A Meditation on Cognitive Dissonance

I haven't posted in awhile, but I am working on improving my writing by making sure to sit down and write something every day whether it is post worthy, or not. These have been mostly stream of consciousness meditations simply to get some thoughts out and to explore future topics of writing. I try to give a speech every two weeks at my Toastmasters club, and that has definitely taken time away from writing for this blog, and I am trying to do some research for a book or paper I want to write about the evolutionary significance of cognitive dissonance.

Today's meditation seemed to come out as a ready-made blog post, so here it is.

I was going to start out today’s writing by asking “what is it about people that they can’t consider alternate explanations when the evidence is overwhelming.” Of course I know the answer: cognitive dissonance. Again I engaged in discussion on a controversial topic on a friend’s Facebook page. The topic: flu shots.  

He assumed that it was stupid that a doctor had said: “Despite getting the flu shot, my family still got the flu. This only reminds me why I get the vaccine. Because the flu stinks." I left a rather long comment describing why this actually demonstrates how the vaccine works over the population.  

My friend has his beliefs, and while there may be some cognitive dissonance involved in the persistence of these beliefs, education is really the issue here: he doesn’t know how vaccines work, and it is a difficult and complicated thing to understand.  

What isn’t hard to understand is that correlation does not infer causation.  You will often hear people tell you that they know someone who got the flu directly from the flu shot.  I can understand why you might think this: a virus is a very simple organism, made up of RNA, and maybe it can mutate so that it will become virulent.  However the virus in the shot is not only inert, it is not even complete.  

I’m sure that it could be possible for this section of RNA to attach to something else and begin to replicate itself, but the likelihood that this resultant organism would also become a flu virus is on the order of zero.  

I bring this up because one person on my friend’s thread said exactly that: “I know several people who have gotten the flu from the flu shot.” Ok. How do you know that they got the flu from the shot? Instead of answering that question she stated that she finds it “exhaustingly repetitive that people with no direct knowledge of a specific situation tell you you don't know what you are talking about when you do have direct knowledge of a specific situation”.

I am sorry about that.  However I don’t see how I need to know the situation to call into question how one can be certain of their conclusion.  If you know, and accept, the the virus is inert; if you know, and accept, that it would take an astronomically unlikely event to change this fact; and you also believe that this has happened more than once… to people that you know, you should be able to come to the conclusion that, perhaps, they just got the flu.  The only thing that would keep one from making the deduction that they, in fact, just got the flu is a little irritation in your anterior cingulate cortex which initiates a fight-or-flight response.  This allows you to effectively battle the new belief, and make decisions based on your original belief.  

There are at least two evolutionary advantages to this response. One is that you won’t waste time and energy worrying about decisions that don’t matter: for the overwhelming majority of decisions made throughout our evolutionary history our original belief was at least good enough to get us through. Any difference in quality between two possible choices were overshadowed by the value of just making a decision and moving on.

The second has to do with the value of winning, or at least not losing, an argument.  For most of our evolutionary history we have not dealt at all with objective facts simply because we did not have the precision to measure them, and so they were not useful.  What is useful, in a tribal-social environment, is the maintenance of status.  You don’t maintain status by easily giving into another’s point of view, even if it may be slightly better worded or reasoned.  You maintain status by winning, and your body keeps you from losing by reacting to the possibility of losing in the same way it reacts to a real and mortal threat. Of course the cost of losing status could very well be death when resources are slim. We aren’t made to be totally cooperative creatures.  We are not built for objective reasoning.  The fact that we are even capable of it on any level is what is strange.  Perhaps it is a byproduct of our necessary capacities for logic, which we have needed to become good hunters and gatherers, and tool makers.

Cognitive dissonance only seems like an impedance in our postmodern society where we trade more in ideas and knowledge than we do in real social status.  And, based on our recent experiences in our political system, it has become a very large impedance indeed.