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Cognitive Dissonance Quotes

Browse 62 quotes about Cognitive Dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance Quotes

“Reality Check His lying is not contigent on who you are or what you do. His lying is not your fault. Lying is his choice and his problem, and if he makes that choice with you, he will make it with any other woman he’s with. That doesn’t mean you’re an angel and he’s the devil. It does mean that if he doesn’t like certain things about you, he has many ways to address them besides lying. If there are sexual problems between you, there are many resources available to help you. Nothing can change until you hold him responsible and accountable for lying and stop blaming yourself. The lies we tell ourselves to keep from seeing the truth about our lovers don’t feel like lies. They feel comfortable, familiar, and true. We repeat them like a mantra and cling to them like security blankets, hoping to calm ourselves and regain our sense that the world works the way we believe it ought to. Self-lies are false friends we look to for comfort and protection—and for a short time they may make us feel better. But we can only keep the truth at bay for so long. Our self-lies can’t erase his lies, and as we’ll see, the longer we try to pretend they can, the more we deepen the hurt.”

TrustLiesDeceitLieLiarCognitive DissonanceRelationship ProblemsPathological LyingCompulsive Lying
Author:Susan Forward
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“An individual may become aware that their sexual fantasies are racially charged or socially inappropriate. As a result, they might attempt to suppress or rationalize their desire by identifying as a supporter of racial equality or anti-racism. This cognitive dissonance leads to a justification of their fantasies as expressions of appreciation for diversity, rather than as symptoms of internalized racial bias.”

DesireRaceIdentityHuman BehaviorStereotypesSocial PsychologyCognitive DissonanceRacial BiasFetishizationInternalized Racism
Book:The Fetish of Welcome
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“A pompous, arrogant, narcissistic intellectual came up to me at a conference and said rather boastfully. "You must feel really good about yourself to be the nice guy all the time! But let me tell you something - it takes balls to say what's really on your mind. You might have heard, the best defense is a good offense..." He went on and on for a while, and the more he spoke the more his intolerant nature became evident. I listened to everything he had to say, then heaved a soft sight, and replied with a smile. "You are absolutely right! Ama senin gibi şerefsiz olmak insanın lazım yok - porque, no soy un hijo de puta como tú - nu okka chetta na kodakkala behave cheskovachhu, kaani naaku anthaa scene ledu." He looked rather annoyed, because all my words went over his head, so he flared out, "don't beat around the bush, man - say, what you want to say!" I spoke calmly. "I'd love to speak my mind, but I wouldn't want to give anyone an inferiority complex. Bad behavior don't make us cool, it only exposes the fool we are. If bad behavior made the world better, we'd already be living in utopia, instead of still struggling for basic human rights." I didn't want the argument to linger any longer, so I asked him to join me for lunch. You see, self-regulation is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. It doesn't take any character for the animal to be animal, but the true test of character is to behave human, upon conquering our inner animal.”

Human NatureGood And EvilIntoleranceSelf ControlSelf RegulationSelf RestraintBad BehaviorCognitive DissonanceEthics And MoralityPrimitive Urges
Book:Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament
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“Self-regulation is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. It doesn't take any character for the animal to be animal, but the true test of character is to behave human, upon conquering our inner animal.”

Human NatureGood And EvilIntoleranceSelf ControlEvolutionary PsychologySelf RegulationSelf RestraintCognitive DissonanceEthics And MoralityPrimitive Urges
Book:Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament
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“I hate violence - you know why, because I'm afraid - terribly afraid – every single minute of my existence - I'm afraid of myself - I'm afraid of my own rage - I'm afraid, that if I raise my hand at someone, there won't be any trace of them left.”

