Jakob Sverre Løvstad
CTO, Seema
21 May 2025
My experience so far is that "cognitive dissonance" is a term that many people have heard of. In any case, many people raise their hands when I talk about the phenomenon at various courses and I ask if the audience is familiar with it. At the same time, it's probably also the case that not everyone fully understands what the term actually means and where the concept comes from. Since it's quite highly relevant in both our and other disciplines, I think we should allow ourselves a little wander back to the origins of research in this area.
The first book to address cognitive dissonance was "When Prophecy Fails" published in 1956, written by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter - all very well-known names in social psychology. To summarise the book briefly, it's a description of what happens when our beliefs are confronted with a reality that doesn't conform. Festinger et al looked at a doomsday cult that, since we're all still here, was wrong in its beliefs. The interesting thing, however, was to see what happened to the followers when the world did not end. Of course, there were those who realised their mistake and left the cult. But there were also many who opted for completely different solutions to avoid changing their beliefs. For example, some believed that they had simply got the date of the apocalypse wrong, or that perhaps the cult had saved the earth thanks to their efforts ("pray doomsday away").
This led to the beginnings of understanding cognitive dissonance, or how humans respond when faced with conflicting thoughts. Perhaps more relatable than the apocalypse is when people smoke, but eventually receive irrefutable evidence that it is carcinogenic. At that point, you might say to yourself "I live so healthily otherwise" or "you only live once" if you want to continue with the habit, even in the face of the fact that it's not a good idea.
It was also hypothesised that whether you keep your original perspective or change it has a lot to do with a number of factors such as how invested you are in your own beliefs, whether you are in a group that believes the same as you, how many actions you have taken in line with your beliefs and so on. Obvious enough, perhaps.
Later, Leon Festinger himself, as well as a number of other researchers, spent a lot of time setting up experiments that show precisely how we deal with different types of inner conflict (hint: we're not necessarily very good at it - we prefer to avoid or try to reduce the effect of conflicting information). And a favourite book here is probably "Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts" by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. As the title suggests, this is a (dark but hilarious) description of how cognitive dissonance can lead to some pretty dire consequences when you look at the effects on decision-making, global politics and so on. With accompanying relevant research, of course.
If I may, in all humility, draw the above into the field of diversity, there are some pretty important things to think about, as I see it. As mentioned in several other posts of mine, there are quite a lot of emotions and agendas in all directions in what we work with. And my job is essentially to analyse data and find the statistical truth as best I can for a bunch of organisations. In this, it's actually relatively easy to do the data analysis (it requires a lot of coding and maths, but is very predictable). The challenge lies much more in getting people to recognise what the numbers actually say. Precisely because diversity in various forms is, by definition, different from the majority, dealing with "other realities" is often a major challenge. Not least, we may well uncover issues that are not in line with what the organisation assumes. For example, many (most?) organisations work with a form of gender equality and inclusion based on culture/ethnicity. But in many cases, we see that neurodiversity and socioeconomic status have much more to do with it. How do you react to such information? Or what happens when you observe that managers' assumptions about the organisation are far removed from employees' self-reports? Can you tolerate this kind of feedback, which can be a little painful for the ego and also shows a perspective you're not familiar with?
Such issues abound in our daily lives. And given that cognitive dissonance can also cause feelings of stress/anxiety/discomfort, it's only natural that most people want to avoid it. But then the whole scientific principle of relying on empirical evidence disappears. So, in fact, data-driven diversity work is sometimes as much group therapy as analysis.
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