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Sunday May 19th 2019Tim
Candler9
Cognitive
Dissonance. Your correspondent is inclined to use the
word stress in a most random manner, it's also true that
aging brain cells tend to revert and stress is one of
the words that sounds right for a fourteen year old
looking for a reason to avoid visiting his cousins. The
professionals, however, have indeed defined stress as a
feeling of pain and pressure. Stress can be motivating,
in the sense of adaption and reaction to the world
you live in. And the pain and pressure of stress can be
mentally and physically debilitating. In many ways it's
how you deal with stress that marks the distinction
between Eustress which is positive stress and Distress
which is negative, more destructive stress. And
certainly it's an easy distinction to make from the
comfort of a bubble bath with a good view of a distant
calamity in an ant heap, yet in the area of cognitive
dissonance, I'd argue Eustress and Distress are
necessary areas of consideration. Prior to the 1950's
people reckoned on thinking in terms of Behaviorism,
which basically says that our behavior is a response to
stimuli within the environment and we determine our
behavior based on our past experiences and the various
reinforcing mechanisms of behavior that surround us.
Then a man called Leon Festinger. and others. suggested
with us people the whole response to stimulus and
reaction thing was considerably more nuanced, so much so
we people are downright diabolically devious. They'd
studied an Apocalyptic Cult that had been much
influenced by Hubbard's Dianetics, which is all about
getting rid of that source of every ailment physical and
mental. The Reactive Mind, they argue, is an unconscious
stimulus/reaction response and a part of the mind that
should be totally ignored. For cult members, the end of
the world was nigh on December 21st 1954, people had
sold their possessions, got all ready for it, but
nothing happened, no rapture, no flood, same old same
old. Far from discouraging the cult members, the failure
of the prophecy served to reinforce cult members belief
in their leader, who claimed the world had obviously
been saved by the 'force of good and light' and cult
members became ever more fervent in their determination
to spread the word about the majesty of their calling.
Many would just say the gullible are anomalous, and you
can't really build useful theories around people who
could be totally Nuts.
Past
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Not Festinger and
his collaborators, because the cult they'd studied was a
real world thing that happens far to often. In the book
When Prophecy Fails, Festinger and his collaborators
reached five conclusions about how and why it was the
cult didn't drift off into nowhere, it's actually still
around today, and you can certainly still find Hubbard's
Dianetics happening in Scientology. The first
conclusion, was that the Belief had to be held with
conviction and the belief had to be motivating in terms
of the believers actions and behaviors. Secondly, the
belief had to have produced actions and behaviors that
were difficult to undo, you sell all your stuff and your
option is to either react to the stress by feeling like
an idiot, or carry on believing in your 'firmly' held
conviction by finding other reasons why it makes sense.
The belief has to be sufficiently specific so that when
something happens that runs entirely contrary to the
belief it has to be obvious that something went wrong,
i.e. the end of the world didn't actually happen.
Finally believers have to have support from other
believers, so they can scurry around like ants trying to
put the eggs back in the bowels of the Ant heap where
they could be kept safe from little boys with sticks.
From this work, Festinger proposed the idea of Cognitive
Dissonance. A person, he argued, likes to feel a good
balance between his or her beliefs, ideas and values,
it's a satisfied feeling, nothing wrong with me, and the
high odds are that all of us have contradicting beliefs,
ideas and values. "Though Shalt not Kill" "Nothing wrong
with a bit of an eye for an eye even if some might by
mentally disabled or innocent." Festinger suggested that
when the mind contains contradicting, beliefs,
ideas or values it gets stressed out when presented by
in you face facts or events that challenge a persons
beliefs, ideas or values. So what does a mind, (the
cognition) do to relieve the pain and pressure of the
contradiction (the dissonance)? Eustress, good stress,
would be to add new parts to cognition, try to make
sense of it all, adjust to the circumstance cognitively
and that way ease the pain. Distress, a more negative
response, would be to avoid the awkward facts and
circumstances, just carry on in a "let's not talk to
them shall we" kind of way, which could well serve to
increase the magnitude of Cognitive Dissonance, and soon
enough you're living in Fairy Land which is not
necessarily an adequate response to the longer term
demands of the ever changing and very real environment
we have lived in and whether we like it or not will have
to continue to live in. I'm told Scientology is big in
Hollywood, where dreams come true.
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