Outsmarting Yourself

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In nearly every dimension of our lives, we have 2 selves. We have the self that knows what the right thing is to do, and then we have, well, ourselves. In high school, we know that hard work and preparation are crucial to success. But when it comes time to choose between study and play, many of us choose the easy path. As adults, we know that kindness and civility are what allow communities to function. Yet when we are late or upset, we often act impulsively. We know that we should visit elderly parents or stay in touch with friends who have fallen on hard times. We know we should exercise regularly and make the time to eat healthy. We know sleep and social connection are engines for contentment and well-being. We know these things, but it is so tempting to settle a little deeper into the couch, crack open a fizzy drink, and let Netflix auto-stream another episode of our favorite television show. Over the last several decades, the psychologist Elliot Aronson has worked to understand how our minds justify our actions. We explored the origins of Elliot's research in the previous episode. If you missed it, I strongly recommend you start there and listen to it first. We looked at the curious ways cognitive dissonance works, and we examined the clash between 2 of Elliot's mentors, the famous psychologists Abraham Maslow and Leon Festinger. This week on Hidden Brain, Psychological jiu-jitsu— how to use your mind to get your mind to do what your mind would rather not do. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

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Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. In one of Aesop's fables, a fox notices a bunch of grapes high up on a vine. The grapes look delicious, and the fox's mouth starts to water. The fox jumps as high as it can but fails to reach the grapes. The fox tries again. It takes a running start and leaps into the air with all its strength. Again, it misses. Over and over, the fox tries to reach the grapes. Finally, it gives up. But before it walks away, It looks contemptuously at the grapes and exclaims, they are sour grapes anyway! The parable, of course, is not about foxes, but about us. When we want something but cannot get it, we quiet our disappointment and frustration by denigrating the thing we wanted but cannot have. But let's give the parable a little twist. After leaping and failing to catch the grapes, let's say the fox takes one final mighty leap and manages to reach the grapes. What happens now? Do the sought-after grapes taste just like— grapes? No, of course not. They taste like the best grapes in the world. As we explored in our previous episode, the story of the fox and the sour grapes is a textbook example of the phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance. First conceived by the psychologist Leon Festinger and then developed by Elliot Aronson when he was Leon Festinger's student, the theory suggests it is difficult to hold contrasting or dissonant thoughts inside our heads. In the parable, the fox wants the grapes, but it cannot get them. This dissonance Is frustrating. So the fox changes whether it wanted the grapes in the first place. It tells itself the grapes were not really desirable. Elliot says the same thing happens in every domain of our lives. We are all master storytellers, and we are quick to invent stories that reduce our cognitive dissonance. An early experiment that Elliot helped to set up illustrates this idea.

It's an experiment on cheating. The way I visualize it is, and I'd like you and your listeners to visualize it this way, think of a pyramid and think of the apex, the very tippy top of that pyramid, as being a person's attitude on a particular issue, let's say on cheating. Now, Suppose you're a student and you want to go to medical school and you're in a biology class in your senior year and you know it's an important class and how well you do in this class is going to have a major impact on whether or not you can get admitted to a good medical school. You go in for the final exam, you think you know the stuff well enough, and you look at the questions and you pulled a blank. You panic. You don't know a single thing. It's as if you never took the class and you break into a cold sweat. You don't know what to do. And then you look around and you see that you happen to be sitting right behind the smartest person in the class who also has the largest and most easily readable handwriting. So you can You can decide just by craning my neck a little, I can read what's on her paper, copy it, and do well on the course and get into medical school. But it's an immoral thing to do. Now imagine there are 2 people in exactly the same position, and they're both sitting at the— on the apex of that pyramid and have Almost identical attitudes toward cheating. It's not a good thing to do, but it's not the worst thing in the world, and a lot of people do it, and it's built into the system. It's not so bad. It's immoral, but there are much worse things in the world. One of them decides to cheat and one of them decides not to cheat. Now imagine as soon as they make that decision, They're sliding down opposite sides of that pyramid.

Elliott calls this thought experiment the Pyramid of Choice. Picture a triangle in your mind. 2 people are at the apex, about to make a decision on whether to cheat. They make different decisions and start to slide down opposite sides of the triangle. When they reach the bottom, they are far apart. The base of the triangle has 2 ends, and these ends represent diametrically different views about cheating.

