Chapter 3
Cognitive dissonance

In this chapter, we will address the contributions of 20th century sociology no longer at the level of understanding group dynamics, but at the level of the functioning of individuals. The book that will serve as our guide is relatively little known to non-sociologists. It is about A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance written in 1957 by Léon Festinger. A French translation was published in 2017 under the name A theory of cognitive dissonance.

Implications of cognitive dissonance on our vision of humans

The theory of cognitive dissonance proposed by Festinger states that an individual experiences stress when two pieces of information brought to his attention are contradictory, dissonant, and that he will therefore seek to make this dissonance disappear. The heart of Festinger's book is a classification of the different methods that the individual can use to do this.
What interests us more particularly here is that often one of the pieces of information comes from the experience of the individual, and the other from an event which suddenly contradicts it. In this case, the rational attitude of questioning acquired experience is actually uncommon. Forgetting the element which brought the contradiction, rejecting its validity under the pretext that it is not completely proven, seeking and adopting new beliefs to reinforce those which have just been shaken, or considering that there is no no contradiction when we generalize, are much more frequent attitudes.

When he summarizes as much as possible, Festinger makes this key remark for the rest of this work: contrary to the received idea of u200bu200ba rational individual who acts according to his reason, scientific observation shows an individual who adjusts his decisions a posteriori. beliefs to justify one's actions.
To illustrate this phenomenon, let's take another look at one of the experiments carried out by Festinger. People are invited to participate in a perfectly boring experiment, for which they are paid, some a small amount, others a larger amount. Then we ask all these people what they think of the experience. The result is that low-paid people express a more positive opinion about the experience. The explanation is that when the sum is not sufficient, individuals seek other explanations to justify their action a posteriori, in this case having agreed to participate in the experiment.
In the same logic of self-conviction a posteriori of one's attitude, if participation in an experience requires more effort, then it will be seen as more interesting.
Here is another less intuitive example of the effect of cognitive dissonance: people having to make a choice between two products will spend all the more time continuing to collect positive information concerning the chosen product after having made the choice, that at the time of choice the perceived merits of the product chosen were not significantly greater than those of the other, so that after a certain time, the gap between the two products will seem greater to them.
In summary, contrary to the idealized vision we have of humans as rational beings at the peak of evolution, Festinger shows us an individual who seeks more to justify his errors a posteriori than to correct them. So he tends to repeat them, and the more he repeats them, the more dissonant, and therefore difficult, going back becomes.

This phenomenon of a posteriori consolidation of choices, regardless of their relevance, has a very serious consequence that is particularly interesting for the rest of this work: what is most difficult is to make an individual change his usual action, even if it is inappropriate and the elements to prove it relatively simple and clear.
Furthermore, what Festinger shows in the 'Maintaining incorrect beliefs' section of his chapter others make the same mistake as us - is often enough to make us collectively maintain an erroneous position. However, most social organization choices are complex, so that simple usage can be enough to maintain the illusion of their relevance. Basically, 'we have always done it this way, so it's good' allows us to evacuate the arguments which call into question the validity of the usage, as long as the situation is complex, that is to say say almost all the time.

Let's continue the list of bad news: once we accept an action under duress, whether it is a strong duress like a physical threat, or a weaker duress like working for a living, cognitive dissonance generally acts in the meaning of gradually making us accept the merits of these actions. We will return to this in the second part of this chapter more specifically devoted to the world of work.

Finally, the problems revealed by cognitive dissonance do not stop at the difficulty in correcting errors. It must be added that the same mechanisms provide the individual with the possibility of freeing themselves from their responsibility cheaply, and thus preserving their good conscience.
For example, the simple fact of not agreeing will tend to be interpreted as exonerating co-responsibility for the actions of the group, even when the person is not firmly opposed, or even opposed at all. Let us quote Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem : “'The internal emigrant' saves his conscience by not agreeing deep within, but without changing his action... so as not to be unmasked! »
Once again, we have the illusion of a rational individual, making choices consciously. This undoubtedly comes from the stories of our childhood, in which the bad guys are aware of their wickedness, and take responsibility for it. However, cognitive dissonance shows us that acting against the interests of others is generally accompanied by lying to oneself, which, using the methods listed in the theory of cognitive dissonance, generally allows the individual to ultimately act in good conscience, all the more easily when the situation is complex.
In other words, the world that is going badly is not the result of a few individuals who consciously do evil like the bad guys in the stories of our childhood, nor even the result of actions of which we are not proud but which we do anyway. by opportunism, but much more the result of the enormous mass of actions that we carry out against the interest of others, and for which lying to ourselves allows us to feel no bad conscience, quite the contrary.