ViolenceHuman NatureSelf RealizationSelf ControlSelf RegulationSelf RestraintPrimitive Human BehaviorCognitive Dissonance
Book:Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live
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“Що в цей час відбувалось із мешканцями міст? Із тими, які традиційно гидують кров’ю? Бійню своїх співвітчизників вони сприймають з відразою та обуренням, приділяючи достатньо уваги філософським роздумам, історичним паралелям і різноманітним поясненням. Але, коли у ЗМІ з’являються світлини, на яких знавіснілим злочинцем, жорстоким убивцею, є хтось із їхнього народу, а жертва — з іншого, ось тоді наші громадяни (байдуже, чи йдеться про журналістів, політиків, інтелектуалів чи сантехніків) передусім заперечують очевидний факт, стверджуючи, що побачена ними світлина насправді вигадка, монтаж та ворожа пропаганда. А коли вже неможливо заперечувати здійснені жорстокі вбивства, тоді вони починають закидати, що злочин скоїли російські або англійські найманці, лише «аби нам нашкодити».”

WarPropagandaCognitive Dissonance
Book:Жертвам сниться велика воєнна перемога
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“When you get down to it, though, explaining what you believe isn't all that easy. If you say that you believe something to be true, you might mean one of two things—that you're still weighing the alternatives, or that you accept it as a fact. I don't logically see how one single word can have contradictory definitions, but emotionally, I completely understand. Because there are times I think what I am doing is right, and there are other times I second-guess myself every step of the way.”

BeliefsContradictoryCognitive DissonanceSecond GuessingSara Fitzgerald
Book:My Sister's Keeper
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“When there is inconsistency in belief and action (such as being violated by someone who is supposed to love you) our mind has to make an adjustment so that thought and action are aligned. So sometimes the adjustment that the mind makes is for the victim to bring her or his behavior in line with the violator, since the violator cannot be controlled by the victim. Our greatest source of survival is to adapt to our environment. So increasing emotional intimacy with a person who is forcing physical intimacy makes sense in our minds. It resolves cognitive dissonance.”

HealingSurvivalVictimDomestic ViolenceSexual AbuseRapeViolationChild Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsSurvivorsIncestHealing InsightsSexual ViolenceCognitive DissonanceHealing From AbuseChild Sexual Abuse SurvivorRecovery From AbuseStockholm SyndromeEmotional IntimacyTrauma BondingSexual Abuse Of A Child
Book:Tree Leaves: Breaking The Fall Of The Loud Silence
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“The human need to be visible is countered by the need to be invisible to avoid further abuse, and the need for intimacy and the dread of abuse, all pose insoluble dichotomies which promote further withdrawal from human contact, which reinforces the sense of dehumanisation.”

PtsdDomestic ViolenceAbuse SurvivorsDomestic AbuseTraumatizedDehumanizationSurvivors Of AbuseCognitive DissonanceComplex PtsdChild Abuse SurvivorsWithdrawnDehumanisationDehumanizeDehumanized
Book:Introduction to Counselling Survivors of Interpersonal Trauma
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“Most of us do not like not being able to see what others see or make sense of something new. We do not like it when things do not come together and fit nicely for us. That is why most popular movies have Hollywood endings. The public prefers a tidy finale. And we especially do not like it when things are contradictory, because then it is much harder to reconcile them (this is particularly true for Westerners). This sense of confusion triggers in a us a feeling of noxious anxiety. It generates tension. So we feel compelled to reduce it, solve it, complete it, reconcile it, make it make sense. And when we do solve these puzzles, there's relief. It feels good. We REALLY like it when things come together. What I am describing is a very basic human psychological process, captured by the second Gestalt principle. It is what we call the 'press for coherence.' It has been called many different things in psychology: consonance, need for closure, congruity, harmony, need for meaning, the consistency principle. At its core it is the drive to reduce the tension, disorientation, and dissonance that come from complexity, incoherence, and contradiction. In the 1930s, Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Lewin's in Berlin, designed a famous study to test the impact of this idea of tension and coherence. Lewin had noticed that waiters in his local cafe seemed to have better recollections of unpaid orders than of those already settled. A lab study was run to examine this phenomenon, and it showed that people tend to remember uncompleted tasks, like half-finished math or word problems, better than completed tasks. This is because the unfinished task triggers a feeling of tension, which gets associated with the task and keeps it lingering in our minds. The completed problems are, well, complete, so we forget them and move on. They later called this the 'Zeigarnik effect,' and it has influenced the study of many things, from advertising campaigns to coping with the suicide of loved ones to dysphoric rumination of past conflicts.”

