Alternative Editorial: Cognitive Dissonance
From Everyday Health
Sometimes the news is hard to read. Not only for the pain and injustice being reported. But for the cognitive dissonance we are obliged to witness and participate in. By cognitive dissonance we mean the mental conflict that occurs when behaviours and beliefs do not align.
For example, making the headlines in Week 153 of The Shift is the tragic news of a second wave of COVID hitting India so hard that oxygen supplies have run out in major cities and thousands of people are dying needlessly.
In a blink of an eye, another story shows several thousand people marching through Oxford Street in London, demanding the ‘freedom’ not to wear masks.
Both make a call for our empathy but it’s hard to believe they are in the same universe of understanding, as their realities clash so completely. What would the Indian people think of the immense freedoms the marchers have to walk through the streets, having been through a strict lock-down and now majority vaccinated?
And what do the marchers think of the stories coming from India? Is this just “fake news” to them? The new catch-all term that calls out deliberate lies but also helps people to filter out what they don’t want to hear?
What do the passive consumers of this clash now believe our so-called Western value systems to be? Prizing autonomy (meaning not Chinese values) or prizing socialism (meaning, we all need to be less individualistic)?
If this example is easy for you to distance yourself from, more acute forms of media-enhanced cognitive dissonance - where our awareness of the incompatibility of our ideas and values is suppressed, diverted or ignored - are readily available.
For example, take our love of pets and animals, taken to its zenith in every form of digital and media communication available. This sits in the same information space as documentaries of helpless animals being slaughtered unnecessarily cruelly to feed our culinary appetites.
These are two truths that most of us would show empathy for. Yet we cannot – vegans excluded – make ourselves accountable to both at once in our daily behaviour. The conflict exists in our own heads’ (Check the brilliant Cosmic Skeptic for a journey down this lane.) How do people respond to this cognitive dissonance, other than to edit their viewing and live in carefully curated comfort zones, that they then complain are too bubble-like?
There is no easy answer. In this era of ‘waking up’ to the mediascape, the steepest learning curve is grasping that we have all lived in a world of propaganda for most of our lives; and that this has exacerbated our own cognitively dissonant behaviour.
Our societies have been crafted through the stories we read and the belief systems our media upholds – that media itself following the agenda of the elite. We live every day in a way that destroys our own future, leaving us to believe there is no alternative. For any change activist, a course of media studies - which clarifies the relationship between the establishment and the news makers - is the vital first step in challenging power.
In other words, while the problems of media barons and toxic social media might seem like a 21st century phenomenon, they are not. The Social Dilemma – a documentary tracing the trajectory of Facebook and the impact of Zuckerberg’s monetisation of data – describes a new era of media manipulation of the public realm. But can anything ever compare to the 20th Century’s media culpability for turning us all into addicted consumers?
Think of the partnership between business, newspapers and advertising to convince us that buying stuff was the way to get our emotional needs met? A handbag for status, a pair of trainers for achievement, a can of Coke for meaning and purpose – enough to keep us on the hamster wheel for life.
Only now that we are beginning to see how that consumption pattern has also destroyed our planet are we ‘waking up’ to the power of the media to set the narrative that is controlling our actions. Not just setting the rules for social behaviour, but our internal lives – making us want stuff we don’t need and yearn for perfect, selfish lives with no consequences that are not available.
In that context, waking up to media manipulation is a development of our ability to observe our own thinking – a skill that Facebook and other tools of social media have surely enhanced, as they have overstepped the mark. However, for the most part we are not yet able to get free of these external controllers.
Tweeting about fake news is the very demonstration of trying to lift a table while you are standing on it. Everything you say is polarized by the algorithms of the technology you are using. How do you hope to bring people together using a tool whose business model is to drive you apart?
In the midst of this extended moment of self-conscious madness, the Premiership has suddenly taken an unusual turning by announcing a four-day social media boycott. The logic of this is complicated. It comes in the wake of a frankly astounding climb-down by the owners of five Premiership clubs who were planning to join a closed super-league of European clubs to rival the more open and fluid European Championship. The immediate and unanimous condemnation of this proposal by the fans of these same clubs caused the owners to retract their decision within days.
Seeing this, the Premiership has concluded that social media owners – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, others – have the power to create good outcomes for the people, or at least, the power to stop bad outcomes. And if they do, they should also be able to stop abuse and racism by cutting out trolling:
Sheffield United's David McGoldrick, who was racially abused last year, welcomed the move, saying: "It is about time. What has gone off on social media, it has happened to me.
"It has happened to many players. Something needs to happen, it is too easily to get racially abused on there."
Speaking to Sky Sports on Saturday night after scoring in his side's 1-0 win over Brighton, the striker added: "The Super League got cut off in 48 hours, why is racism on the back foot? It is bigger in my eyes."
Again, it’s hard not to empathize with the view that ‘something can be done’. On the other hand, how many books and articles and tweets have warned us about government intervention on social media? Is there not, at this very moment, a growing movement against the claims of ‘woke’ communities - who claim that our ingrained colonial, racist and misogynist culture must change? Priti Patel - a key minister in a government with an 80-seat majority – is about to decriminalize hate crime. In the Western world, one person’s freedom is another person’s prison.
Where are we going with this you might ask? Back to cognitive dissonance – a phenomenon that exists on social media only because it exists in our own minds first. Here is a description by Simply Psychology:
Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviours to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.
Is it possible that demanding social media to change is likely to eliminate the mental discomfort of conflicting beliefs in our society? Or does the history of our cosmolocal lives, in which we increasingly face the consequences of our collective actions in the past both locally and globally, mean it is inevitable that we experience discomfort?
Holding the tech giants to account for amplifying and polarising has a role to play in change. But expecting them to do the job of fixing the basic problem for us, without each of us taking our role in the crises personally, is unrealistic. Like the kind of medicine that suppresses symptoms but does not treat causes, the toxicity will simply re-appear in a different form.
This is one of the reasons a deeper democracy will not be delivered simply by giving more people the chance to vote more often. Everyone having their opinion counted, without any mechanisms for deliberation, is the same as social media allowing cognitive dissonance to continue, without any possibility of a deeper understanding. The fastest way to transformation is for each of us to take response-ability, in some way, for what we see occurring around us - rather than hoping someone else will. We must talk to each other, grasp the complexity, find shared solutions.
For those caught in the crosshairs of debate and on the receiving end of abuse, this may sound utopian. At the same time, the range of new social technologies – human libraries, empathy circles, open-space, liberating structures, people’s assemblies, sensemaker, pol.is – make this a uniquely promising moment in which human understanding can emerge. So long as the tools being used establish reciprocity and relationship between all participants – with no external agent to take the blame for everything – we have a chance of moving forward in ways that impact upon those looming major crises.
This is not likely to occur in any other way than within containers – diverse groups with healthy boundaries – where the effects of what is learnt collectively can be harvested for the benefit of the whole. Here are several blogs about the citizen action networks throughout the UK (and some globally) where this kind of conversation is being enabled.
In this immediate period of easing the lockdown in the UK at least, what better way for communities to come together and start thinking about the future?