On the left-hand side is, it's not important, it's a minor thing, it's— everybody does it, it's a victimless crime, nobody is harmed by my cheating. And on the extreme right-hand side of that base is cheating is a terrible thing to do, you're depriving other people of an opportunity to do as well as you're doing, you're taking somebody else's place in medical school, it's not a victimless crime, it's It's terrible, and if everybody always did it, it would be a terrible society, and anyone who's caught cheating should be immediately kicked out of school. Those are the 2 extreme positions. And according to dissonance theory, if you decide to cheat, your cognition that you are a moral, ethical person is dissonant with your cognition that you committed an immoral, unethical act. And therefore you will slide down that left-hand side of the pyramid and end up at the bottom saying cheating is nothing, everybody does it. If you decide not to cheat, you will slide down the other side of the pyramid because you experience cognitive dissonance. I had a chance to go to a great medical school. All I had to do was look over that girl's shoulder at her exam, and I flubbed that opportunity. Therefore, I have to believe that if I had taken that opportunity, I would've committed a terrible sin. Cheating is a terrible thing. I'm glad I didn't do it. Either way, you see, whether you decide to cheat or not to cheat, you experience cognitive dissonance. And so you get to change attitudes dramatically In either one direction or the other, depending upon that one decision that a person makes.

And in some ways, both those people who are sliding down these opposite ends of the pyramid, unconsciously, what they're really doing is trying to get to a place where they can sleep well at night. So one person is saying, yes, I cheated on the exam, and maybe that wasn't the best thing to do. But on the other hand, I'm going to become an ophthalmologist one day, and I'm going to save people's eyes, and I'll be able to help them see. And I'm going to do all of this good in the world. fact that I had to do a little bit of bad to do all this good is totally worthwhile. And the other person basically says, you know, I'm a moral person because I didn't cheat. And yes, it does mean that I couldn't go to medical school, but isn't being a moral person good for me and good for my soul and ultimately good for society? And both people are telling themselves stories that allow them to sleep well at night.

Exactly right. Exactly right. Now we have this person who's able to think going through this elaborate thing, which is making him feel good about the action he's just taken.

So do you ever wonder, Eliot, given the fact that our ability to study our own minds is something that we are doing with our minds, and our minds, as we are seeing, are sort of these flawed, these flawed machines, it's hard to sort of know what the correct thing is to think in this situation. In the cheating experiment, regardless of which choice you make, you're going to experience cognitive dissonance and you're going to rationalize the decision you've made.

Is it actually absurd to ask what the right answer is?

Because regardless of what you do, your mind is going to come up with a story that tells you it's the right thing to do.

When it comes to making a moral decision, which have— especially one that has consequences for other people, we really have to be very careful. If you're the leader, especially the leader of a country, you have to surround yourself with people who might not always agree with you so that they can point out the flaws in your thinking. Exactly what According to Doris Kearns Goodwin in her wonderful book about Abraham Lincoln, how he surrounded himself with 3 people who ran against him for the presidency of the United States at that time. They were all in his cabinet and he listened to them. I think that's the thing to do. If you surround yourself with yes-men, you're apt in your need to reduce dissonance, You're apt to go ahead and make some terrible mistakes because there's— everybody around will agree with you. When it's an important decision that involves other people, you really have to scrutinize yourself carefully and ask yourself, is this something I truly believe in, or am I simply justifying something that I've done in the past or justifying my own needs for the future? And am I fooling myself to make myself feel a little bit better? These are the important questions we need to ask ourselves when the decision is an important one. If it's a trivial one that only involves myself, cognitive dissonance reduction can be a very useful tool that helps me sleep well at night and help me feel good about the decisions that I've made. It would do no good to worry about that decision afterward and doesn't help anybody.

Cognitive dissonance can seem like a bad thing, and it can in fact have serious consequences. But it is really just a tool in the brain that allows us to resolve seemingly unresolvable issues. When we come back, Elliot shares how cognitive dissonance can be deployed to accomplish important goals. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't We know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince.

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The versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable All season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Elliot Aronson has spent decades thinking about cognitive dissonance. He has explored how our minds come up with justifications for our actions and when those justifications can be harmful and when they can have salutary effects. An early example of the power of cognitive dissonance came in Elliot's own life. Early in his career, he landed a plum job at Harvard University.

I was there for 2 years and was just starting my 3rd year when I was offered a wonderful position at the University of Minnesota. And it was just, it was a dream job. But in order to go there, I had to leave Harvard, which was in most respects a very nice place to be.

Elliot debated long and hard, about whether to make the move.

