Did I finally get what cognitive dissonance is?
Tags: Lessons Learned, Mistakes, First Post, Cognitive Dissonance, Life

As I always look for the things that I think develop myself, I paused for a little bit when I read about cognitive dissonance. The very first thing I discovered after I happily shared my new curio with friends was that I totally don’t understand it, moreover I probably looked like an idiot trying to explain how it works to them. Thus I decided to deepen my knowledge in this area, and I come up with a very funny example of cognitive dissonance from my own life, and how moronic I was managing it. But first let’s take a look at the dissonance itself.

We experience cognitive dissonance in a situation when we receive information or impulses that are contradicting each other. The best example is a parent who beats his kid, and at some point hears that beating kids is bad. It’s obvious that if he’s been doing it, he did not consider it as a bad thing, that’s how human’s consciousness is build. We do what we think is good — or at least not bad. However, when the parent is being told that beating kids is bad (from a neighbour for example), he experiences a cognitive dissonance, and its consequence — mental discomfort. In this scenario it turns out that he was actually doing a bad thing. There is a bunch of ways to get rid of this feeling and our brain takes them automatically. In this case parent is going to reduce mental discomfort very easy by changing one element. He will say he only slapped his kid, he did not beat it. More examples on Wikipedia. What is more, in situations where we act against our demeanour, or when we think one thing and do the other, to reduce the cognitive dissonance we change our demeanour to adjust it to our deeds. Eventually we’ll just find a silly justification for deeds that already has taken their place. What does it mean? It means that when John doesn’t like his job but is still doing it, being asked if his job is interesting he will describe it much more interesting than he really think it is, to reduce his mental discomfort.

Now something from my life.

When I was on the 4th

semester doing my bachelors, I plagiarised one paper. Well, I don’t think I’m any different to my academic fellows. Maybe apart from the fact that I did it fucking bad and they kicked me out from the University. But here’s funny part. I noticed, that when I finally decided to tell someone about it, there was many other things to study, a part time job, and lots of other academic activities around that plagiarism (that was my own way to reduce a cognitive dissonance). Every next chime in a gesture of understanding from whoever was listening to me was giving me a mental release. I simply couldn’t accept the fact that anyone would think I was a lazy bitch who plagiarised some paper and on top of that was a looser who’s been kicked out from the university (that would be not in line with my demeanour — I’m so hard working). Well, I could not be more mistaken. They kicked out from the university a fucking lazy bitch, and the other things to study, a part time job and other academic activities were just some excuses.

Summing up. After a bloomer with plagiarism that suggests that I’m lazy, what is against what I think of myself — my demeanour, I used a variety of excuses, so that I don’t feel that people think I’m a slacker. Which should maybe be replaced with confessing to myself that I have made a mistake, and accept it.