Why did you do that? - Cognitive Dissonance and Character Motivation

I’ve been struggling a bit this year so far. To say anything.  Aethelread posted a disturbing entry to his blog yesterday, filled with honesty at how he is feeling (great bravery and detachment), so I thought I could perhaps make more of an effort myself.  Time Traveller asked me if I was writing recently, and I replied something along the lines that I had very little time, hardly any focus and zero ideas.  This is true.  She seems to be barrelling along with a fury, which is righteous news, writing wise, as she’s so good. I hope for a barrelling period of my own sometime soon.

In the meantime…

It’s been biblical, the rain, here.  On and off, that 40 days and 40 nights.  I start to wonder if it’s washing me away, that being dry inside is some form of illusion.  I read a quote the other day by Orson Welles about the idea that you’re born alone, live alone and die alone, and only the illusion of friendships and family keep you sane…along those lines. I was really struck that he called friendship and family an illusion.  I’ve long been convinced of the born, living and dying alone bit.  If you’ve ever had a fit of depression or sadness you see quite clearly that you are utterly alone, that that is no illusion at all.  But I’ve never seen the friendships I’ve made as illusory.  They are real enough.  (And family – what trouble they can be – they definitely aren’t illusion!)

But Welles has a point.  I don’t think any relationship is what you think it is, as you can’t see into other people’s heads.  Even if you sat down with your best friend, or your partner, and had a brainstorming session where you swore to be utmost honest, and made ground rules for your relationship where you both by the end, have some sort of list and are on the same page with core values and beliefs, assumptions, basic ways of viewing the world; so that even if you disagreed with one another, you would at least understand each other…I still maintain you would likely not have a clue at all as to what’s truly going on in your friendship or relationship.

I was talking to Fry yesterday.  He is walking a torturous winding way and has been for sometime.  It’s a shame you cannot save your children from the pits you fell into, that people cannot learn lessons at second hand.  Still.  Fry postulated that most of my friendships and all my relationships have worked along a pattern whereby I think in my head that its ‘us against the world’.  A unit.  Two freaks together, navigating an uncertain and scary world, but together in seeing the joy, having moments of wonder.  And that if someone then does something contrary to my idea of them, it breaks my ‘siege mentality’ and throws me completely.  Leaving me lost.

That has happened twice in close friendships recently.  It leaves me feeling a bit like an idiot, a bit disillusioned and unclear.  Mixed signals flying about all over the place.  I'll give you an example of one of the incidents.  Someone being nice to me in quite a genuine seeming way though they know they have done something that has really upset me.  I expressed it, fully and clearly – and got…practically zero reaction.  I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to do with little explanation, hardly any expression of remorse, and being left with the feeling, due to another’s calmness, that I am merely having a tantrum by myself.  Instead of a legitimate reaction to ( a repeated) wrongdoing.  I then start twisting myself into a pretzel trying to understand why the person did what they did, what their state of mind could have been.  I try to understand.  I try to understand the lack of reaction, of talking.  I make little lists in my head – doesn’t want confrontation, feels explanation won’t be listened to, is very angry and doesn’t want to say something that will be regretted, or conversely, actually doesn’t really care much at all about the issue and thinks I’m making a storm in a teacup, so the best way to blow over it is to just act all business as usual.  Which would explain their being as nice to me as usual – as if I hadn’t just expressed great upset and disquiet.

The person in question isn’t usually a game player either.  If anything, they are sometimes in ignorance of their actions’ consequences for others.  I don’t suspect (I think) any great masterplan to freak me out or control me via withholding of reaction – as if I’m an actor performing to a mannequin and getting nothing back to work with, no two way street.

In a way, this is all great writing stuff.  My total confusion at other people’s motivations and actions, my attempts to understand.  The contradictions of someone knowing I am angry with them and not seeming to care enough to address it at all, but being perfectly pleasant as they usually are – as if nothing at all had happened.  Bit of cognitive dissonance there on my part for sure.  I remember saying ages ago that I was going to do a post about cognitive dissonance and I never did.  Maybe this is a quick post about that, then.  Not a proper one, as I don’t feel in the mood to relate any experimental examples.