I finally decided to take that job. And when I got to Minnesota, I realized for the first time, Harvard is a place which is very stratified. There's not a lot of intermingling between the assistant professors and the full professors. When I got to Minnesota, the whole atmosphere was very, very different. Everybody becomes buddies with everybody else, and it— the status of the person makes very little difference. There was a much more democratic atmosphere that I noticed. But of course, as I'm noticing this, I'm aware of the fact that the things I'm doing right now are convincing myself that the University of Minnesota is a great place to be. And maybe I was motivated, highly motivated, to see those advantages.

And of course, if you had stayed at Harvard instead of moving to Minnesota, presumably your mind would have come up with rationalizations about why that was the right decision.

I would assume so. And boy, you know, it's a useful mechanism once you're in it, as long as it doesn't do you any harm. Because it helps you sleep at night.

After Eliot moved to Minnesota, he went house hunting with his wife. As would-be house hunters everywhere often discover, the experience provided ample opportunities for cognitive dissonance.

We didn't have much money, but we wanted to buy a house. And there were only 2 houses that we could afford that we really liked, and they couldn't have been more different. One was near campus. It was a beautiful little Victorian. It was also near an industrial area where Pillsbury was grinding up grain and things like that. And it didn't have much of a yard. But boy, I really wanted that house because it was close to campus. And my image was to have my graduate students come over at 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and we could sit around and drink scotch or coffee and talk about research ideas in my living room. That to me was the ideal of being a professor. The other house was out in the suburbs, a 20-minute drive from campus. It was a Plenty of room, plenty of space. It wasn't— the houses were not cheek to jowl, but they were all separated. Beautiful big backyard, but a very common-looking house. Nothing good about it particularly, but a great place for the kids. We had 4 young kids between the ages of 6 months old and 7 years old, and we needed space for the kids. Oh, and we were near a lake, Lake Owosso. So my wife and I couldn't decide which of the 2 houses to get. We went back and forth several times, and finally we decided on the house in the suburbs for the sake of the children.

It wasn't what Eliot had wanted, but soon enough he began to rationalize the decision. He had to give up that image of himself at the center of a circle of graduate students in his Victorian living room But wasn't this better for the kids? And wasn't that more important? In time, though, the story Eliot told himself about the democratic, egalitarian nature of his Minnesota colleagues and the extra space provided by his suburban home ran into a large obstacle. Even though he was coming to the Midwest from New England, where the winters are hard, it was difficult not to notice the approach of the fearsome Minnesota winter. Soon enough, Elliot's mind came up with a way to grapple with this challenge too.

So what happened was, we bought the house in early November. In early December, about 3 or 4 weeks after we bought the house, I saw an ad in the newspaper for a used canoe, and I went out and bought it. All right. We had this old station wagon with a luggage rack on top. I tied the canoe to the top of the station wagon and drove back to this house in the suburbs, drove into the driveway. My wife sees me coming, looks out the kitchen window, sees the canoe on top of the car, and bursts into laughter. And I go in the house. I said, what are you— what's so funny? She points to the canoe and she says, ask Leon, meaning Leon Festinger. He could tell you why I find it so funny. And of course, as soon as she said that, it dawned on me that I bought that canoe in the middle of winter. Now, winters in Minneapolis last for a very long time. In the wintertime, the lakes are frozen over, frozen so solid that people often drive their cars across the lakes as a shortcut. The unofficial first day of spring in Minneapolis is the first time a car falls through the ice. Okay. And that wouldn't occur. I wouldn't be able to use that canoe on the lake until the middle of May. Sometime. So why did I buy the canoe in December when I couldn't use it till May? Well, maybe there was a bargain price or something. No, that's bullshit. The reason I bought it was because I was unhappy with the decision and I wanted to reduce dissonance by saying, aha, but this house we bought in the suburbs is close to a lake. I'm going to go out there with my kids and— Teach them how to canoe. It's going to be wonderful. We're going to have a great time. It's a beautiful example of cognitive dissonance because at the time I was doing it, I was unaware of why I was doing it. My wife pointing it out to me, I mean, I'm steeped in cognitive dissonance and yet it's an unconscious process. I wasn't aware of it. As soon as my wife pointed it out, I realized I was doing it. And it was a reasonable thing to do. You know, one might say, yeah, but for the next 6 months, that canoe is just going to be taking up space in the garage. No, wrong. It's going to be helping me sleep at night because I can be thinking about, yeah, but I have this canoe and look at all the good things I can do with it, even though it's going to take me a few months before I can start doing that. It has a lot of value.

Yeah.

