According to Google, cognitive dissonance is a “psychological phenomenon where a person holds two or more conflicting beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors simultaneously. This inconsistency creates discomfort and tension, motivating the individual to resolve the dissonance.”
This concept came to mind recently while I was watching the first season of 911 (after a marathon binge of the show, starting in season three, that left me really curious about how the series began). I was especially interested in the romance between Abby, a 42-year-old 911 operator, and Buck, a 26-year-old rookie firefighter, because it set up the whole structure of the show, where they follow 911 calls through to their resolutions. But almost immediately, I felt queasy about the age difference between the two characters. I had to remind myself that, even though he was immature, Buck was an adult, and even though Abby was 42, she was at a vulnerable stage in her life and not in a position to take advantage of any perceived power differences between the two of them. They were both so obviously in need of love, and specifically in need of the kind of love the other had to offer, but…
Maybe because of the low stakes (it’s a TV show after all), I was able to sit with the dissonance and let it simmer for a while (a day or two, actually, because I watched the first season all in one go), and I realized that even though these moments of cognitive dissonance can be uncomfortable, or worse, they are also an opportunity for deeper understanding, of ourselves and of others.
When we see this kind of cognitive dissonance in our politicians, we tend to call it hypocrisy. How can you say you care about the poor and then fight so hard to cut Medicaid? How can you say you are an advocate for survivors of sexual abuse and then ignore the sexual offences of your favorite politician? In our private lives, it can show up maybe as wanting to save money for retirement, and then going on Amazon to buy ten things we don’t need.
Like many psychological terms and theories, cognitive dissonance feels like a judgement being made on other people, a negative way of naming how we behave, without bothering to understand why we do it or having compassion for the struggle. Psychologists and therapists, and many other helping professionals, tend to feel overwhelmed by the chaos their patients or clients bring into the room and rely heavily on the intellectual distance of naming things to keep the chaos from seeping into their own lives.
The emphasis in the cognitive dissonance articles I was able to find, was on how we tend to resolve our dissonances, often with defense mechanisms, like: avoiding the dissonance altogether by staying away from discussions or situations that bring it up; delegitimizing the person or group or situation that highlighted the dissonance (this is fake news!); or minimizing the impact by telling yourself that you didn’t really go against your beliefs, or you just did it one time. Rarely, the articles seemed to suggest, do we actually choose to change our behavior or reassess our value systems in order to resolve the dissonance.
I’m not comfortable with the judgment (name calling) underlying all of this, and the assumption that we are all lying to ourselves all the time in order to resolve our discomfort, but I still think Cognitive Dissonance can be a useful concept, if we use it as a way to identify a problem that needs further attention. Ideally, if I feel guilty for doing something I didn’t plan to do, I can be curious instead of judgmental. And if I find myself minimizing, rationalizing, ignoring new information, or dismissing research out of hand, I can be curious rather than self-loathing. I can choose to look at the dissonance as a mystery worth exploring, a part of myself that deserves more of my attention and respect, rather than my judgment or impatience.
Just like in music, dissonance can catch your attention in a way that harmony may not, and it can tell you that something important is happening: it could be a mistake (you played the wrong note); or it could be the entrance of a new character, or a change in mood; or it could be the start of a disaster.
The Abby and Buck story on 911 tapped into two of my strongly held, and in this case opposing, beliefs: 1) that age/power/status differences between people can lead to abuse if we’re not careful about setting clear boundaries, and 2) love is a wonderful and healing thing. The way the show dealt with the dissonance in the relationship was both to minimize the weirdness of the age difference (by rarely mentioning it), and, in the end, by sending Abby off on a trip around the world until Buck could get over her. The un-stated conclusion was that two people who are at two very different places in their lives (either because of age or status or something else) may be able to spend time together and do each other good, but only for so long. The creators of the show chose not to sit with the discomfort inherent in such an age difference for more than a season, maybe because it made them that uncomfortable, or maybe because they discovered that it made their audience uncomfortable. And in season two, they replaced Abby’s character in the ensemble with Jennifer Love Hewitt, playing Buck’s older sister, suggesting that Buck was drawn to Abby in the first place in part because he was missing his sister, or missing the supportive role she played in his life, helping to ground him and give him perspective.