Like Marx and Parkinson, Festinger starts from observations and not speculations, then offers an explanation of the causes, but gives few solutions to change this state of affairs.
What is stranger, given the importance of cognitive dissonance theory for understanding human cognition, is that Festinger forgets to address two important issues related to cognitive dissonance, which will not be addressed further.  by his multiple successors who were content to seek to invalidate or refine the initial theory.

The first question is: Festinger considers cognitive dissonance to be a fundamental constituent of our cognitive mechanics. He also tells us that it is not necessarily the only one, but he does not try to establish the exhaustive list of the constituents of our cognitive mechanics.
We will immediately add the widespread nepotism, or social ambition, which we saw in Chapter 2, and hypothesize that these two elements suffice as foundations on which to build the rest of this book. More precisely, the desire for social advancement constitutes the initial motivation, and cognitive dissonance preserves our capacity for action to achieve it.

The second question is: throughout Festinger's book, the experiences reported are built on a sociological model, that is to say in which what we measure is the proportion of individuals choosing each option proposed . At the end of the book, Festinger approaches the psychological aspect in a naive manner since he only proposes to classify individuals according to their tolerance for cognitive dissonance. What we expected at this level was something much more ambitious, which would have consisted of establishing a new classification of psychological profiles, the scientific basis of which would be its effectiveness in predicting the behavior of an individual subjected to different sociological experiences. .

On the other hand, we find in the later developments of the theory of cognitive dissonance an interesting proposition: the resolution of cognitive dissonance would serve us to preserve our capacity to act by limiting our level of doubt. This argument fits perfectly with the vision proposed in the book The stupidity paradox: The power and pitfalls of functional stupidity at work que nous aborderons plus loin dans ce chapitre.

Having established these two limits in Festinger's work, let us list some consequences to better assess their importance.

The starting point for scientific psychiatry

For the moment, the fact that psychiatry is not yet a science is fairly commonly accepted, and there are three main opposing approaches.
The first would consist of seeking scientific bases for psychiatry from the neuroscience side. The problem is that although neuroscience meets the criteria of the scientific approach, its object of study only covers certain basic mechanisms at work in brain functioning, but not the complex whole that produces our psychology. Wanting to explain psychiatry through neuroscience is a bit like wanting to explain our social organization by only observing the movements of citizens.
The second consists of renouncing the adoption of scientific bases, and considering that therapy is reduced to a verbal doctor-patient interaction which follows conventions based on a simply plausible theory, as in Antiquity, for example psychoanalysis.
Finally, the third is the cognitive-behavioralist approach, which aims to reintegrate the individual by training them, and therefore conditioning them to perform actions consistent with social expectations. The problem here is that the stated objective, to obtain the patient's agreement, is the development of the individual, but as we do not know how to define the behaviors that produce this development in a particular individual, We substitute the behaviors considered the most effective for achieving social success, which we deduce from the observation of individuals who have experienced great success. However, on the one hand absolutely nothing says that these recipes will produce the same effects when they are applied to other individuals, and on the other hand, personal development is not limited to 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, via the establishment of a classification of personalities which would be validated by its effectiveness. to predict the behavior of individuals during different sociological experiments. It now remains to carry out the heavy work of defining these categories or axes, and the tools to characterize an individual. One 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 will be able to maintain an incorrect belief as long as he receives social support, that is to say, if other individuals make the same error as him. 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 It was Japan that won the war.
Also, the remark “we don’t have anything other than psychoanalysis” from the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Pierre Sidon during the show Paths of knowledge of December 11, 2018 seems to us both revealing - we are not looking - and problematic, because it aims to justify the maintenance of psychiatry as the only branch of medicine not subject to the scientific approach, therefore "not effective in everything” to use the words of Jean-Christophe Rufin (1).

To illustrate the relevance of a classification based on the prediction of behavior in sociology experiments, take for example the case of Autism. The American DSM classification ended up more or less giving up on defining this category, given the difficulties in defining the criteria. We propose to define Autism as a weaker motivation for the struggle for social status, that is to say a lesser predisposition to generalized nepotism seen in Chapter 2, as well as a different selection of preferred solutions in case of cognitive dissonance, which obviously remains to be clarified. What is interesting with this approach is that there are no longer normal individuals and defective individuals, but two modes of processing cognitive dissonance which each have their advantages and disadvantages; which explains much better on the one hand the difficulties encountered by autistic people in a society which is mostly not, and in which the rules have therefore been established by non-autistic people, but also on the other hand their social interest in compensate for the lack of rationality of so-called normal individuals that the sociological studies underlying the theory of cognitive dissonance have highlighted, but which psychiatry ignores.
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, therefore dominant, group. And consequently, the second problem is that it therefore creates a bias which leads to characterizing all the 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 which currently prevents psychiatry from becoming a science: psychiatry does not dare to look at - and therefore present to society - the normal individual for what he is, namely very largely irrational, as This is shown by cognitive dissonance theory.

