Dissonant voices

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 10:00:40 +0100

Chris has written a nice piece on our old friend cognitive dissonance although you can get a decent overview from Wikipedia as we would expect from Chris his piece is augmented with interesting experiments and tidbits from the history of science:

When facing a black four of hearts, people would see it either as a four of spades or as a perfectly normal red four of hearts – their expectations about what a four of hearts should look like dictated what they actually saw. As the display times lengthened, people did eventually begin to notice that something was amiss, but they could not determine what was wrong.

Quotes from the transcripts are particularly revealing. One person, gazing at a red six of spades, responded: “That’s the six of spades, but there’s something wrong with it – the black spade has a red border.” Lengthening the display time increased the confusion and hesitation experienced. One exasperated participant reported: “I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what colour it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure what a spade looks like. My God!”

I used to keep a poster on my wall saying "What has cognitive dissonance done for you today?" But it didn't help me much because the trigger was never in the right place when I needed it.

In the future, when a functional MRI scanner can be fit nearly into a hat, maybe we'll all wear dissonance detectors that beep when we fall into such patterns of thinking. I'm not sure if that means we'll all live better lives or go mad from how much dissonance we live with daily. Until then all we can do is hope that our friends (and our enemies) help us avoid the trap.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on cognitive-dissonance

Dissonant voices