So this story, it's a charming story and it's a funny story, but you can also see when the stakes are much bigger. If I'm a politician, for example, and I launch my country into war and the war is not going well and things are backfiring on me, I now can either tell myself, I made a dreadful mistake and as a result of the mistake that I've made, other human beings have died and there are families that are going to grow up without a father or a brother or a Or a mother or a friend. And so in order to not feel that, in order to sleep well at night, I say, all right, maybe what I should do is actually send even more troops there so we can finish up this war and come back victorious and everyone will say that I did the right thing. I'm really extrapolating here several orders of magnitude. I recognize I'm doing that, but I think the same mechanisms that happened with you in Minnesota and the canoe happen all the time at much, much bigger scales.

Exactly right. And that's pretty much how I think George W. Bush went through when he invaded Iraq, because he thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass And that was the whole justification for that invasion.

As you may remember, it came on the heels of September 11th, but Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with September 11th, and he didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and they couldn't find them. And when they couldn't find them, George W. Bush was saying, oh, we'll find them, they're there someplace.

We do know that Saddam Hussein We know he was a danger.

But he never did find them. And when the war wasn't winding down as quickly as he expected, he put more troops in and more troops in, did a lot of destruction, both in terms of people and places.

You know, when we first got in there and started looking around and didn't find anything, you get that kind of sinking feeling that, you know, maybe we're not going to find them. Uh-oh. And then, yeah, I felt terrible about it. And on the other hand, those reports did point out that Saddam Hussein was very dangerous, that he had the capacity to make weapons, that— and I'm convinced that if he were in power today, the world would be a lot worse off.

And I think that's the kind of way that cognitive dissonance works on a political level, on an international level. That can be and has been, in my opinion, disastrous.

Why is it that we feel so impelled to self-justify our actions, Eliot? When we're choosing to do something, whether that is to move from Harvard to Minnesota or to marry one person or divorce someone else, why is it that we feel this powerful urge to justify our own actions?

Well, I think we're hardwired to believe that we are good, smart, competent, moral people. Most people think they're better than average in intelligence, better than average as a driver, better than average at most things, so that whenever they do something that seems stupid, incompetent, or immoral, It creates dissonance with that self-concept that almost all of us have, and therefore we need to reduce it. Now, not all people have a high self-concept, but the overwhelming majority of people do, and that's what motivates us.

As he saw how cognitive dissonance worked in his own life and in public life, Elliott started to ask himself a provocative question. It was clear cognitive dissonance was routinely deployed by individuals to make themselves feel better about their decisions. And it was clear that cognitive dissonance could prompt leaders and countries to double down on disastrous policies. But cognitive dissonance in itself was neither good nor bad. So could you use it To do good. That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Elliot Aronson studies how we justify our own actions. By the 1980s, Elliot had moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz. The AIDS epidemic was spreading, and the campus student health center was trying to promote sexual health. The problem was nothing was working.

My students and I did some survey research of college students, and we found that they didn't like to use condoms because condoms were unromantic, There's nothing really sexy about a condom, and they didn't like using them, and they're inconvenient. They were convincing themselves that it was okay, that they were being careful enough. And student health centers were trying all kinds of lectures and education, and none of it was having much of an impact. So they asked me on my campus if there was anything I could do.

Elliott wondered if there was a way to make condoms more attractive. He designed a PSA, a public service announcement, that talked up the benefits of condoms.

But it didn't work, or rather, it worked for a little while. Right after seeing the video, a large number of students began using condoms, but only for a few weeks, And after a few weeks, they stopped doing it. So then I thought, well, we need to find a way to use cognitive dissonance because cognitive dissonance, reduction of dissonance, usually produces long-term effects because the people are convincing themselves to use condoms. They're not using them Because you told them to use them or because you showed them a movie that was trying to convince them to use condoms. It's that they themselves decided to use condoms. Now, how do you do that? It's not an easy thing to set up. So then I began to think you do it by getting a person to try to convince other people to do it, to go out on a limb advocating the use of condoms. And the reason that that might work is that all of the students believed that using condoms was a good thing for other people, but they themselves weren't using it. If they could convince others to use it by implying that they themselves were using it, We would put them in a dissonance situation. They could convince themselves that the use of condoms was really something they should be doing because they already implied that they were doing it. And that's what we did. We got college students to make a videotape, which we helped them make. They composed it themselves, talking about the dangers of AIDS. And the fact that they believed that using condoms was the best way to prevent getting AIDS, to keep from getting AIDS. And we told them that these videotapes that we were making, they were going to be played to high school students as part of their sex education course. And then we tracked their use of condoms. And we found that the number of people who said they were using condoms as much as 6 months later had gone up enormously from about 18%, which it was on our campus, to about 68%, which was a huge leap 6 months later.