Spirituality as a tool to limit cognitive dissonance

At the level of spiritual practices now, Buddhist non-duality can be reread advantageously in terms of cognitive dissonance. Indeed, it consists of getting rid of the biases identified by cognitive dissonance, that is to say objectively welcoming information that contradicts our past experiences.
Likewise, meditation can be seen as an exercise aimed at lowering the level of general mental tension to then allow dissonant information not to be immediately blocked by a wall of defensive reactions, therefore a tool to help establish harmonious functioning. cognitive dissonance.
However, we will not delve deeper into these subjects here, because we prefer to methodically establish in chapter 22 a minimalist philosophy which takes into account the advances in science through 20th century sociology.

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 firstly interested in actual behavior in very high-tech companies, or in consulting firms with an elitist image and only recruiting after leaving the most prestigious schools: we mainly encounter bureaucracy there. and very ordinary functioning, completely out of step with the external image of the company. Likewise, promotion is officially based on excellence, but in practice on the game of alliances. Then, the book notes 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 culture and methods of the company and losing their critical sense. The book concludes that companies find a certain benefit in terms of capacity for action, at the cost of an increased risk linked to the inability to take into account the warning signs of a catastrophe.
In terms of promotion based on the game of alliances, this illustrates that generalized nepotism is the norm in commercial companies. Young people's rapid incorporation of the gap between discourse and reality perfectly illustrates Festinger's point of ongoing work to reduce cognitive dissonance. An interesting element to note at this level is that when we interview employees and their superior, only the superior needs to lie to himself about the importance of his work, which is generally done by adopting beliefs concerning the virtues of enlightened management. Finally, the conclusion of the book announces that the benefit obtained in return for the increased risk linked to the lack of rationality observed, is the optimization of the capacity for action. This overlaps with the addition in the new edition of A theory of cognitive dissonance.

Now let's 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 Journal of Sociology and titled Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. This is a summary article from which we retain several key points.
First of all, the formal organization of organizations (2) corresponds to the application of good practices whose efficiency is taken for granted without verification.
Then, alongside this formal organization displayed in an ostentatious manner, an informal organization is discreetly set up, necessary because the first does not allow the real activity to be carried out correctly, but without calling it into question. Quite surprisingly, organizations that agree to set up these inefficient formal organizations, based on what the article describes as myths, lose in effectiveness, but ultimately increase their chances of survival, because they create confidence in internally and externally, and thus facilitate their access to financing. Finally, the article reports that the more an organization has incorporated mythical good practices into its formal structure, 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 notes the mediocrity of effective organizations, and the gap between the displayed image and real practices. Like the book, he explains it by the interest that organizations find in it. However, the article leaves several questions unanswered, which we will now attempt to answer.

The first question is: why and how do myths arise?
To answer this, we will use the tripartition of Georges Dumézil which we will explain in more detail in the next chapter. For the moment, let us content ourselves with the simplified representation that our societies are divided into three social groups, which correspond to the clergy, the nobility and the third estate in the Ancien Régime. Let us repeat: if our main motivation inherited from our genetic heritage is social ascension, then, at any time, there are people who seek to bring about a new god, because this allows us to constitute a new clergy, therefore this creates socially elevated places. To understand this, it is appropriate to refer to the notion of clergy in Antiquity, where each god corresponded to one or more temples and the associated clergy, as opposed to our monotheistic Judeo-Christian heritage. In the economic pantheon, we therefore regularly add new gods, such as quality, the corporate citizen, the manager who helps his teams grow, respect for the environment, e-reputation, the integrated management software package, data outsourcing, etc. Each time, standards and diploma training will be put in place to supervise the new field, that is to say protect the new clergy.

Then, what Meyer and Rowan show is that organizations, whether commercial companies or administrations, will not seek to be efficient in different areas, but simply to comply with new constraints, and for that, they will largely be content to employ people with the corresponding diplomas, or apply the standard method of the field, without worrying about its relevance, which leads to the second question: why do commercial companies not fight energetically against these myths, then that they lead to the establishment of ineffective formal organizations which will ultimately reduce their results?
As seen in Chapter 2, to progress socially, what is most effective is to be strategist in the game of alliances. However, going to denounce the absence of usefulness, or rationality, of one of the myths of corporate culture amounts to declaring war on the corresponding clergy, which is generally a bad strategy; so the people who progress the best on 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 manager who would be the sole shareholder of his company, we could say that for him, personal interest corresponds to that of the company, therefore he has less reasons to preserve these myths within his company, since by rejecting them, he could improve his results by limiting the unproductive costs associated with them. However, a company does not operate in isolation, but in close relationship with customers and suppliers, so that the fact of no longer applying the standard will expose the company manager to the risk of having to explain his choices. , therefore to denounce myths, and consequently call on those you speak to to clarify the situation at their level, which they may not appreciate at all.

