That last part about the frogs and dogs is just an example of the type of “word salad” nonsense a person experiencing cognitive dissonance typically exhibits.
Now here’s the fun part. How often do you think normal humans experience this weird phenomenon? If you’re not a hypnotist and not a cognitive psychologist, you probably think it’s rare. But if you have some experience in this domain, you see it as a fundamental human experience. We are always in a subjective bubble of reality of our own making, one which requires cognitive dissonance. So it isn’t rare. It’s the opposite—closer to universal. Understand this and you understand people.
On social media, common sense suggests that political disagreements emerge from different priorities, different information, and sometimes different levels of reasoning skills. Sometimes political debates look like pure teamplay with no regard to reason. But once you learn to spot cognitive dissonance, you realize it explains about 60 percent of all the “crazy” opinions you see.
If you want to burst out of the cognitive dissonance bubble so you can see the world as it is—yourself included—I have a reframe that can help. I wrote this as an absolute to keep it simple, but let’s agree you are not always wrong or always hallucinating.
Usual Frame: Being wrong is embarrassing and should be avoided.
Reframe: Fear of embarrassment forces you to be wrong.
Notice we harken back to the previous reframe about boredom and embarrassment. Fear of embarrassment is the main reason people don’t like to admit they are wrong. And that’s what causes cognitive dissonance. When you discover you were wrong about something important, your brain fixes that for you by hallucinating you were right all along—for reasons that will sound to others like word salad. But imagine if you were never embarrassed in life, about anything. If you were wrong about something, you would simply say so and never fret about it again. If your friends mocked you for being wrong, you would join in the fun.
The opposite would happen if you were susceptible to shame and embarrassment. In that case, your brain might insta-generate a hallucination that you were right all along, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. For example, if you imagined you were a subject matter expert and some non-expert annihilated your opinion in an undeniable way, that would trigger a hallucination. You might hallucinate that your critic is a foreign spy and dismiss them as a troublemaker. You might hallucinate that you “keep answering the question” while never doing anything of the sort. A hallucination can take any form, from a false memory to the false belief that the words you’re saying make sense.
I have a lot of experience identifying cognitive dissonance because I intentionally trigger people into it on X as a demonstration for my followers. I’ve started telling my audience in advance when my debate participant will start the word salad phase, and sure enough, it happens on cue. All I need to do is point out an obvious flaw in an argument. When I’m wrong, the response is a normal counterpoint that sounds sensible, even if I don’t agree. When I’m right, the response reads like a jargon-generator having a meltdown. Very different and easy to spot. A public display of cognitive dissonance is far more embarrassing than admitting you were wrong. Between the two, the latter is easy. It just takes some practice. I recommend putting yourself in potentially embarrassing situations until it becomes easy to ignore the sensation, the same way you hone any skill—you train. You test. You experiment.
I use another hack as well, which you might be able to replicate in your own way. I repurpose my “mistakes” into content for my daily livestream shows, which makes me more relatable to the audience. They also create a learning opportunity. Why was I wrong? What illusion bamboozled me? What gap in my reasoning skills caused the problem? By turning my mistakes into content, I can welcome them instead of hiding from them. Cognitive dissonance gets no problem to solve in my case—I need no illusions to explain my place in the universe because I know everyone makes mistakes. My self-image stays intact, so there is no trigger for hallucinating.
You don’t have a livestreaming show (probably), so that specific hack won’t be for you. You can still generalize the concept for presenting yourself to others. Do you have an “always right” brand that would make you vulnerable to a better argument or better data? When the “always right” are proven wrong, they hallucinate. But if you can, for example, cultivate a reputation that can handle being spectacularly wrong without offending your sense of self, do that. It will make you the only person in the room who can see the whole field. Others will be obsessed with being right, and that becomes the fuel for their own hallucinations.
I also recommend detaching your sense of self from any “team” in politics. The moment you join a team, your brain will start feeding you one hallucination after another about the wonderfulness of your side and the horribleness of the other. That’s why I don’t identify as Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. If any group comes up with a good idea, my brain won’t fight it. That means no trigger for cognitive dissonance.
I can almost hear your thoughts as you read this, screaming at me in your head that I have no way to know if I have reduced my cognitive dissonance with the techniques I described. Maybe I am having the sort of hallucination I keep assigning to others. How would I know?
You get an A+ for that insightful criticism. By definition, a person experiencing cognitive dissonance does not know it is happening. I would be no different. It’s within the realm of possibility that I wrote this entire chapter while hallucinating.
See what I did there? I admitted I could be hallucinating. That’s a hack for reducing the odds of it happening. When you accept your human nature, you remove the need to defend yourself to avoid embarrassment.
If you have a strong opinion about something and see a trigger for your own cognitive dissonance, don’t ignore it. And if you disagree with someone spewing word salad and see the trigger for them, you’re probably right about who is hallucinating.
My final note on this is that I have never seen anyone get talked out of cognitive dissonance. The best you can do is put a crack in the wall and hope that someday makes it easier for the sufferer to break out on their own. I mention this so you don’t get frustrated by thinking you are in a debate with a reasonable person when nothing of the sort is happening.
How to Start Something Big
Have you ever wanted to do something substantial in your personal or work life but couldn’t motivate yourself to start? A reframe can fix that.
Usual Frame: The effort is so big and daunting I can’t even start.
Reframe: What’s the smallest thing I can do that moves me in the right direction?
Momentum can often create more momentum, especially if you find “fuel” along the way, like the way some video games work; you can only complete your mission if you find energy sources as you go. I treat the real world as if it’s that kind of video game—by starting journeys without knowing how I’ll get the fuel to complete them. I have faith that good projects become somewhat self-fueling, so after an initial nudge, they will start dragging me along for the ride. Instead of draining my energy, they become suppliers.
Take the writing of this book as an example. Do you have any idea how hard it is to write a book? IT’S REALLY, REALLY HARD. It’s so hard I generally take a few years off after writing one. And I suspect I never would have written a second book if I had accurately remembered how hard the first one was. I’ve written a dozen books or so, not counting the fifty(ish) Dilbert comic reprint books. At this point in my career, I have a full understanding of how hard the book-writing process is—in the sense that I could explain it to you—but I still have partial amnesia about HOW BAD IT FEELS when doing it. Instead of treating that memory problem as a defect, I reframe it as an advantage. It’s how I trick myself into succeeding. It’s a two-step scheme: