Difference between revisions of "Criticism of Mormonism/Cognitive dissonance"

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Questions

== Many critics of the Church portray members as either naive, ill-informed dupes or cynical exploiters. Fortunately, most fair-minded people realize that—just as in any religion—there are intelligent, well-informed people who become or remain members of the Church. In response, some critics appeal to the social psychological concept of “cognitive dissonance” to dismiss the spiritual witnesses of intelligent, articulate members.

To see citations to the critical sources for these claims, click here

Answer

== Cognitive dissonance theory, when applied with a critic’s intent to explaining away the witnesses and convictions of believers, is badly flawed. Critics' efforts fail on many grounds: • Cognitive dissonance is a “motivational state” like hope or remorse or love. The fact that it may be operating does not exclude the possibility of a spiritual witness. • critics define what evidence or beliefs are "rational" and which are "false" or "irrational." In doing so, the dice are loaded from the start since it's the critics' epistemological assumptions that will determine the outcome. • critics can dismiss any attitude or conviction using the concept of cognitive dissonance. Conversely, believers can dismiss any argument made by critics using the same concept. The arguments cancel each other, resulting in a nil score. • critics’ claims rely on inferences about hidden, unverifiable, unfalsifiable, “subconscious” sources. • critics reject subjects' self-reports of experiences and inner states in favor of their own assumptions.

Detailed Analysis

What is cognitive dissonance?

Cognitive dissonance theory was first described in the mid 1950s by Leon Festinger.

Cognitive dissonance explains behavior by pointing out that all people have various beliefs, thoughts, or ideas, called "cognitions." From time to time, these cognitions will come into conflict —for example, someone might believe their child is honest and law-abiding. However, they might learn one day that their child has been charged with shoplifting. There are now two cognitions in tension:

• cognition #1: "my child is honest"
• cognition #2: "my child has been arrested for shoplifting"

These cognitions create conflict, or "dissonance" because they create internal conflict—it is not readily apparent how both cognitions can be 'true'. This realization is a psychologically unpleasant experience. According to the theory, people seek to minimize or resolve dissonance. This can be done in a number of ways:

the former cognition can be rejected

"I guess my child isn't as honest as I thought he was."

the new cognition can be rejected

"My child wouldn't take something without paying. There must be a mistake." or "It's a lie! He was framed!"

a new cognition can eventually be formed which reconciles the two conflicting cognitions

"My child put something in his shopping cart, and forgot to pay for it on leaving the store. Thus, he was not trying to be dishonest, but it is understandable why he was arrested. It was a misunderstanding."

The important point is that all people experience cognitive dissonance whenever they encounter something that does not match what they have previously thought or believed. People may choose appropriate means of reconciling their dissonance (e.g. accepting new truths, adopting new perspectives, rejecting or modifying previous beliefs) or less appropriate ones (e.g. denying new truths, clinging to false ideas).

The operation of cognitive dissonance alone says nothing about the quality or truth of someone's beliefs. For example, in the third case, the child might truly have forgotten to pay for the article, or the parent might have seized on a rather threadbare excuse (not bothering to ask, "How did you forget the radio was hidden under your jacket?") and accepted it uncritically, because rejecting the first cognition—my child is honest—is too painful. The presence, or resolution, of dissonance proves nothing about the facts.

How do the critics misuse it?

Michael Shermer, an agnostic and writer for Skeptic magazine, specifically dismissed the idea that "cognitive dissonance" could serve as a tool to explain away the convictions of religious believers as a group:

It would be a long stretch to classify [millions of white, middle class American Christians] as oppressed, disenfranchised, or marginalized…[millions of apocalyptically-inclined] Americans are anything but in a state of learned helplessness or cognitive dissonance. Indeed, some recent polls and studies indicate that religious people, on average, may be both physically and psychologically happier and healthier than non-believers.^[1]

This is not to say that Shermer would deny that some believers might be the victims of cognitive dissonance. However, he balks at using cognitive dissonance to explain an entire group of believers.

Critics claim their use of cognitive dissonance is scientific and objective. However, this claim doesn't measure up to one of the most important principles of a scientific inquiry: falsifiability.

The criterion of falsifiability...says that statements or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable, observations.^[2] A hallmark of pseudoscience is its inability to be falsified.

How could faithful Mormons' behaviors or attitudes toward anti-Mormon "evidence" prove they are not subject to the critics' notion of cognitive dissonance? Critics' claims are not falsifiable and, therefore, not strictly scientific. There is nothing which critics could not shoe-horn into theories of cognitive dissonance. Instead, cognitive dissonance is little more than a club to beat anyone who does not share critics' interpretations.

The anti-Mormon use of the concept is especially vulnerable to the charge of being unfalsifiable, but a lack of falsifiability has long been the chief criticism of cognitive dissonance theory generally:

One continuous criticism of Festinger's theory is that it may not be falsifiable. That is, there are no solid empirical data that prove without a doubt that people will react in a reliable, predictable, specifiable manner in a given situation or when dealing with dissonance.^[3]

Dissonance is easier to identify when a group of people is exposed to the same situation and makes the same kids of choices under controlled conditions. Trying to tease out why a given individual holds or rejects specific religious or philosophical positions is a much taller order. There are no controls on the critics' speculative conclusions. They may invoke the idea of "cognitive dissonance" without having studied believers under controlled conditions yet still claim their methods are scientific.