Cognitive Dissonance was proposed by Leo Festinger in the late 1950s.  It’s basically the sense of acute mental discomfort you experience when you experience or do something that is contrary to your beliefs or expectations.  Something did not turn out the way you thought it would.  That’s a massive over-simplification, but here’s a very ordinary example so you see what I mean, one that’s happened to me and probably some of you in the past –

"Imagine that you prepared at great length for a dinner party at your home. You constructed the guest list, sent out the invitations, and prepared the menu. Nothing was too much effort for your party: you went to the store, prepared the ingredients, and cooked for hours, all in anticipation of how pleasant the conversation and people would be. Except it wasn't. The guests arrived late, the conversations were forced, and the food was slightly overcooked by the time all of your guests arrived. The anticipation and excitement of the great time you were going to have are discordant with your observation of the evening. The pieces do not fit. You're upset, partly because the evening did not go well, but also because of the inconsistency between your expectation and your experience. You are suffering from the uncomfortable, unpleasant state of cognitive dissonance."
(Cooper, 2007)[1]

Now, Festinger went on to state:

"Festinger's insistence that cognitive dissonance was like a drive that needed to be reduced implied that people were going to have to find some way of resolving their inconsistencies. People do not just prefer eating over starving; we are driven to eat. Similarly, people who are in the throes of inconsistency in their social life are driven to resolve that inconsistency. How we go about dealing with our inconsistency can be rather ingenious. But, in Festinger's view, there is little question that it will be done."
(Cooper, 2007)[2]

He thought that people could not exist with the uncomfortable feeling of knowing things were not as they thought or needed to think they were, with themselves. E.g. man thinks of himself as environmentally friendly, buys car he believes is sound to these principles; later finds out it does not do good mileage and will harm the environment more by excessive use of fossil fuels (ah, should’ve got electric car, he kicks self, knows that now…but he took price into account, oh dear oh dear).  Festinger would say that in order to square the man’s view of himself with his actions and their unforeseen consequences, he is going to have to find a solution.  He can’t just leave it as it is.  He’ll have to get another car, along with all the time, loss of money through part exchange and general hassle this will cause.  But he will likely endure this discomfort because he wants to stay true to the principles he has chosen for himself: it’s important to feel consistent, authentic to self, true. 

Festinger would call this trying to achieve consonance, recalibrate his internal sense of who he is, what he does, what he’ll accept.  If he can’t change the car, he’s going to have a problem, he’s going to have to find somesort of rationalisation about it.  If there’s no money to do a further change, he’ll possibly have to try and be philosophical – I have learnt my lesson here, I’ll do better research next time, this experience isn’t wasted, I’ll make sure my next car (in 10 years or whenever) is highly efficient and environmentally friendly.  In the meantime I’ll try and use this one as little as possible, and …recycle more, or something.  I am a good person, I am I am.  See the sort of thing I mean?

I am experiencing cognitive dissonance myself here, as a person was not the way I thought.  And I am having a troublesome time trying to achieve consonance about it.  My own feeling of a sort of sad subsiding into a sense that I will never know, because I think they just are not going to want to explain themselves.  That apparently I’m not worthy of explanation.  That creates one of my usual steady sinkings into a good bit of unhelpful self loathing. On the other hand – I could rationalise that I am merely allowing myself to be upset[3].  I could take a leaf out of the other person’s book, they who briefly apologise with very little explanation indeed and simply move along; knowing that if I choose to remain friends with this person it is (highly) likely (I would say) that this behaviour that upsets me will be repeated at some point in the future.  But that they have other good points that I am also taking into account.  So maybe I choose to remain friends as I really and genuinely value these points.  Let they who are sinless cast the first stone etc etc.  I’m not perfect either.  In fact, as we all know, I’m a bit of a pill most of the time. 

I could say all that, in an attempt to recalibrate.  I’m not sure if it feels true yet though. I feel like the whole situation needs more investigation.  But I don’t think the other party wants to play ball with my desire to analyse or understand.

Which brings me back to Welles.  The illusion of friendship??  Maybe some are illusory, no matter of how longstanding.  Or maybe parts are illusory.  Maybe no matter how much we try to be awake to our own preconceptions, and biases, our own wishes and casting of people around us partially into roles of saviour or sinner or martyr or gogetter…no matter how complex we try and allow for them to be, as complex as ourselves – perhaps we simply can never have a proper friendship with someone because we just do not know what they are really about.  So any or all parts of the friendship will be built around houses made on sand.  Illusion.  Pattern making filling in the blanks.  Likely erroneously.  Cause for dissonance.

