You don’t really mean….?

Cognitive Dissonance;

I keep running across this term over in King Alfred’s various writings.
When I do, this quote from The Princess Bride comes to mind…“

You keep using that word — I do not think it means what you think it means.â€?

According to King Alfred (If I’m reading him right.) People who do not accept his world-view are automatically cognitively dissonant. You know; the world where aliens are running around rudely giving people involuntary colonoscopies and cutting up cows in the middle of the night. The reality where there is SO much evidence of the ETH that only a complete moron would fail to believe just like King Al does.

You know! That one!

Cognitive Dissonance is more like George Orwell’s concept of doublethink. The ability to hold two or more conflicting ideas but compartmentalize them so that they do not overtly conflict with one’s thinking. A person who is cognately dissonant will self-filter information (as in not reading conflicting papers or writings) and/or they will actively lie to themselves thus reducing their internal conflict.

This is a very good rendering of the idea.

An example used by Festinger (1957) may assist in elucidating the theory. A habitual smoker who learns that smoking is bad for health will experience dissonance, because the knowledge that smoking is bad for health is dissonant with the cognition that he continues to smoke. He can reduce the dissonance by changing his behavior, that is, he could stop smoking, which would be consonant with the cognition that smoking is bad for health. Alternatively, the smoker could reduce dissonance by changing his cognition about the effect of smoking on health and believe that smoking does not have a harmful effect on health (eliminating the dissonant cognition). He might look for positive effects of smoking and believe that smoking reduces tension and keeps him from gaining weight (adding consonant cognitions). Or he might believe that the risk to health from smoking is negligible compared with the danger of automobile accidents (reducing the importance of the dissonant cognition). In addition, he might consider the enjoyment he gets from smoking to be a very important part of his life (increasing the importance of consonant cognitions).

So, in UFOlogy, people who habitually lie to themselves and others, people who refuse to read stuff that might go against their ideas, people who constantly and systematically distort information so that good-facts happen to correspond with their local beliefs. People who (for example) make up their own private lexicons (thus helping them distort that truth.) People who (for example) ignore the overwhelming *lack* of hard evidence for the ETH ….are being cognitively dissonant!

That’s pretty cool! I like it!