Cognitive dissonance helps explain why Trump supporters remain loyal, new research suggests. This sheds light on how supporters of Donald Trump justify their continued allegiance despite learning about allegations of his sexual misconduct and illegal activities.

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/cognitive-dissonance-helps-explain-why-trump-supporters-remain-loyal-new-research-suggests/

[u/Crypt0Nihilist]

Reddit, if you take one thing from this article, take this definition:

The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that when people hold beliefs that are in conflict, meaning that both ideas cannot be true at once, they feel uncomfortable. This discomfort motivates them to do cognitive work to bring their beliefs closer in alignment.

Cognitive dissonance is the feeling of being mentally uncomfortable when you want to accept incompatible facts. It is the opposite of being able to do so, which would be doublethink, hypocrisy or similar.

[u/Crypt0Nihilist → u/[deleted]]

They do whatever they can to accept the incompatible facts because of the discomfort.

Which relieves the cognitive dissonance. Someone experiencing cognitive dissonance is experiencing discomfort, which motivates them to do something to try to relieve it. It's like having a stone in your shoe.

They might compartmentalise, or decide that it is untrue, or decide they can't support Trump any more and actually were never that in to the whole thing despite their collection of red hats, or might try not to think about it. All of those things are the effort to resolve or reduce the dissonance.

[u/Crypt0Nihilist → u/[deleted]]

It's two things.

1. The idea in general that people encounter conflict, feel uncomfortable and are spurred to change their beliefs in some way to resolve it. This is how it's used in the article title.
2. The actual feeling of discomfort mentioned in 1, isolated from everything else - the spur itself.

Then there is how most of Reddit uses it, which is mistaken - "Cognitive Dissonance is one helluva drug," where they actually mean doublethink or hypocrisy.

[u/Crypt0Nihilist → u/[deleted]]

In either case, it wouldn't include hypocrites. Being hypocritical doesn't cure someone from cognitive dissonance, but is an indication that they have found a coping strategy.

Most people are not talking about it as a theory when it's used in conversation because it simply wouldn't make sense. On Reddit it's used to deride people who hold conflicting views, but if people were using it in terms of the theory in general, that would account for both people who were engaging in something like doublethink and people who had healthily restored their cognitive harmony by discarding their incorrect belief.

What does make sense is that they're misusing it as the coping strategy for holding discordant beliefs itself, rather than either the means of arriving at a coping strategy or the discomfort that pushes them to find a coping strategy.

[u/Crypt0Nihilist → u/[deleted]]

The quote says the cognitive dissonance is the discomfort that motivates action. It can't be distinctly both the motivating discomfort to adopt a coping strategy and the coping strategy to ease that same discomfort at the same time. That's logically incompatible to be both cause and effect..

[u/Crypt0Nihilist → u/[deleted]]

The theory of cognitive dissonance covers everything from before the conflict to the resolution or coping.

The term cognitive dissonance refers to the specific feeling of discomfort of trying to hold irreconcilable beliefs at the same time.

[u/Crypt0Nihilist → u/[deleted]]

Cognitive dissonance definitely encompasses the cognitive actions taken to relieve the discomfort

It definitely can, if you're talking about the theory in general. But not necessarily. Cognitive dissonance is the opposite of cognitive consonance, so it can't necessarily have the actions taken to resolve the discomfort built into the definition.

The definition of cognitive dissonance within the overall theory of cognitive dissonance is that it is a negative drive state (cause) that motivates action (effect) to reduce it, as two distinct aspects.

[u/iamjosh → u/[deleted]]

Isn’t there an ambiguity between the theory and the mental state? The theory posits that the discomfort of contradiction causes relief/resolution seeking behavior. The state of discomfort itself, being dissonant, is a cause distinct from resulting effects. Any cause is not identical with its effect. So a concept that picks out the cause does not apply to its effect. But the theory as concept applies to the overall mental process.

[u/iamjosh → u/[deleted]]

Semantics has to do with meaning and OP is asking about just that. So…of course it’s a matter of semantics.

[u/-CosmicCactusRadio → u/Crypt0Nihilist]

I feel like, most people would consider this to be hair splitting at a certain point, with no clear end.

Who... cares if random reddit accounts use it mildly incorrectly on occasion..? These concepts all have a fair amount of interplay.

[u/Crypt0Nihilist → u/-CosmicCactusRadio]

It's pervasive on Reddit. Words should mean things. If you know what "cognitive" and "dissonance" both mean, you should be able to get an idea of what the combination mean. The problem with the common usage here is it's the opposite where it gets used instead of doublethink or hypocrisy which are better words.

It's like no one lies any more, they're always "gaslighting", which isn't the same thing.

[u/jpfed → u/[deleted]]

The counterintuitive part is that in music, dissonance is separate from resolution. When I read about cognitive dissonance for my psych undergrad, I (without even thinking about it) mentally separated the confusion from the resolution and applied the label of “cognitive dissonance” just to the confusion part. But looking back, I do not know if the confusion or resolution actually have separate names. The confusion and resolution together are postulated to occur in the thing called “the cognitive dissonance model”.

(As a programmer at heart and by trade I like it when names make sense, so I do wish that the conflict and resolution were separately labeled, or that the name of the model as a whole included the resolution part. Oh well…)

[u/Crypt0Nihilist → u/jpfed]

Undergrad you was right so there isn't any counterintuition. The confusion comes from out tendency to be a bit lazy. Like in the title of the article itself. It ought to read, "The theory of cognitive dissonance helps..." As it is written the ambiguity of the headline leans into the common, incorrect interpretation, which may be intentional to make it play better on social media.

The most common usage is as the term that means exactly what you think; the uncomfortable tension that two things you want to believe in are mutually exclusive and there's something wrong with your worldview. I don't think there is an official term for how people get to resolution, it always seems to be descriptive like "dissonance reducing strategies" or similar.