Even though I really liked the character of Abby, and especially the actress who played her (Connie Britton), I was relieved when she left the show and the void was filled with two new characters, Maddie (Buck’s sister) and a separate love interest. The dissonance that Abby and Buck’s relationship brought up for me, and for others, it turned out, was fundamentally not resolvable. I do wonder, though, what would have happened if the writers had made a different decision, and allowed that relationship to play out over a longer period of time. Would that have offered me an opportunity to delve more deeply into my own beliefs and feelings about power gap relationships, or would I have had to stop watching the show because it just made me too uncomfortable? (It’s also worth considering how the storyline would have been treated differently if the 42-year-old character had been male and the 26-year-old female. Would they have even told us their ages? Would I have thought to be bothered by it?)
While I was researching cognitive dissonance, I also came across the related quote, attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald, that “Intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind.” The quote suggests that it’s a sign of intelligence to be able to entertain conflicting theories or facts without becoming overwhelmed or paralyzed, but I think the ability to face your cognitive dissonance is more about emotional strength, or intellectual bravery, rather than intelligence itself. I know a lot of highly intelligent people who, when faced with opposing ideas or desires within themselves, or facts in contradiction to a well-loved theory, resort to ever more inventive defense mechanisms to try to deny the existence of the conflict.
And I am no different. Recently, I was listening to a podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur, an Israeli journalist who writes and speaks in English to reach an audience outside of Israel. He was responding to an article in Haaretz (Israel’s venerable left-wing newspaper), that claimed Israeli soldiers were intentionally shooting at Gazans seeking aid. My first response, when I saw the article in my newsfeed, was disbelief, and then anger that they would even repeat such claims. How dare they suggest that the IDF would deliberately kill civilians, especially after telling me over and over again that the IDF does its best to avoid civilian casualties. But Haviv Rettig Gur, as a journalist, was able to sit with the dissonance (between believing that the IDF tries to avoid killing civilians and the reports that they were doing just that), and what he came to understand, or believe, was that, yes, the shootings were happening (though probably not in the numbers reported by Hamas), not because the soldiers intended to randomly kill civilians, but rather because these young soldiers were being tasked with protecting aid locations without being trained for the task. Most of the soldiers involved had been taken from nearby battlegrounds, where they were under attack from Hamas soldiers wearing civilian clothes, facing booby-trapped buildings and roadside bombs and all kinds of dangers around every corner, and then suddenly they were told to guard aid sites, where the signage was unclear and it was inevitable that civilians would go the wrong way at the wrong time and the soldiers were going to see them as a threat.
The problem, as Haviv Rettig Gur saw it, was caused both by the presence of Hamas in the aid areas and by the expectation of Israeli politicians that these soldiers could be tasked with protecting the aid sites without adequate training or support. Those politicians, especially the ones with little to no military experience (which is a significant deficit in Israel, where army service or an equivalent form of civil service is required for the majority of the population, but the fight over whether or not the ultra-orthodox have to serve is ongoing), probably thought they could order the army to do whatever they wanted, like ordering a special hamburger off menu. And when the army’s leadership said they couldn’t do it, the politicians probably assumed that they were lying for some reason, because that’s what the politicians themselves would have done. Are some of those politicians okay with killing civilians? Yeah. Some of the far-right politicians have basically stated their disinterest not only in the lives of Palestinian civilians but in the lives of Israeli soldiers and Israeli hostages as well. Should they still have their jobs? Not at all, but Netanyahu appeases them in order to keep his coalition government afloat. Is this the best way to run a country, especially during a war? Not even a little. But when the attorney general or the supreme court in Israel have tried to intervene, the government has threatened to dismantle the whole system of checks and balances (this is what led to the year long protests across Israel in the year leading up to October seventh), and being attacked by Hamas didn’t fix the underlying hypocrisy and graft in the government that is now tasked with protecting its people from further attacks.
The dissonance between Israel’s stated dual values of protecting civilian lives and eliminating Hamas has been there from the beginning, and ideally those conflicts would have been openly addressed and debated, with deep discussions as to the value of human life and the needs of a populace to feel secure, but instead the conflicts have been minimized and denied, to disastrous effect.
