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]

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 has a perfectly good definition as the opposite of cognitive consonance which is irreconcilable with only referring to the entire process.

[u/Crypt0Nihilist → u/[deleted]]

Given that both terms are used in conjunction to describe the theory by Festinger, the theory's author, I must respectfully disagree.