MOST OF US have experienced conflicting beliefs at one time or another. For instance, you know that drinking too much alcohol is bad for your health, but you pour yourself a second glass of wine ...

"We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." –Daniel Kahneman Cognitive dissonance, a psychological phenomenon first identified by Leon Festinger in 1957, refers to the ...

The author's favorite celebrities made smoking seem cool. Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons Have you ever wanted to do something that you knew was bad for you? I once wanted to smoke cigarettes. My ...

A foundational 1956 study of the concept, focussed on a U.F.O. doomsday cult, has been all but debunked by new research.

The Penguine Dictionary of Psychology defines cognitive dissonance (CD) as "an emotional state set up when two simultaneously held attitudes or cognitions are inconsistent or when there is a conflict ...

Cognitive dissonance is what happens when a person holds two sets of beliefs at odds with each other. The human brain doesn’t like logical inconsistencies, so someone experiencing cognitive dissonance ...

Conversation among us is peppered with observations of the division within the American population. The division is revealed in a number of forms. It may be the acknowledgement of the political gap ...

A leading large language model displays behaviors that resemble a hallmark of human psychology: cognitive dissonance. Anyone who interacts with an AI chatbot for the first time is struck by how human ...

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Doing something that goes against your beliefs feels pretty bad, right? But what if those beliefs are ...

A most distinct memory of my first job as a clueless marketing assistant was the day I was thrown a set of keys to a well-used blue van. Said blue van was weighed down with boxes of jams and ...