Another example. When it became obvious to the people around Joe Biden that he was losing his faculties, yet still insisted on running for President again, they could have been open, with him and with the American people (or at least with the higher ups in the Democratic party), about their concerns. There could have been discussions about how to prevent a Trump presidency (with all of its inherent dangers to democracy), while also pursuing an open Democratic primary, and a contest of ideas leading to the best possible candidate, or at least an open acknowledgment that our country is still not ready for a woman of color as our president; but instead, they rationalized and made excuses and got defensive, and therefore they could not solve the problem at all, until it exploded.
Unfortunately, we are living in a time when defense mechanisms are being chosen over reality, not just by some people but by most people, and especially by those in power. Republican congressmen are ignoring their cognitive dissonance around the “Big, beautiful bill,” with its severe Medicaid cuts and inevitable growth of the national debt, because they seem to be too afraid of Trump to vote their stated values. And many Israelis, at least at the beginning of the war with Hamas, seemed to be willing to ignore the suffering in Gaza because they thought empathy for the civilians would get in the way of their goal of removing Hamas as an existential threat. Most Israelis have, as far as I can tell, grown throughout the war in their empathy and willingness to face a complicated reality, including the realization that removing the threat of Hamas entirely may be impossible.
The acknowledgement of a cognitive dissonance, between what you may have hoped to be true and what is really happening, or who you thought you should be and who you really are, can be painful and frightening, and can lead to hopelessness and despair, which explains why we have found so many creative ways of avoiding the dissonance. At times it can feel like the dissonance is unresolvable, because it may be, and therefore that there’s no point in facing it. And sometimes we really do need the respite that denial and minimization can provide, until we feel strong enough and capable enough and supported enough, to face the truth. But it’s only when we allow ourselves to see all of the facts, and to face all of the conflicting facets of ourselves, that we have any real chance of finding solutions, or at least of processing our grief when solutions are found to be impossible.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 
I’ve encountered several essays about cognitive dissonance and its relationship to hypocrisy. They are closely related. Most of us have a degree of both in our personality makeups. People who wish to work on their integrity issues delve into apparent discords between their personal beliefs and their speech/actions. Being mindful of our personal contradictions and remedying them is a lifelong process. Personal honesty about oneself and working to walk the talk are virtuous and provide psychological peace.
Psychological peace would be nice!
Better than gold.
Reality isn’t all cut and dry, it doesn’t follow a pattern. The world is complicated.
Very.
Thanks, Rachel, for provoking me to think about this matter more intensely (in my mind).
Thank you!
The first word I thought of was “hypocrisy,” but there can be subtle shades of difference and a person can hold two opposing opinions. For example: I don’t like to see animals be killed, but I like a steak. It’s not easy to sort out what’s right or wrong. Some things are blatantly wrong, no matter how you dress it up, but there is often a gray area.
The grey areas are where the interesting stuff is hiding.
Yes!
Cognitive dissonance is indeed an issue that touches most of us, and I value your thoughtful treatment of it in this post. However, the Republicans’ support and passage of trump’s budget is not an example of cognitive dissonance. There are other terms for saying one thing and doing another.
I was thinking of someone like Senator Murkowski, who seemed to have been caught between wanting specific cut outs for her constituents and believing that the bill overall was bad. There are others in her category as well, though I agree that there are a lot of politicians who aren’t so much experiencing cognitive dissonance as a character disturbance.
I think Murkowski is the best of the lot, but she knew the bill was wrong and chose help her state and throw the rest of the country under the bus instead of voting against what she knew was a bad bill. As for the rest of them, I agree with you. It is clear that they knowingly voted for a bill that would hurt regular Americans to help the privileged few.
Oh My 😸
This is a sharp and nuanced analysis of cognitive dissonance. Your approach—favouring curiosity over judgment—adds depth to a concept often reduced to accusations of hypocrisy. The connections between personal reflection, cultural narratives, and political realities are clear and compelling. Framing dissonance as a meaningful signal, rather than just a problem to solve, is an especially valuable insight.
Thank you so much!
🤝👏🌷
Very well thought out and written Rachel.
Thank you so much!
This post packs a real punch.
I hope that’s a good thing!
Rachel, I started reading this last night and realized it was too much to digest that late in the day.
