Chapter 3  
Cognitive Dissonance

In this chapter, we will explore the contributions of 20th-century sociology, not at the level of understanding group dynamics, but at the level of individual functioning. The book that will serve as our main thread is quite unknown to those outside the field of sociology. It is A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, written in 1957 by Leon Festinger. A French translation was published in 2017 under the name A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.

Implications of cognitive dissonance for our view of humans

Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance states that an individual experiences stress whenever two pieces of information presented to him are contradictory and dissonant, and will then seek to eliminate this dissonance. The core of Festinger's book is a classification of the various methods individuals can use for this purpose.  
What particularly interests us here is that often one of the pieces of information comes from the individual's own experience, and the other from an event that suddenly contradicts it. In this case, the rational attitude of questioning one's own experience is actually quite rare. Forgetting the element that introduced the contradiction, rejecting its validity on the grounds that it is not fully proven, seeking and adopting new beliefs to reinforce those recently shaken, or considering that there is no contradiction as long as one generalizes, are far more frequent attitudes.

When he summarizes to the maximum, Festinger makes this key point for the rest of this book: contrary to the common idea of a rational individual who acts according to reason, scientific observation shows an individual who adjusts their beliefs a posteriori to justify their actions.  
To illustrate this phenomenon, let's take one of the experiments conducted by Festinger. People are invited to participate in a perfectly boring experiment, for which they are paid, some a minimal amount, others a more substantial one. Then, all these people are asked what they think of the experience. The result is that those who are poorly compensated express a more positive opinion about the experience. The explanation is that when the amount is not sufficient, individuals seek other justifications to rationalize a posteriori their action, in this case having accepted to participate in the experiment.  
Following the same logic of self-conviction a posteriori of one's attitude, if participating in an experiment requires more effort, it will be seen as more interesting.  
Here is another less intuitive example of the effect of cognitive dissonance: people facing a choice between two products will spend more time continuing to collect positive information about the chosen product after making the choice, especially if at the time of the choice, the perceived merits of the chosen product were not clearly more important than those of the other, so that, after a certain period, the gap between the two products will seem greater.  
In summary, contrary to the idealized view we have of humans as rational beings at the top of evolution, Festinger shows us an individual who is more interested in justifying their mistakes a posteriori than in correcting them. Therefore, he tends to repeat them, and the more he repeats them, the more going back becomes dissonant, hence difficult.

This phenomenon of a posteriori consolidation of choices, regardless of their relevance, has a particularly heavy and interesting consequence for the rest of this book: the hardest thing is to change an individual's habitual action, even if it is inappropriate and the elements to prove this are relatively simple and clear.  
Moreover, what Festinger shows in the 'Maintenance of incorrect convictions' section of his chapter X is that, in the case of complex situations, simple social support - i.e., the fact that others make the same mistake as us - is often enough for us to collectively maintain an erroneous position. Since most organizational choices in society are complex, the mere fact of habitual practice is enough to maintain the illusion of their relevance. In short, 'we have always done it this way, so it is good' allows us to dismiss arguments that question the validity of the practice, as long as the situation is complex, which is almost always the case.

Let's continue the list of bad news: as soon as we accept an action under coercion, be it a strong constraint such as a physical threat, or a weaker constraint such as working to earn a living, cognitive dissonance generally acts to progressively make us accept the justification of these actions. We will come back to this in the second part of this chapter, which is specifically devoted to the world of work.

Finally, the problems revealed by cognitive dissonance do not stop at the difficulty of correcting errors. We should also add that the same mechanisms provide the individual with the opportunity to escape responsibility at low cost and thus preserve his good conscience.  
For example, the mere fact of not agreeing will tend to be interpreted as exonerating the co-responsibility of the group's actions, even when the person did not firmly oppose them, or even oppose them at all. Quoting Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: 'The 'inner emigrant' saves his conscience by not agreeing within himself, but without changing his actions ... so as not to be unmasked!'  
Once again, we have the illusion of a rational individual, making conscious choices. This probably comes from the stories of our childhood, in which the villains are aware of their evilness, and assume it. But cognitive dissonance shows us that acting against the interests of others is generally accompanied by a lie to oneself, which, using the methods listed in the theory of cognitive dissonance, allows the individual to act in good conscience in the end, the easier the more complex the situation is.  
In other words, the world that is going wrong is not the result of a few individuals who do evil consciously, like the villains in the stories of our childhood, nor even the result of actions we are not proud of but still do for opportunism, but rather the result of the huge mass of actions we carry out against the interests of others, and for which the lie to ourselves allows us to feel no bad conscience at all, quite the opposite.