CoherenceUnfinished BusinessCognitive DissonanceRuminationOversimplificationZeigarnikIntractable ConflictWhy Writers Write
Book:The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts
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“It is critical to recognize that we live in an increasingly complex world - biologically, socially, politically, technologically, you name it - that holds many inherent contradictions. In the middle of this complex world are we humans, who have a natural tendency to seek coherence in what we see, feel, think, and do. When we experience conflict, this tendency intensifies. Conflict is essentially a contradiction, an incompatibility, oppositely directed forces, and a difference that triggers tension. When we encounter conflict, within the field of forces that constitute it, the natural human tendency is to reduce that tension by seeking coherence through simplification. Research shows that this tendency toward simplification becomes even more intensified when we are under stress, threat, time constraints, fatigue, and various other conditions all absolutely typical of conflict. So what is the big idea? It is NOT that coherence is bad and complexity is good. Coherence seeking is simply a necessary and functional process that helps us interpret and respond to our world efficiently and (hopefully) effectively. And complexity in extremes is a nightmare - think of Mogadishu, Somalia, in the 1990s or the financial crisis of 2009 or Times Square during rush hour on a Friday afternoon. On the other hand, too much coherence can be just as pathological: for example, the collapse of the nuances and contradictions inherent in any conflict situation into simple 'us versus them' terms, or a deep commitment to a rigid understanding of conflicts based on past sentiments and obsolete information. Either extreme - overwhelming complexity or oversimplified coherence - is problematic. But in difficult, long-term conflicts, the tide pulls fiercely toward simplification of complex realities. This is what we must content with.”

ComplexityCoherenceCognitive DissonanceOversimplificationUs Vs ThemIntractable ConflictSocial Conflicts
Book:The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts
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“If a given idea has been held in the human mind for many generations, as almost all our common ideas have, it takes sincere and continued effort to remove it; and if it is one of the oldest we have in stock, one of the big, common, unquestioned world ideas, vast is the labor of those who seek to change it.”

ChangeFeminismRevolutionAnarchySocial ChangeRadical FeminismCognitive DissonanceGender Critical FeminismCarnism
Book:The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture
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“The military estate is the most honored. But what is war, what is needed for success in military affairs, what are the morals of military society? The aim of war is killing, the instruments of war are espionage, treason and the encouragement of it, the ruin of the inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to supply the army; deception and lying are called military stratagems; the morals of the military estate are absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, depravity, and drunkenness. And in spite of that, it is the highest estate, respected by all . . . the one who has killed the most people gets the greatest reward . . . They come together . . . to kill each other, they slaughter and maim tens of thousands of men, and then they say prayers of thanksgiving for having slaughtered so many people . . . and proclaim victory, supposing that the more people slaughtered, the greater the merit. How does God look down and listen to them! . . . Ah, dear heart, lately it has become hard for me to live. I see that I've begun to understand too much. And it's not good for man to taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . . Well, it won't be for long!”

ResignationCognitive DissonancePrince AndreiPhilosophy Of WarDuality Of WarEthics Of War
Author:Leo Tolstoy
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“We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so... I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! "This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico ... They took us over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them." "No, no, no, no," [Carlos replies] "This is absurd don Juan. What you're saying is something monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone." "Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates you? ... You haven't heard all the claims yet. I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradictions between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behaviour. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of belief, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal." "'But how can they do this, don Juan? [Carlos] asked, somehow angered further by what [don Juan] was saying. "'Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?" "'No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous manoeuvre stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous manoeuvre from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now." "I know that even though you have never suffered hunger... you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its manoeuvre is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear." "The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when [the predator] made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat." "There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.”