In a similar study, Eliot encouraged students at UC Santa Cruz to protect the environment and ease California's famous droughts by taking shorter showers.

Santa Cruz is a very interesting campus. The students all believe in the importance of global warming. They all believe in saving the redwood trees. They all believe in all the environmental issues. But when you ask them to take short showers because of the perennial water shortage we have, they don't do it. Because taking a short shower is more than just getting clean. You can take a 3-minute shower and be pretty clean, but it's a luxurious experience and people enjoy luxuriating in the shower. So then we decided to use the same paradigm we used in the condom experiments, which I call the hypocrisy paradigm. It's making people aware of the fact that they are behaving hypocritically, and the only way to change that is for them to start Behaving in a way that's in line with their public statements. Okay, so in the shower study, I like that study even better than the condom study because we're not dealing with people telling us what they're doing. We're dealing with actual behavior. So what we did was there's a big poster that we were putting up in the field house that said, conserve water. Take short showers. If I can do it, so can you. And then their name is printed in big block letters underneath that sign. And we got people to put their name on that sign that was posted in the field house in public view. And almost everybody that we asked to do that were willing to do it. And then We had somebody stationed in the shower room with a waterproof stopwatch. And as soon as the person got under the shower and turned it on, they started the stopwatch. And as soon as they stopped, they stopped the stopwatch. And the results we got were incredible.

The researchers found that people took much shorter showers when they had made a public commitment to taking short showers. The reason was simple. If I had just publicly declared my support for water conservation and then didn't conserve water when I was in the shower a few minutes later, how would that make me feel?

I would feel like a hypocrite. I just signed that petition. It's up there for everybody to see. It will be up there. There were several of these that we put up. It will be up there forever. I have to start taking short showers. That's the only way I can keep from feeling like a hypocrite.

More recently, Elliott used his research to help get out the vote during the 2012 presidential election. He was concerned that there were efforts underway to suppress the Black vote. A friend connected with President Barack Obama's campaign asked Elliott if he had any ideas to address the issue. For what it's worth, Elliott insists his aim was not partisan. It was merely to encourage people to vote.

I came up with the following plan. You go to Black churches, and on a Sunday, you get the minister to deliver a short sermon in which he talks about voting and the importance of voting. And in effect says to his congregation, a great many of your brothers and sisters died in order to get you the vote. So it's important that you vote in every election, including the upcoming one, and don't let them discourage you from voting. And I want you to all agree now to vote. And all of those who agree to vote, raise your hand. And everybody in the congregation When they did it, raised their hand. Then he said, okay, now, right now, I want you to call 3 of your friends or relatives and tell them exactly what I told you right now, what I just now got through telling you about your brothers and sisters. And I want you to say to them, and make sure you use these exact words, Make sure you vote. If I can do it, so can you. And they did it. They said, if I can do it, so can you, which is the exact same words that were on the poster in the shower room.

The people making the phone calls may have believed they were convincing others, but the real focus of the intervention was to convince themselves.

That's the hypocrisy paradigm, and that increases the probability that they will vote and not let rainy weather or extra hot weather or the fact that they have to drive an extra few miles to get to a voting situation, that none of that will discourage them. They might even have to lose a day's work, but in order to avoid being a hypocrite, My prediction is that a great number of people, a high percentage, will vote. And in every single one of the swing states, the percentage of Black voters capable of voting who actually voted in Obama's second election exceeded the percentage who even voted in his first election. It wasn't a well-designed, well-controlled experiment, of course, but I think it's pretty good evidence that the hypocrisy paradigm worked in getting out the vote.

And so in all these cases here, the goal is not so much that people are convincing others, but that by trying to evangelize to others, you end up convincing yourself. That's the central idea here.

Exactly. And you can see that it follows from— in trying to convince somebody else that it's an interesting thing, you end up convincing yourself. That's powerful.

It's also worth pointing out that in all 3 of these examples that we've looked at, the condom study regarding stopping the HIV virus and AIDS, the shower study of taking shorter showers and conserving water, Turning out to vote. In all these cases, you're actually closing the gap between what people already say their views are and their behavior. So you're not convincing people who are against conserving water to conserve water. You're not convincing people who don't want to vote to vote. You're just telling people, if you already believe this, let's close the gap between your intention and your action.