Like Marx and Parkinson, Festinger starts from observations and not from speculation, and then proposes an explanation of the causes, but offers few solutions to change this situation.  
What is more surprising, given the importance of cognitive dissonance theory for understanding human cognition, is that Festinger forgot to address two important questions related to cognitive dissonance, which his many successors will not address either, contenting themselves with trying to invalidate or refine the initial theory.

The first question is: Festinger considers that cognitive dissonance is a fundamental component of our cognitive mechanism. He also tells us that it is not necessarily the only one, but he does not even try to establish an exhaustive list of the components of our cognitive mechanism.  
We will immediately add the generalized nepotism, or social ambition, that we saw in chapter 2, and formulate the hypothesis that these two elements are sufficient as foundations to build the rest of this book. More precisely, the desire for social advancement constitutes the initial motivation, and cognitive dissonance preserves our ability to act in order to achieve it.

The second question is: throughout Festinger's book, the reported experiments are built on a sociological model, i.e., in which what is measured is the proportion of individuals choosing each proposed option. At the end of the book, Festinger approaches the psychological aspect in a naive way since he only proposes to classify individuals based on their tolerance of cognitive dissonance. What we would have expected at this level is something much more ambitious, which would have consisted in establishing a new classification of psychological profiles, whose scientific foundation would be its effectiveness in predicting an individual's behavior under various sociological experiments.

However, in the later developments of the theory of cognitive dissonance, we find an interesting proposition: the resolution of cognitive dissonance would serve to preserve our ability to act by limiting our level of doubt. This argument perfectly matches the vision put forward in the book The stupidity paradox: The power and pitfalls of functional stupidity at work, which we will address later in this chapter.

Once these two limits in Festinger's work are set, let us list some of their consequences to better assess their importance.

The starting point of scientific psychiatry

For now, the fact that psychiatry is not yet a science is widely accepted, and three main approaches oppose each other.  
The first would be to seek scientific foundations for psychiatry in neuroscience. The problem is that if neuroscience meets the criteria of the scientific method, its object of study only covers some basic mechanisms at work in brain function, not the entire complex system that produces our psychology. Trying to explain psychiatry through neuroscience is a bit like trying to explain our social organization by only observing the movement of citizens.  
The second consists in giving up on adopting scientific foundations, and considering that therapy reduces to a verbal interaction between doctor and patient that follows conventions based on a theory that is merely plausible, as in antiquity, for example psychoanalysis.  
The third and final one is the cognitive-behavioral approach, which aims to reintegrate the individual by training and thus conditioning him to perform actions that conform to social expectations. The problem here is that the stated goal, to obtain the patient's consent, is the individual's fulfillment, but as we cannot define the behaviors that produce this fulfillment in a particular individual, we substitute them with behaviors considered most effective in achieving social success, deduced from observations of individuals who have achieved great success. First of all, nothing at all says that these recipes will have the same effects when applied to other individuals, and secondly, personal fulfillment is not summarized by social success.

However, as we have just seen, for more than 50 years, cognitive dissonance has opened up the first possibility of a scientific approach in the field of psychiatry, through the establishment of a classification of personalities validated by its effectiveness in predicting individual behavior during various sociological experiments. What remains now is to carry out the heavy work of defining these categories or axes, and the tools that allow us to characterize an individual. An axis could, for example, be the individual's sensitivity to social support. In chapter 10 ofA Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Festinger explains that the more complex a situation is, the more an individual can maintain an incorrect belief as long as they receive social support, i.e., other individuals make the same mistake as them. The example he takes is that of Japanese citizens living in the United States of America, who requested repatriation to Japan at the end of the Second World War and remained convinced, even on the return boat, that it was Japan that had won the war.  
Also, the remark by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Pierre Sidon in the show Les chemins de la connaissance on December 11, 2018 that 'we don't have anything else [than psychoanalysis]' seems both revealing - we are not looking - and problematic, because it aims to justify the maintenance of psychiatry as the only branch of medicine not subjected to the scientific method, therefore 'completely ineffective' to quote Jean-Christophe Rufin (1).