You’ve really tackled a lot here with some fascinating examples. I’m not familiar with the Israeli journalist you’ve referenced and I’m going to explore that one more. I remember shortly after 10/7/2023 when other Jewish friends were saying we can be fighting hard for the release of hostages and begging you to acknowledge the rape, murder, and kidnappings and still not be okay with the (Hamas provided) visual of ‘innocent civilians’ being killed in the war. We are not okay with both of these things.
But so many of the people who were posting the war photos NEVER acknowledged the 10/7/2023 atrocities.
At this point, and I’m not sure what shifted, I think many in the diaspora without specific ties to Israel are less inclined to support the war because as you say the government doesn’t care about the reasons they became invested to begin with.
Also, moving on to the topic of our own disaster of a government … I am not sure if it’s cognitive dissonance or stupidity, but when people say they HATE the ACA or Medicaid but don’t realize they benefit from one or both because they have a different name in their state, it will be too late.
The stupidity is rampant and leaves me feeling powerless, honestly. And then there’s the outright lying and malicious propaganda, that’s another area that leaves me feeling helpless. So I try to focus on the things that can at least start to make some sense to me.
Pretty deep stuff here, and it struck a nerve with me. I didn’t think the age of two made-up people would matter to me, but as I kept reading, I felt an unease about it all. I will have to ponder this further. Thanks.
I know of successful age gap relationships, but it depends on who the people are and what brings them together. It tends to take me a long time to figure out these dissonances for myself, and that’s only after I’m finally willing to look at them.
I think we do our best to accommodate our dissonances rather than learn from or even confront them. Instead we do our best to, as you said, resort to inventive defense mechanisms. Not that it’s a bad thing. Your description of the dissonance and the management of it during the war is eye opening. Well stated and an excellent read. Thank you!
Thank you so much!
Wow, Rachel. Very well written, and a lot to take in. Will have to do a second read through!
Thank you!
Excellent! Especially your conclusion: “The acknowledgement of a cognitive dissonance, between what you may have hoped to be true and what is really happening, or who you thought you should be and who you really are, can be painful and frightening, and can lead to hopelessness and despair, which explains why we have found so many creative ways of avoiding the dissonance.”
There persists still some WP glitch wherein your posts don’t show up anywhere for me. I have to search them out. 😦 I don’t know why.
I’m so glad you keep reading anyway!
Oh so difficult. I just had a convo w/Wordpress. For an 1+ hour. We (aka The People} don’t have a chance, is my conclusion.
Be that as it may – your thoughts and feelings have value to me. Thank you.
Check out “Full Metal Jacket” for an answer to the complicated question of wtf is going on. 🙂
Thank you!
I think “lying and hypocrisy” are more common in our politics at the moment. We experience incoherence when we try to reconcile truth and lies. They can’t be reconciled. Your other examples are clear I think. But in case of the Congress they are simply lying.
Yeah, I guess my first response to practiced dissonance is hypocrisy as well. Though I also believe in paradox that is the holding of contradictory notions and might be relevant in considering cognitive dissonance. I mean, I rely on paradox among other things in order to have faith. The example of the soldiers, though, is hard, tragically so. Yet I can appreicate the problem in sending soldiers battle-hard to civilian gatherings, even for aid. Which might place the blame and burden on the leadership and to respond to a call for change. But if I were a civilian needing help who got shot instead, I’m not sure I’d care about philosophy. And yet, those of us who can, must. And, as we are able and are charged, work out which contradictions to keep for being helpful or change for resulting in destruction. Sorry for my own roundabout expressing. Thanks again for–in narrative and argument–providing so much that’s exigent to think about.
Thank you!
Thank you for this well-thought-out article – I have a lot of cognitive dissonance with so many political and world issues right now – your article nailed it, and now I need to go have coffee and ponder!
Enjoy!
This was such a well-written and timely article! So much of what we see in our world today seems to be a result of the cognitive dissonance, and it is definitely present in our political arena, in both parties. Honestly, I think it is at the root of our polarization: if we had think about what is really happening and deal with it, we could find common ground. But it’s so much easier to turn a blind eye to the faults of the party we like, and blame everything on the party we don’t like. Truth just doesn’t seem to matter anymore!
The truth is always more complicated and difficult than whatever lie we’d rather believe, so I can understand the impulse to go with something that sounds and feels easier. It’s just that it’s not helping.