Is turnabout fair play?

This is not to say that cognitive dissonance cannot play a role in religious belief. It plays a potential roles in beliefs of all sorts—the religious as well as the a-religious.

It might play a role in some Mormons' refusal to accept an uncomfortable truth. It could also play a role in the critics' experiences, in which their expectations and beliefs did not meet their perceptions of reality. Each critic is the only one able to make that assessment.

But, lacking access to others’ reasoning and spiritual experiences, a critic cannot objectively judge the influence (if any) of cognitive dissonance in others’ decisions. He can worry about the dissonant beams in his own eye; others’ motes are out of the reach of his self-justifying inquiry.

Many critics seem unwilling to recognize that men and women of good will and sound intelligence might honestly disagree on the interpretation of evidence, even if considered with all the objectivity they can muster. This is, for example, why some people will buy stock at a price at which other people are eager to sell. (But perhaps the entire economy is merely an exercise in cognitive dissonance?)

LDS critics often have a naïve, super-simplified view of the historian’s work whereby anyone who disbelieves a religious account is somehow automatically more free from bias than a believer. Such a stance ignores the fact that unbelievers may feel at least as great a stake in disproving uncomfortable and uncompromising religious claims as believers might in supporting them. It is therefore no surprise that critics label interpretations with which they do not agree as examples of “cognitive dissonance” in action, while the critics' positions are portrayed as merely the product of dispassionate analysis.

One critic fond of this 'theory' tells us:

The most important part of this analysis, by far, is to recognize that the forces we are about to discuss [cognitive dissonance] operate mostly at the subconscious level. To the extent we drag them into the conscious realm, they largely stop operating.^[4]

“Subconscious” forces which are used to explain behavior, especially by the outside observer, are a classic unfalsifiable hypothesis. How can we know that a “cause” which has been supposedly dragged from subconscious to awareness is the genuine article?

Why isn’t our “discovered” reason simply a rationalization, which is driven in turn by an even deeper “subconscious force” and so on down forever? Since a person is—by definition—unaware of unconscious processes, how can the critic know with any confidence that the "forces we are about to discuss" look anything like the unconscious ones?

How can you say that A and B are the same thing if no one can get a certain look at A?

If this is difficult in oneself, how much harder is it in another person, to whose mind and experience the outsider has no direct access? Despite these major hurdles, the critics seems to presume that they can reliably determine what others’ unconscious processes are and “drag them into the conscious realm.” Freud would have been envious.

The critic then makes the equally strange assertion that these effects “largely stop operating” if we are but aware of them. Even if the critic, by the greatest fortune, has indeed identified a proper “subconscious force”—something of which he can never be sure—this belief is extraordinarily optimistic. Anyone who has spent any time in counseling or mental health work knows that awareness of a problem rarely provides a direct line to altered thinking or behavior. If it did, therapy would be just a dump of information to the patient.

The critic goes on:

The message that booms through the above evidence to me is that the denial inducing nature of cognitive dissonance makes it difficult to self-diagnose.^[5]

Unfortunately for the critic, if we assume that this is true, then critics are equally vulnerable to the same treatment. The Mormon could just as easily respond that an anti-Mormon's perspective is all due to cognitive dissonance. He just doesn't know it, because such a condition is "difficult to self-diagnose."

This illustrates that whatever else might be said about the flaws in this misuse of cognitive dissonance theory—the lynch-pin (“most important part…by far”) of which is an unfalsifiable and unverifiable claim about subconscious motives—it is not rational and not scientific.

But, appeals to "cognitive dissonance" allow the critic to fit the evidence to his biases, and “diagnose” flaws in others. No matter how much his Mormon target might insist that the critic does not understand the Mormon's point of view or evaluation of the evidence, this just serves as stronger evidence to the critic of how deluded the Mormon is. Cognitive dissonance in the critics' hands is nothing but self-fulfilling prophecy, or a variation of the observer-expectancy effect. It is full of fallacies, a substitute for rational discussion of the evidence and the witness of the Spirit.

== Notes ==

1. [note] Michael Shermer, How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (New York: WH Freeman and Company, 1999),211–212.
2. [note] Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1963), 33.
3. [note] M. Bruce Abbot, “Cognitive Dissonance Theory,” class notes for ADV382J, University of Texas at Austin, September 2003 (accessed 31 October 2005). off-site
4. [note] Bob McCue, “Notes for Van Hale’s Radio Show”; e-mail posting (5 September 2004), copy in author's possession.
5. [note] Bob McCue, “Notes for Van Hale’s Radio Show”; e-mail posting (5 September 2004), copy in author's possession.

Further reading and additional sources responding to these claims