To illustrate the relevance of a classification based on behavior prediction in sociology experiments, let us take for example the case of Autism. The American classification DSM eventually more or less gave up defining this category, in the face of the difficulty of defining its criteria. We propose to define Autism as a weaker motivation for the struggle for social status, i.e., a lesser predisposition to the generalized nepotism seen in chapter 2, as well as a different selection of preferred solutions in case of cognitive dissonance, which remains to be clearly specified. What is interesting with this approach is that there are no longer normal individuals and individuals with deficiencies, but two modes of processing cognitive dissonance, each with its advantages and disadvantages; this explains much better on the one hand the difficulties encountered by autists in a society that is mostly not autist, and in which the rules have therefore been established by non-autists, but also on the other hand their social interest to compensate for the lack of rationality of individuals said to be normal, revealed by sociological studies at the basis of cognitive dissonance theory, but ignored by psychiatry.  
In other words, the first problem with the current classification is that it is based on a normality whose only objective reality is to correspond to the behavior of the majority group, therefore the dominant one. Consequently, the second problem is that it creates a bias that leads to characterizing all other categories in terms of failures. This is evidenced by the replacement of the word Autism, which literally means centered on oneself, by the expression 'Pervasive Developmental Disorders'. This reveals another obstacle that prevents psychiatry from becoming a science: psychiatry dares not look - and therefore present to society - the normal individual for what he is, that is, largely irrational, as shown by the theory of cognitive dissonance.

Spirituality as a tool to limit cognitive dissonance

At the level of spiritual practices, Buddhist non-duality can be advantageously reinterpreted in terms of cognitive dissonance. Indeed, it consists in getting rid of the biases identified by cognitive dissonance, that is to say, objectively accepting information that contradicts our past experiences.Similarly, meditation can be seen as an exercise aiming to lower the overall level of mental tension, allowing dissonant information not to be immediately blocked by a wall of defensive reactions, therefore a tool to help establish a harmonious functioning of cognitive dissonance.However, we will not go into these subjects in depth here, as we prefer to systematically lay out a minimalist philosophy in chapter 22 that takes into account the advances of science through the sociology of the 20th century.

Cognitive dissonance in the world of work

A direct effect of cognitive dissonance in the world of work is described in the book The Stupidity Paradox: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work by Mats Alvesson and André Spicer. This book is first interested in the effective behaviors in very high-tech companies, or in consulting firms that have an elitist image and only recruit upon graduation from the most prestigious schools: one mainly finds bureaucracy and very ordinary functioning, in complete contrast with the company's external image. Similarly, promotions officially rely on excellence, but in practice on the game of alliances. Then, the book observes that young people who arrive in these companies at the end of their studies, after a period of surprise and disappointment, generally end up adopting the company's culture and methods and losing their critical thinking. The book concludes that the companies find a certain benefit in terms of action capacity, at the price of an increased risk linked to the inability to take into account the signs heralding a catastrophe.At the level of promotion based on the game of alliances, it is the illustration that widespread nepotism is the norm in commercial companies. The rapid incorporation of the gap between discourse and reality by the young perfectly illustrates Festinger's statement of the permanent work to reduce cognitive dissonance. An interesting point to note at this level is that when employees and their supervisor are questioned, only the supervisor needs to lie about the importance of his work, which is generally done by adopting beliefs about the virtues of enlightened management. Finally, the book's conclusion states that the benefit obtained in return for the increased risk linked to the lack of observed rationality, is the optimization of the ability to act. This coincides with the statements of the addition in the new edition of A theory of cognitive dissonance.

Let us now turn to the more subtle effects of cognitive dissonance in the world of work. For this, let us refer to the article by John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan published in 1977 in American Jounal of Sociology and titled Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. This is a synthesis article from which we retain several key points.First, the formal organization of organizations (2) corresponds to the application of best practices whose efficiency is considered to be acquired without verification.Next, in addition to this formally displayed organization, an informal organization is put in place discreetly, necessary because the first one does not allow the actual activity to be carried out correctly, without challenging it. Rather surprisingly, the organizations that accept to put in place these inefficient formal organizations, based on what the article calls myths, lose efficiency, but ultimately increase their chances of survival, because they create trust internally and externally, and thus facilitate their access to funding. Finally, the article reports that the more an organization has incorporated into its formal structure mythical best practices, the more objective controls and evaluations tend to be replaced by ritualized and inefficient evaluations: trust has replaced rationality.Like the book The stupidity paradox: The power and pitfalls of functional stupidity at work, the article by Meyer and Rowan observes the mediocrity of effective organizations, and the gap between the displayed image and the real practices. Like the book, it explains it by the interest they find in it. However, the article leaves several questions unanswered, to which we are now going to try to answer.