ImportantReligionDreamsMagicFoodHumanSlaveryChaosAliensCosmosServiceManipulationSecretsProblemsBeliefsCause And EffectOccultPredatorMind ControlVirusAlienShamanismSorceryMatrixAncient HistoryCognitive DissonanceSorcererAnunnaki
Book:The Active Side of Infinity
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“Writer Brigid Brophy exposes [their motives] with great precision: "Whenever people say 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it. These slogans have a long history. After being used to justify slave traders, ruthless industrialists, and contractors who had found that the most economically 'realistic' method of cleaning a chimney was to force a small child to climb it, they have now been passed on, like an heirloom, to the factory farmers. 'We mustn't be sentimental' tries to persuade us that factory farming isn't, in fact, cruel. It implies that the whole problem had been invented by our sloppy imaginations.”

SlaveryAnimal RightsSentimentalVegan QuotesFactory FarmingCognitive DissonanceMeat IndustryFactory Fans
Book:You Don't Need Meat
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“The textbooks also fail to show how the continuous Indian wars have reverberated through our culture. Carleton Beals has written that "our acquiescence in Indian dispossession has molded the American character." As soon as Natives were no longer conflict partners, their image deteriorated in the minds of many whites. Kupperman has shown how this process unfolded in Virginia after the Indian defeat in the 1640s: "It was the ultimate powerlessness of the Indians, not their racial inferiority, which made it possible to see them as people without rights." Natives who had been "ingenious," "industrious," and "quick of apprehension" in 1610 now became "sloathfull and idle, vitious, melancholy, [and] slovenly." This is another example of the process of cognitive dissonance.”

PowerlessnessCognitive DissonanceIndiansNatives
Book:Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
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“If you are fighting "slavery forever" or a modern-day Hitler, everything - including the companion you find yourself in bed with - is a minor detail. It's similar, in many ways, to how evangelical Christians were coaxed by their leaders to set aside the fact that Trump's behavior - the philandering, the alleged sexual assaults, the lying, the cruelty - violated their professed values. To get over all that, they had to cast him, in all seriousness, as the Lord's messy messenger, put on earth to fight God's own doppelganger: the devil. With stakes as high as eternal salvation, what's a little pussy grabbing?”

Cognitive DissonanceValues And BeliefsDoppelgangerMirror World
Book:Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
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“It was Daisuke's conviction that all morality traced its origins to social realities. He believed there could be no greater confusion of cause and effect than to attempt to conform social reality to a rigidly predetermined notion of morality. Accordingly, he found the ethical education conducted by lecture in Japanese schools utterly meaningless. In the schools, students were either instructed in the old morality or crammed with a morality suited to the average European. For an unfortunate people beset by the fierce appetites of life, this amounted to nothing more than vain, empty talk. When the recipients of this education saw society before their eyes, they would recall those lectures and burst out laughing. Or else they would feel that they had been made fools of. In Daisuke's case it was not just school; he had received the most rigorous and least functional education from his father. Thanks to this, he had at one time experienced acute anguish stemming from contradictions. Daisuke even felt bitter over it.”

ValuesEducationYouthMoralityEthicsWesternJapanImperialismModernityCognitive DissonanceConfucianMeijiWesternizationCulture Clash
Book:And Then
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“I think it started to feel like home when I stopped maintaining any pretense that I was ever going to be in the movie business. I went there like many writers - I had a screenplay deal and I would go to these meetings and it was the typical thing. And I hated it. I was not interested in writing screenplays, actually. But I kept feeling like that was what I was supposed to do. It was just this horrible cognitive dissonance.”

ThinkingFeelsWritingFeelingsHomeDealsMeetingsHorribleHatedNot InterestedTypicalMaintainingPretenseScreenplaysCognitiveMovie BusinessDissonanceCognitive Dissonance
Author:Meghan Daum
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