And as Fry said, breaking my siege mentality leaves me saddened and quiet, and alone.  But it’s nothing I didn’t know, right?  It is highly possible I knew about this flaw (its happened before in a smaller way) but didn’t want to know it again, so allowed myself to forget, spinning myself my little tales of solidarity and sisterhood, togetherness, likemindednness.  Which were only partially true.  Maybe I was half asleep.  Foolishly.

I wish I was strong enough to be awake all the time, and to not be saddened by the actions of others when they do not turn out to be as I fondly thought.  I wish I could just say – ok, you can’t be trusted on that issue, or, you’ll always be a loose cannon where that’s concerned, though reasonable and kindly in other ways.  Like someone who’s nice when they aren’t drinking.  Or your old granddad who’s really nice apart from those really nasty inappropriate racist/homophobic comments he comes out with sometimes.  I wish I could separate people’s bad points from their good ones and yet accept the whole.  Not be surprised by either.  I suppose it’s a goal.

And in the meantime – I have some interesting character stuff to write about don’t I?  We all have people we know that we don’t understand half as well as we think we do.

The trick would then be to put the detachment hat on and actually be capable of writing about it.  Instead of feeling sad and alone and sitting here simply relating the matter slightly evasively.  I haven’t learned that trick either – though I did used to have it, so its there somewhere.  I used to be able to fictionalise anything that happened to me to be able to make sense of it.  In one way or another.  Annoyingly, I think this would take more time than I have in this case.  So these preliminary notes will have to do.  And I shall continue to sit here, confused, rather sad, and very quiet.  In a state of dissonance.[4]

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[1] Cooper, J. (2007). Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory. London: Sage Publications. 

[2] I think some forms of depression are strongly linked to being in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance: you can’t make any rationalisation that feels good enough as to why things aren’t as you thought they were (or imagine they should be).  You can’t marry it up, so you remain confused, and for some people, in a state therefore of perpetual internalised self rejection…a sort of mind dysmorphic disorder (whoa – I’m making up my own helpful pyschobabble labels now!).  Just thinking aloud.

[3] One of my past partners was a master at telling me all my upsets with him were a result of this: me ‘allowing’ myself to be upset.  He was never even 10% responsible for anything that ever went wrong between us.  Couple this with a stance of ‘you mental patient, me caring psychiatrist’ and you can kind of see why that relationship didn’t make it to the truly longterm…

[4] http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html
Try this very good link if you want to read more on the subject than I’ve had time to tell you about today.

The Perils of Having More Than One You

I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think you think I am.

~ Charles H. Cooley, 1902[1]

So.  Son Number One hates the blog.  Ouch.  He doesn’t think it sounds like me, and was expecting to see lots of our private jokes there.  I pointed out that (a) they’re ours, hence private ‘in’ jokes, which would (b) make them really boring for other people to read.  But he wouldn’t be persuaded.  I do believe he found it straight up boring.  OUCH.

I’m going to take the bad/sad thoughts I could have from that and turn them over to something else, instead.  Hence…

It reminds me that I (we?) have different voices for everyone.  This one is genuine, and I think it’s the voice I use with most of my friends.  The ones that let me waffle on, obviously.  Otherwise it would be very bitty.  It can’t be the voice I use with Son, though I thought it was.  It’s definitely not the voice I use with two very different friends, off the top of my head.

I have one friend, Alias Dreamer, who keeps me company on some of the days I stay in my head because the outside world is not liking me (or vice versa).  My imaginary Lands have had picnics with him there.  Stanley comes sometimes (though he likes to sit on the overcast beach and play guitar, mostly by himself), but Dreamer is the one who really likes to be with me here.  We tend to talk gibberishly playful nonsense; he cheers me up.  Then there’s Alias True, who comes from far away.  I have exceptionally formal conversations with him, because to him, words must be very carefully used.  They are very important and catch our essences.   We analyse, we speculate, we digress, we try and see how things work.  Two completely different tones there, alone.

