Class 37. This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain on Moral Disengagement.

How to identify the "moral off-ramps" that enable people to rationalize problematic beliefs and behavior.

If you are just joining The Freedom Academy, welcome! As a reminder, this post is a standalone “lesson” and you do not need to be caught up to follow along! I’ll reference any previous posts that offer relevant background, and you can always visit the syllabus and catch up at your own leisure. All class posts have an audio recording if you prefer to multitask while listening to me lecture!

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

In my class assignment a couple of weeks ago, I asked you to watch a video of a Trump supporter who got duped by Russia’s social media disinformation operation in 2016, and to consider why the woman was so unwilling to accept the facts presented by the reporter. (If you missed that assignment, I encourage you to go back and watch the video and think about the questions I posed, as it is sort of fascinating.) Here were some of your responses:

• “I think we all justify our beliefs by how it feels.”

• “No one ever likes to admit that they've been fooled. They take it as a personal insult. It is purely about ego. They will debate facts to preserve their feelings.”

• “It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” (quoting Carl Sagan)

• “The avoidance of feeling duped is what is driving her non acceptance of what the man is telling her.”

• “If the woman accepted what the reporter was telling her it would mean that she was duped by Russians…. which wasn’t the narrative she believed.”

• “People don't want to be called out and labeled as wrong and will fight uphill against reality so that everything in their head is justified and correct in their (warped) view.”

All great responses! The following one, though, is closest to the answers I was hoping to elicit:

• “The woman's identity is under attack. The ‘fight or flee’ part of her brain is triggered….With the reasoning part of her brain disengaged, she recreates the reality (cognitive dissonance) to protect her identity, her ‘id’, in an act of self-preservation.”

So “cognitive dissonance” is the key phrase I was looking for, because it drives so much of how we process information. Carol Tavris and Eliot Aronson, authors of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me, (a must-read, in my opinion), describe cognitive dissonance as “the engine of self-justification.” They write:

Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other….Dissonance produces mental discomfort that ranges from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it.

In Class 36 I discussed the concept of directional motivated reasoning, which goes hand and hand with cognitive dissonance. The way I think of it is that directional reasoning is the how, but cognitive dissonance is the why. People process information to reach a desired conclusion, because if they didn’t, they’d have to sit with the deep discomfort — even pain — of acknowledging something that is fundamentally inconsistent about themselves, or their worldview. In the class assignment, the woman being interviewed clearly believes she is patriotic (which, presumably, is why she followed and was in contact with an account called “Being Patriotic,” not realizing it was a Russian troll farm account). To concede to the interviewer that she had been duped by Russia would mean (in her view) that she was “going with the Russians” — something that would be completely inconsistent with her self-conception as a loyal American. (Remember that this was 2016, when “going with the Russians” was still a bad thing for Republicans.)

One of the questions I asked at the end of the class assignment was whether you thought the reporter’s approach was conducive to getting the woman to accept the information he was telling her. Most of you said it wasn’t, and I agree — he was pretty attacky or, at the very least, not particularly sympathetic; he made it seem like she should have known better, and appeared to be shaming her. In other words, he created a second layer of cognitive dissonance: To admit she was duped would be to admit that she was an idiot. Most people don’t like to be idiots.

The most interesting part of the interview, though, is at the end, when the woman feels backed into a corner. At that point, she does a Reverse Uno on the reporter, accusing him of lying because he is with CNN, and of being in bed with Hillary Clinton and “her bandits.” (I’m not going to lie, the way she says “Hillary and her bandits” cracks me up every time.) And that brings me to today’s lesson, which is how certain types of rhetoric can offer “off ramps” that help people quickly resolve their cognitive dissonance without engaging too much with the moral implications of their beliefs. I think this lesson will help you make sense of how MAGA, in particular, are so willing to go along with almost any narrative, no matter how destructive or farfetched. But first, a little insight into cognitive psychology.

The Pyramid of Choice

One of my favorite insights in Tavris and Aronson’s book is their description of how the process of self-rationalization can not only resolve cognitive dissonance, it can actually help entrench someone in a particular belief even if it was not one they held very strongly before. It goes like this: