Is “Facts First” Always the Priority?

While two opposed ideas can simultaneously be true, the human brain often struggles to consider the middle ground between them. In 1957, psychologist Leon Festinger founded dissonance theory, observing that when two cognitions, or elements of knowledge, are opposite to each other, one may feel psychological discomfort, motivating the person to reduce the dissonance so that their cognitions become consistent, often leading people to avoid information that increases the dissonance. 

In 1959, using an induced compliance paradigm, Festinger and James Carlsmith asked 71 students to complete the monotonous task of repeatedly moving and turning square pegs and then tell the next group of participants the tasks were interesting. Half of these students were given $1 and the other half were given $20. When asked afterwards about how enjoyable the tasks were, the group given $1 rated it a 1.35 on a scale of -5 to 5, and the group given $20 rated it a -0.05. Festinger and Carlsmith concluded that participants experienced dissonance between telling a group a certain task was interesting while they found it boring. The group given $1 forced themselves to rationalize their judgments to convince themselves the task was enjoyable, while the group given $20 found that the money they received was sufficient justification for their lies to promote the experiment, and did not feel the need to justify their enjoyment in menial tasks. This is the basis of the induced compliance paradigm, where an individual is told to express an attitude that violates or contrasts their attitude, in which they become more positive towards the idea to reduce the intensity of the dissonance. 

In Festinger’s book, When Prophecy Fails, he writes, “A MAN with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” A meta-analysis named, “Feeling Validated Versus Being Correct” systematically reviewed studies and calculated effect sizes to assess individual preferences in information with respect to their attitudes and beliefs. The study found that people are almost two times more likely to select information similar rather than different to their pre-existing beliefs because selecting similar information allows individuals to feel validated about their perspective and maintain stable views of the world. 

Additionally, in a 2019 study observing participants with varying support of Donald Trump, psychologists looked into the belief disconfirmation paradigm by presenting either an article about his sex scandal or a neutral article about space exploration, meant to act as a control group. This reading was followed by an anti-Hillary Clinton meme that called attention to her scandal where she, as Secretary of State, used an email server instead of the federal server for communications about classified information, with a series of questions asked afterwards. The results indicate that those with high favorability toward Trump and high belief in the veracity of the article had higher intentions to share the meme than those with high favorability and low veracity. For those who did not read the article, the main effect observed of favorability on intentions to share the meme was favorability towards Trump. The psychologists concluded that participants who supported Trump, and were confronted by his immoral and illegal actions and believed the information, felt dissonance evoked by this belief disconfirmation, and were more likely to respond by sharing a meme that published the illegal actions of his opponent, Clinton. The belief disconfirmation paradigm has been used to prove that when people are exposed to information that challenges their beliefs, they often strengthen and attempt to further rationalize their original beliefs. In this case with Trump and Clinton, subjects who had high favorability for Trump after reading an article about his crimes were able to strengthen their favorability for Trump by increasing their opposition to Clinton. 

The Izuma Lab in Japan has conducted neuroimaging studies to investigate cognitive dissonance through neuroscience research. In 2010, the authors researched the neural signature, or the pattern of neural activity, of choice-induced preference change of participants after they re-rated food in the free-choice paradigm. The traditional experiment for the free-choice paradigm, which is also used for this experiment, is a free-choice study where participants are asked to rate their preferences for a set of goods—in this case, food—choose between two closely rated goods, and rate them again. Individuals tended to increase the rating of the chosen object and decrease the rating of the rejected object, as they are able to reduce the dissonance by associating a lower liking for an object with a rejection, and vice versa. 

The Izuma Lab found that the posterior medial frontal cortex activity reflected the degree of cognitive dissonance. The study looked into the mechanisms of the brain during cognitive dissonance and found correlations between activity in parts of the brain with cognitive dissonance. The activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the degree of cognitive dissonance were found to have a positive correlation. The dACC is a brain region that promotes cognition and motor control, and the activity in the dACC indicated that the dACC responds to the conflict arising from dissonance between individuals’ choices, suggesting it is involved in processing cognitive dissonance. 

While cognitive dissonance is a natural phenomenon of the brain, it is still important to prevent it from blocking new perspectives and information. When it comes to current events, where people often attach emotional significance to their beliefs, those facing new information that contradicts their preconceived notions may immediately shut these ideas down due to cognitive dissonance. However, this failure to process new information without immediately doubling down may be one of the reasons why during times of election turbulence and foreign conflict, rhetoric can be so polarizing and hostile.