Are  those different tones I/we use with different people actually almost whole separate selves, or just aspects of ourselves?  Fiction writers, to take an example, rely on being able to utilize many aspects of themselves for part of character creation:

This is, metaphorically speaking, the fission approach: an atom may be split into several, during which an enormous amount of energy is released. Fyodor Dostoyevski split his personality into many fictional ones, all of them as temperamental as he. Mel Brooks, the comedy writer and movie director, thinks this is the primary way to write: ‘‘every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities, and have them relate to other characters living with him.’’[2]

I’m pretty sure we all do this, not just people that bother to write stories.  William James, American philosopher of the 1890s, said a person ‘has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind’[3].  He wasn’t the first to suggest this; it’s been noted for a long time.

There’s more to it than that, though.  In the eighteenth century the good Scottish moral philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith had the idea that people get their recognition of themselves, almost their sense of self, from other people, largely:

Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with a mirror which he wanted [note: as in didn’t have] before.  It is placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with.  This is the only looking glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct.[4]

Those ideas, those of James, the Scots philosophers, George H. Mead, and the writer of the excellent tongue twister at the beginning of this post, Mr Charles Cooley, led to an idea called the ‘looking glass self’ – that we get our senses of self from interactions with others; we take our opinions of ourselves even, from the judgements of others[5].  So I succumb to thinking my blog is shite, because an important mirror to me, Son Number one (and we are usually in accord in most things) didn’t like it.  I feel oddly better about this mechanism, by simply understanding where I’m getting it from.  Because I find these concepts useful.  Its like worrying about an illness – be it minor or serious, once you have some information about it, some labels, some concepts to think within or around or against, you feel a bit better, more in control.  (At least, control freaks like me do.)

You can directly affect the way people feel about themselves by giving them a good or bad mirror.  Just so you don’t have to take my word for it, think about two of those deliciously daft experiments psychologists get up to. 

First, there was the excellently named Mr Videbeck experiment in 1960.  It was one of those set-ups where there were some students in a ‘speech class’ (real students), who were told a visiting expert on speech would be popping by and assessing their reading of a poem, for voice control and emotional expression.  Of course, that session of the class was an experiment and the expert was a cohort of the psychologist.  The students did not know this.  Each of them, regardless of actual performance, was assessed randomly – half the class were given a rave review; the other half disapproved of.  Before and again after the experiment, the students had to rate their own view of their capabilities.  After the experiment, unsurprisingly, those who had been rated highly had an increased view of their own abilities.  Those who had been rated badly had lost some self-esteem on the subject.  Especially when related to voice control – as you could argue that emotional intonation in a poem is a subjective thing; but voice control…the students judged this as something someone else could be objective about.  So the ‘expert’s’ opinions affected them[6].

And it’s not only that, you don’t even have to talk to someone to affect them.  You just have to Be There.  Other people not only provide a mirror on yourself, they provide a comparison between you and them.  Another brilliantly named psychologist, Mr Festinger, in 1954, proposed that we all have a need to have outside validation of ourselves and our abilities.  (This morning, I caught myself by email begging Alias Dreamer to follow this blog, after far too many cups of coffee.  I came out with: I am but an unidentified mass needing public validation (no personal identity to speak of), so do reflect me back on myself, it'll make me feel like I exist.  And winky emoticon.  That is why I usually only drink the one cup of coffee in a day.)

Mr Festinger’s idea was that this measuring of ourselves against others occurred most strongly when there was no objective physical standard to judge events by (like, the Moh Scale for the hardness of minerals, or the Richter Scale for earthquake magnitude).  Some things aren’t quantifiable physically, absolutely (like, how to have a successful relationship, how to bring up a child).  So you look to other people for comparison (and if you can’t find a comparison, your thoughts might likely shift about fluidly, till you did).  Social Comparison Theory, it’s called[7].  And we can also call it Keeping Up With the Joneses, for short.  Its one of my favourite theories to read about, because I see it happening all the time, everywhere.

The second experiment was dead simple[8].  You get an unwitting succession of students to wait in an area in a university, for what they think is a job interview (they are in the dark again). They fill out a chart (the baseline measure, but they don’t know this) which is about their self esteem.  Then, randomly, each applicant would be assigned another ‘applicant’ to wait with (yes, the other ‘applicant’ was the psychologist’s colleague, acting).  One of the assigned applicants would be ‘Mr Clean’ – well turned out, carrying shiny briefcase, philosophy books, statistical books.  The other half of the poor students would wait with ‘Mr Dirty’ – who had no socks, only battered shoes, was dressed very drably, and carried a battered old novel that he slouched over like a grumpy teenager.  You don’t even really need me to tell you how this affected the students waiting with each assigned stoodge.  You know that the ones who sat with Mr Clean felt thoroughly worried and crappy about their own prospects of getting the job when they filled out the form again afterwards.  And the ones who sat with Mr Dirty felt full of optimism…he couldn’t possibly get the job, could he?  Oh, the power of spin. 