The first question is: why and how do myths set in place?To answer this, we will call on the tripartition by Georges Dumézil, which we will present in more detail in the next chapter. For now, let us be content with the simplified representation that our societies are divided into three social groups, corresponding to the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate in the Ancien Régime. Let us repeat it: if our main motivation inherited from our genetic heritage is social ascent, then, at any time, there are people who seek to bring forth a new god, because it allows the creation of a new clergy, hence creating socially elevated positions. To understand this, it is necessary to refer to the notion of clergy in antiquity, where each god corresponded to one or more temples and the clergy associated with them, by opposition to our monotheist Jewish-Christian heritage. In the economic pantheon, we regularly add new gods, such as quality, the citizen company, the manager who grows his teams, respect for the environment, e-reputation, the integrated management software, data outsourcing, etc. Each time, norms and certified training will be set up to frame the new area, that is to say, to sanctify the new clergy.

What Meyer and Rowan show is that organizations, whether commercial enterprises or administrations, do not aim to be effective in the various fields, but simply to conform to the new constraints, and to do this, they will largely be content to employ people who have the appropriate diplomas, or to apply the standard method of the field, without worrying about its relevance, which brings the second question: why do commercial companies not fight vigorously against these myths, even though they lead to the implementation of inefficient formal organizations which ultimately minimize their results?As seen in chapter 2, to progress socially, what is the most effective is to be a strategist in the game of alliances. Going on to denounce the lack of usefulness, or rationality, of one of the company's culture myths, is declaring war on the corresponding clergy, which is generally a bad strategy; thus, the people who progress the best in the social ladder avoid it. In other words, they simply put their personal interests ahead of those of the company.If we now consider the case of a business owner who is the sole shareholder of his company, we could say that for him, the personal interest corresponds to that of the company, so he has less reason to preserve these myths inside his company, since by rejecting them, he could improve his results by limiting the unproductive costs associated with them. However, a company does not function in isolation, but in close relation with customers and suppliers, so not applying the norm will expose the company owner to the risk of having to explain his choices, therefore denounce the myths, and as a result, challenge his counterparts to clarify the situation at their level, which they may not at all appreciate.

This brings us to the third question: do the people who do not denounce the company's culture myths do so out of opportunism and hypocrisy or in good faith? It is at this level that we find the strong link with cognitive dissonance. The more individuals are aware of the mythic nature of inefficient formal organizations but presented as good practices, rational and optimal, the more they find themselves in a dissonance situation between their knowledge and the necessary behavior to be able to pass the useful alliances in the professional context, therefore the more their ability to act is impaired. The optimum for succeeding in social ascension is therefore to genuinely believe in the relevance of inefficient formal organizations.Another indicator confirms the majority good faith belief in the relevance of inefficient formal organizations. If the banker did not genuinely believe in them, his interest would be to stop financing more broadly the companies that implement the most widely these inefficient formal organizations, contrary to what Meyer and Rowan observe.

Other cognitive biases

The list of scientifically validated cognitive biases is long. The interest of the cognitive dissonance presented by Festinger is that it is not a cognitive bias, but the discovery of a fundamental component of the brain's mechanics that explains a large number of these cognitive biases. We will not attempt to establish an overview of these biases here. For this, refer to the corresponding Wikipedia article. However, we will present three that we find particularly relevant to consider when building a new social organization system.

The first bias is the overconfidence of the ignorant, more doctly called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Basically, when we ask people to evaluate their ability to solve a problem, the overestimation of their own competence is the greater the weaker their actual competence is revealed to be. Another side of the same effect is our tendency to think that we are more competent than others.The mechanism of functioning of this bias is quite simple to understand: in the vast majority of our analyses and decisions, we apply heuristics, that is to say, tricks to avoid having to deal with the problem in all its complexity. We save our cognitive effort, and if we did not do so, we would be very slow and very tired at the end of the day. If we are inexperienced in a subject, we use general heuristics, and if we are experts, we use much more specific and contextual heuristics. What changes in the process is the reliability of the heuristics implemented, and the fact that if we are experts, when the particular case shows specificities that make it not correspond to any of our available heuristics, we may, depending on our psychological profile, either be alerted and switch to a more in-depth analysis mode, or still apply the heuristic because of the cognitive dissonance that tells us that as an expert, we cannot not know. On the other hand, the person inexperienced in the subject applies a broad heuristic that will apply regardless of the details of the case to be treated.The consequence at the level of the social organization system is obvious: we cannot ask a person to evaluate his ability to solve a problem. In the current system, this is translated by the tendency to require that the person has the appropriate diploma. However, Meyer and Rowan show that this has the consequence of purely formal controls, that is to say, we completely rely on the on-site expert. However, we have just seen that in case of difficulty, nothing allows us to say that he will have the social courage to say that he does not know. This is even more true since others are very likely not to encourage him to do so. This is the well-known drama of whistleblowers.But the effect of overconfidence does not stop with technical experts, on the contrary. At the hierarchical management levels, the effect is even more pronounced, and the higher the hierarchy, the more the cognitive dissonance invites the individual to consider that his place necessarily corresponds to exceptional skills, and that the only justification for his position and his exceptional salary becomes his 'ability to make decisions'.