That's exactly right. You've really hit the nail on the head there. We're not changing any opinion or any attitudes. We're simply making sure we convert their own attitude into action.

Can you think of examples in your own life, in your personal relationships, in your exchanges with your wife maybe, where you say and do something and you realize 30 minutes later, I'm actually— this was actually cognitive dissonance at work and you actually are able to self-correct?

Every married couple has things that they disagree on, and this is an intimate relationship that's fraught with difficulties. And that's why the divorce rate is as high as it is. It's somewhere around 50%, but it's more difficult than that because the percentage of unhappy marriages between 2 people who don't get divorced is quite high also. And the question for me is to be able to have a discussion with my wife that becomes an argument about something we disagree on, and then to step back and to ask myself, now, was I simply protecting my ego here, or is this something that is important in and of itself And my position on this topic is really important and true in and of itself. And under close scrutiny, if I decide I think you were just protecting your ego, then to go back and apologize and say, you know, I was wrong on that one. I think you made the right choice. I think I was doing something else. I was reducing distance. For me, there's nothing that feels better than to be able to do that and to be living among people, my wife and my kids also, who are capable of doing that. It really does make for a much more exciting and much more realistic relationship.

Since Eliot developed the theory with his mentor Leon Festinger over 6 decades ago, the term cognitive dissonance has become an everyday term in households and in organizations. I asked Eliot what he made of the ubiquitous use of the term in everyday parlance.

I think we are living in a time now— this is the time of cognitive dissonance. You know, the term cognitive dissonance 20 years ago was unknown. to the general public. Now you see it every time you pick up a newspaper or a magazine or go on television or on the internet. It's become a concept that's very applicable. This is the time of cognitive dissonance where politically and with the COVID crisis, the pandemic, we're living in a world now, more so than ever, I think, where they're using cognitive dissonance theory to understand the things that are going on around us is terribly important.

In the book that you wrote with Carol, Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made, But Not by Me, you cite work looking at marriages, looking at how regardless of how marriages turn out, people tell stories that explain sort of why it is they've ended up the way they have. And this is, I think, the interesting and fascinating thing about cognitive dissonance, which is People sometimes use cognitive dissonance almost as a pejorative, as a form of name-calling. We basically say, our opponents are engaged in cognitive dissonance. But the fascinating thing, I think, about the work that you and others have done is that it actually doesn't matter which course of life you choose. Cognitive dissonance is still probably going to be at play. You have a happy marriage, you're going to tell yourself a story about why you have a happy marriage.

But the same is true also if you have an unhappy marriage.

Yeah, it's true. But if you have a happy marriage, you don't need a story. Things are just working out. If you have an unhappy marriage, you need a story. You need a story as to why you're staying in it. You need a story as to why you're ending it. And chances are the story is very self-enhancing. I recently wrote an autobiography and Writing that autobiography was such a great learning experience because as soon as I started it, I realized that the trap that any person writing an autobiography falls into is to be reducing dissonance all the time, but not telling anybody that you're reducing dissonance. The tendency is to always put yourself on the side of the angels when you're writing this stuff. And what I kept doing was trying to question myself as to, is this the way it really happened, or is this just a self-serving way of presenting myself? And I became my own severest critic, and anything that didn't really ring 100% true, I discarded. And that's because I think my work on cognitive dissonance made me hypersensitive To what we do all the time in self-presentation, even when we're presenting ourselves to ourselves, even if there isn't an audience for that. And that's a trap that's very, very important to try to avoid. Nobody succeeds 100%. I don't think I succeeded anywhere near 100%. But boy, when I read other people's autobiographies now that I've written one, And I see it all the time. I see failures to examine that process.

Psychologist Elliot Aronson's autobiography is called Not by Chance Alone: My Life as a Social Psychologist. Elliot, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

It was a great, great pleasure to be with you.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero for this episode is Michael Read. Michael works at SiriusXM, our ad sales partner, and helps to shape the advertising that you hear on Hidden Brain. Like many small independent companies, Our advertising revenues keep the lights on. Michael has been a collaborative and helpful partner, especially during a time when advertising revenues have taken a serious hit across the media landscape. If you take it for granted there will be a new Hidden Brain episode in your feed every week, Michael is one of those unsung heroes who makes it happen. Thank you, Michael. If you enjoyed our 2-part conversation on cognitive dissonance, Please take a moment and share it with a few friends or family members. Word-of-mouth recommendations make a huge difference in helping us connect new listeners with the ideas we explore on the show. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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