Which brings us to the third question: Are people who don't call out corporate culture myths doing 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 mythical nature of inefficient formal organizations but presented as good, rational and optimal practices, the more they find themselves in a situation of dissonance between their knowledge and the behavior necessary to be able to make useful alliances in the professional context, therefore the more their capacity for action is reduced. The optimum for successful social advancement is therefore to believe in good faith in the relevance of inefficient formal organizations.
Another indicator confirms the majority's good faith belief in the relevance of inefficient formal organizations. If the banker did not sincerely believe in this, his interest would be to stop financing more widely the companies which most widely implement 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 in cognitive dissonance exposed by Festinger is that it is not a cognitive bias, but the discovery of a fundamental constituent of brain mechanics which explains a large number of these cognitive biases. . We will not seek here to establish an overview of these biases. To do this, consult the corresponding Wikipedia article. On the other hand, we will present three which seem to us to be more particularly relevant to take into account when building a new system of social organization.

The first bias is the overconfidence of the ignorant, more aptly called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Basically, when people are asked to evaluate their ability to solve a problem, the overestimation of their own competence is greater the lower their actual competence turns out to be. Another side of the same effect is our tendency to think that we are more competent than others.
The mechanism of operation of this bias is quite simple to understand: in the vast majority of our analyzes 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 didn't, 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 circumstantial and domain-specific heuristics. What changes in passing is the reliability of the heuristics implemented, and the fact that if we are experts, when the particular case shows specificities which mean that it does not correspond well to any of our available heuristics, we We risk, depending on our psychological profile, either being alerted and switching to a more in-depth analysis mode, or of applying the heuristic anyway because of the cognitive dissonance which tells us that as an expert we cannot not know. On the other hand, the person inexperienced with the subject to be treated applies a broad heuristic which will apply whatever the details of the case to be treated.
The consequence at the level of the system of social organization is obvious: we cannot ask people to evaluate their ability to solve a problem. In the current system, this translates into the tendency to require that the person have the appropriate diploma. However, Meyer and Rowan show that this results in purely formal controls, that is, reliance entirely on the expert on the job. However, we have just seen that in the event of difficulty, there is nothing to say that he will have the social courage to say that he does not know. This is all the more true since others are likely not to encourage him. This is the tragedy now well known to whistleblowers.
But the effect of overconfidence does not stop at technical experts, quite the contrary. At the level of hierarchical management levels, the effect is even clearer, and even more so as one moves up the hierarchy, and cognitive dissonance invites the individual to consider that their 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 that we have chosen to highlight, and whose consequences will apply following the first, is the asymmetry of risk-taking expressed in prospect theory. This theory says that we seek above all to maximize the probability of a gain, and to minimize the probability of a loss, but not to optimize the probable 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 the prospect of gain, we do not take enough risk and seek to gain something more or less definitely, even if it is not much, and conversely, when faced with the prospect of a loss, we take too much risk and seek to avoid losing at all costs, even if it means losing a lot when we lose. The second side is well known to the general public in the form of the syndrome of the gambler who seeks at all costs to remake himself and ends up losing everything.
In terms of the world of work, this will translate on 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 'most likely to work'. On the other hand, when we see that a past choice has turned out to be bad, the preferred decision will not be to recognize the loss and then start again on a healthy basis, but to bias all subsequent decisions with the aim of make the initial error disappear or minimize.

Finally, the third cognitive bias, which we will qualify as symbolic evaluation bias, corresponds to the observation that when choosing a product or a complex alternative, we tend to base our decision on a few qualities perceived by different products or alternatives, whereas in use, what will determine our satisfaction is much more the absence of defects in the product or alternative chosen. The initial reason for this methodological choice is quite obvious: anticipating possible defects requires having considered all aspects, while choosing more or less arbitrarily a certain number of evaluation criteria makes it possible to reduce the complexity of the decision-making process as desired. . Where there is bias is that if by force of circumstances we decide to evaluate in a simplistic manner, we should then also modify the evaluation method in order to take this over-simplification into account; for example, by favoring the possibility, ease, and low cost of adapting the product a posteriori. Or by organizing a field experiment before the final decision to make the defects visible. However, we see that in practice, the over-simplification of the decision-making process is not taken into account. This is particularly clear in the choice of computer software, which has become extremely complex products. Everything happens as if what the decision-maker was looking for was 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-making process.

Conclusion

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

If we were to remember only one thing about cognitive dissonance, it is the fact that we cannot trust a person simply because they have the required skills, and even less because they has the corresponding diploma. This will become even more obvious in the next chapter which will illustrate all 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 involving the community.

(1)
Jean-Christophe Rufin, during his conference at the Collège de France on January 23, 2018. He is not talking specifically 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 both businesses and administrations.

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