Exactly!
Oh yes, I’ve seen it so many times and it never ceases to amaze me when I see how some people can be walking contradictions.
I wonder how this journalist would explain the IDF that confiscate formula from foreign doctors trying to feed starving babies.
I hadn’t heard that particular rumor, so I can’t say anything about the truth or falsity of it. I know that the IDF searches the aid trucks before they enter Gaza, and that while there are a few aid distribution sites run by the American/Israeli group there are still aid sites being run by the United Nations. Part of the difficulty in all of this is that we lack reliable information, both because Hamas controls communication in Gaza and because the IDF is slow to respond to requests for information and/or doesn’t know what’s happening in areas of Gaza where they don’t have a strong presence. Ideally, a cease fire deal would have been made a long time ago, and all fo the hostages would have been returned and aid would be flowing safely to civilians in Gaza.
Not a rumour. I witnessed the testimonies of doctors who’d been working in Gaza who’d tried to bring in formula to feed starving babies. The soldiers confiscated any food they’d bring in – food that was available, but the soldiers wouldn’t allow the babies to be fed.
Sources available upon request, but you can easily find it yourself, through independent, i.e. non-Israeli sources.
We obviously trust different sources of information, for different reasons.
I want to know the truth. The truth is there’s a genocide happening in Gaza. As of today, there’s nearly 250 Palestinians dead from malnutrition – some of them are children.
I don’t think the examples you are giving reflect cognitive dissonance. A healthy person can hold two opposing ideas in their mind at the same time and consider the pros and cons of each. That’s what open-minded and unbiased people do. They accept one idea and reject the other or find the best in each idea and merge them. That’s what Hegel’s Dialectics is all about. Moral dissonance is when someone is forced to do things that violate their moral code, such as a doctor forced to perform an abortion against his will or a soldier forced to kill someone in battle. People in the Democratic Party exploited Joe Biden for their own ends, and since the Democrats never admit when they are wrong, they tried to cover up his deficiency. The changes in Medicaid and welfare are designed to get the deadbeats out of the system so that people who are truly in need get the services they need. Fraud is an ongoing problem that’s been allowed to flourish. Taxpayers want to help people in need. They don’t want to support people who don’t want to work, and they shouldn’t. As a registered nurse who worked in both medical and mental health, I saw plenty of people “gaming the system.” I also saw it when I volunteered at a homeless shelter. Politicians who say one thing and do another are either lying or underestimated their ability to fulfill their promises. That’s not cognitive dissonance. That’s dishonesty and/or naivety.
“we are living in a time when defense mechanisms are being chosen over reality” – alas
Yep.
Mind blown! I am so glad 😊 that you are here sharing your writing ✍️ with us. So my professor in college loved the word juxtaposition, an example that comes to mind is the white night, the lawyer in Batman, before he becomes Two-Face, the vigilante Batman as the dark night. It’s mentally challenging to hold onto ideas 💡 in mind at the same time, like a scale ⚖️
Always challenging, but that’s where the interesting things break through.
I like the quote you cited from: F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “Intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind.” This is a point I am making based on my faith and not necessarily pointing to intelligence. However, seeing God as God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit is a struggle for Christians. The term trinity I have learned, which does not even appear in the scriptures of the Tanakh or the New Testament, I have learned falls short for us in understanding a complex tenet of our faith. Thank you for writing ✍️ this and allowing me to introspect on a challenging concept of my faith. Have a wonderful day.
cognitive dissonance is basically a universal human feature, not a flaw limited to “other people.”
Nobody is perfectly coherent because life constantly puts our values, desires, and realities into conflict.
absolutely!
I found this to be really interesting, and the concept is one I use quite frequently as a psychologist. I have found that a lot of the patients I come across who are acutely unwell have had a break from reality, which I believe comes from the extreme stress from cognitive dissonance. For example, I had a patient acutely unwell with psychosis who would seemingly out of the blue defend himself about not being a pedophile and how immoral it is. It had me wondering, had he engaged in such behaviour and this dissonance between his actions and beliefs caused him to develop psychosis? These were all just formulations or hypotheses and I guess you would never know whether it’s true. But still an interesting thought that I ponder over
Very interesting!