The Harmony of Cognitive Disonance

Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person "holds two cognitions (beliefs, thoughts, or attitudes) that are psychological incsonsitent or...incongruent with their behavior" (Tarvis 200). You can use cognitive dissonance to end nasty habits. For example, smoking a pack of cigarettes and hearing that smoking causes your lungs to turn into "blackened swiss-cheese sacs" from the sulfur dioxides, tar, and toxins creates cognitive dissonane with smoking. You can continue smoking but that behavior will not have "consonance" or harmony with one's actions.

Another psychological tendency that arises is "hindsight bias". Hindsight bias is when we say "I knew that was the answer" when we are watching Jeopardy and here the answer read out loud. Hindsight bias distorts the facts of what happened by knowing in hindsight what did happen.

Many times hindsight biases clash with what other people say. For example, hindsight bias can distort the driver of the car to say that the cat stood in the driveway before he turned, while a bystander could say that he swerved into the cat. The contradictory stories create cognitive disonance of that situation. This type of cognitive dissonance can be, fortunately, avoided when people examine reality, abandon (but never deny the powerful impact of)subjecive interpreations, and move towards a harmonious whole. Alternatively, one could recognize that all situations inevitable have alternate perspective realities, so everything is in cognitive disonance, but knowledge of that somewhat chaotic state "in hindsight" creates a kind of prescient consonance...and my brain just short-circuited.

It's great to know about the combination of different realities and how they can interact and potentially dance with each other.