against the democratic candidate who promised to eliminate tuition? How is it that so many poor people voted for an aledged multi-billionaire whose lavish gold-plated lifestyle was the antithesis of a poor person’s lifestyle?  How is it that Clinton and Trump were placed on the same ‘untrustworthy’ pedestal, when evidence showed that Clinton played by the rules and released her income tax statements, while Trump ran a Trump University con job and withheld his?  How is it that Trump’s steadfast attacks against our own intelligence service to defend Putin and Assange are not met with more rejection and patriotic contempt by his followers?

In the end, Trump voters and Red States will be paying a disproportionate economic penalty for letting CD and CB get the better of their reasoning. But because we are all in this together for the next four years, the rest of us will also feel some of this dissonance as well as collateral damage as voters in the red states ask voters in the blue states to bail them out.

Check back here on Saturday, January 14 for the next installment!

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