Most importantly, was that the people affected most one way or the other by the terrifying social comparisons we all make everyday, were those who had an ‘inconsistent or poorly integrated self-concept’[9] anyway.  The most vulnerable.  Possibly due to the fact they had already experienced Bad Mirroring frequently in the past, so were uncertain enough to keep looking for outside validation; those were Festinger’s thoughts, anyway.

So where have I waffled to?  I said we have many parts of ourselves (and I write with lots of mine).  That we have different faces or voices for different people (explaining son’s not recognising me when he thought he would).  I suggested that a lot of these selves we relate to others with, are also partially formed from how they see us, mirroring back what we are shown by them (doesn’t it get wonderfully circular, off down the rabbit hole).  And from there, that we compare ourselves with others favourably or not (affecting how we judge ourselves).  Self esteem doesn’t just come from within.  If you mix with people, they affect you.  I’d say it behooves us all to try and be a Pleasant Mirror to whoever we meet – just because, in there somewhere, how we behave will be remembered and logged.  We affect other people.  No islands exist.  (If you think you don’t affect other people with what you do…I suggest there’s a ‘-path’ after your name, I just don’t know which one as I haven’t met you.)

Son Number one doesn’t like blog.  My uncertain and shifting self feels wobbly about this.  He didn’t recognise me because I didn’t use the voice he was familiar with and is comfortable with.  So though he judged it as boring (which ouch-ed me), I need not actually take on the judgement of this inside myself.  Because its natural for us to have more than one voice, many selves we show others, and have them in their turn contribute to.  I could get derailed by the Bad Mirror effect I got from Son…or I could just nod and remember that he hasn’t seen all of me.  Who has seen all of people they are close to, really?  That doesn’t make any of the other voices I use invalid.  They’re all me. I wish he liked this one, but the fact that we aren’t the same all the time with everyone means that we won’t agree all the time.  It’s natural and understandable.  And nothing for me to get all worked up about.

There.  Your average person could have gone and gotten a hug, had a quick rant, shrugged and done the next thing.  I over-thought that for 5 pages in Word!  Now I have neck ache.  And I’m hungry.  Time for something different.  Something preposterous.  Where’s my copy of Night of the Lepus?

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[1] Cooley, Charles H. (1902) Human Nature and the Social Order, New York: Scribners (pp.183-184, for specific references to the ‘looking glass self’)

[2] Novakovich, Josip (1995) Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Cincinnati, Ohio: Story Press, ‘Character’ (pp.48–66 – whole section most interesting)

[3] James, William (1892 [1961]) Psychology: the briefer course, New York: Harper Torch Books (p.46)

[4] Smith, Adam (1759), A Theory of Moral Sentiments, London; quoted in Stryker, S. and Statham, A. (1985) ‘Symbolic Interaction and role theory’, in G. Lindsay and E. Arohnson (eds.) The Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol 1, 3^rd edn, New York: Random House.

[5] As an umbrella, these ideas get called Symbolic Interactionism – a big thing in Sociology, as well as a useful idea to think with in Psychology. 

[6] Videbeck, R. (1960) ‘Self-conception and the reactions of others’, Sociometry, Vol 23 (pp.351-9).

[7] Festinger, L (1954) ‘A Theory of social comparison processes’, Human Relations, Vol 7 (pp.117-40). (He did another brilliant theory related to this one, called Cognitive Dissonance - but I'll waffle on that one later.)

[8] Morse, S. and Gergen, K.J. (1970) ‘Social comparison, self-consistency and the concept of self’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 16 (pp.148-56)

[9] Festinger, ibid.  For excellent discussion of all of this, I recommend the now defunct Open University textbooks for course DSE 202, primarily Roth, I. (ed.) (1990) Introduction to Psychology, Vol 1, Hove: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates Ltd in assoc. with the Open University.  Especially the whole of Part II.