The second bias we have chosen to highlight, whose consequences will apply to the continuation of the first, is the asymmetry of risk-taking expressed in prospect theory. This theory states that we mainly seek to maximize the probability of a gain and to minimize the probability of a loss, but not to optimize the likely gain or loss, that is to say, the gain multiplied by its probability or the loss multiplied by its probability. Put more simply, when faced with a gain perspective, we do not take enough risk and seek to gain something more or less for sure, even if it is not much, and conversely, when faced with the prospect of a loss, we take too much risk and seek at all costs to avoid losing, even if we lose a lot when we lose. The second side is well known to the general public in the form of the gambler's syndrome who seeks at all costs to get back and ends up losing everything.At the level of the world of work, this will be translated at two levels: on the one hand, a certain conservatism at the time of decision-making, which generally leads to the adoption of a mythical solution as described by Meyer and Rowan, seen as the solution 'that has the most chances of working'. On the other side, when we notice that a past choice has turned out to be bad, the preferred decision will not be to acknowledge the loss and then start afresh on sound bases, but to bias all subsequent decisions in order to make the initial error disappear or minimize it.

Finally, the third cognitive bias, which we will qualify as the symbolic evaluation bias, corresponds to the observation that at the time of making a choice of a complex product or alternative, we tend to base our decision on a few perceived qualities of the different products or alternatives, whereas in practice, what will determine our satisfaction is much more the absence of defects of the product or the alternative chosen. The initial reason for this methodological choice is quite obvious: anticipating potential defects requires having considered all aspects, whereas arbitrarily choosing a certain number of evaluation criteria allows reducing the complexity of the decision process at will. The bias is that if by force of things, we decide to evaluate in a simplistic way, we should also then modify the evaluation method to take into account this oversimplification; for example, by prioritizing the possibility, the ease, and the low cost of adapting the product afterwards. Or by organizing a field experiment before the final decision to make the defects visible. However, we observe that in practice, taking into account the oversimplification of the decision process does not happen. This is particularly clear at the level of the choice of computer software, which have become extremely complex products. Everything happens as if what the decision-maker is looking for is to give the illusion of a rational decision, and not to make a rational decision. From our point of view, this means that what Meyer and Rowan observe at the level of the production process in the company is also true at the level of the decision process.

Conclusion

The process of irrational resolution of cognitive dissonance ultimately appears to us above all as the tool of blindness, and therefore of good-faith lying, that is to say, a limit imposed on rationality to favor the game of alliances, and therefore social advancement. However, this contradicts our intuition, which is the result of an education leading us to assume that lying only occurs in bad faith (3).

If for the sequel one could only retain one thing from cognitive dissonance, it is the fact that one cannot trust a person simply because they have the required skills, and even less so because they have the corresponding diploma. This will become even more evident in the next chapter, which will illustrate all of this by dissecting effective decision-making processes. A credible social system aiming to benefit everyone from progress must therefore necessarily put in place an efficient mechanism to verify each reasoning leading to a decision affecting the community.

(1)Jean-Christophe Rufin, during his lecture at the Collège de France on January 23, 2018. He does not specifically talk about psychiatry, but about medicine as a branch of the humanities, that is to say, medicine not subject to the scientific method.

(2)Organizations means companies as well as administrations.

(3)This education that leads us to associate lying with bad faith is itself the result of a long philosophical tradition, which starts with Plato and continues with the Stoic Marcus Aurelius then Descartes. This tradition would have it that the only real obstacle to clear-sightedness is ignorance. In other words, it presupposes that any man has the possibility of making an informed decision as long as he takes the trouble to study the subject properly. The only other obstacle considered to this natural clear-sightedness are the passions.However, cognitive dissonance is the science that refutes this reassuring belief in a much more fundamental way, by revealing other mechanisms leading to self-deception. For example, chapters 2 and 3 of Festinger's book address the consequences of decisions and show a distortion of reality resulting from anxiety and not from passion.