This past year, I studied the book Mistakes were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. I studied the 2020 edition of the book. The first edition was published about twenty years ago, in 2007. I was struck by the ways in which the psychological mechanisms discussed could be fit into a framework of cultural evolution.
The thesis of the book is that humans have psychological mechanisms that predispose us to hold onto beliefs that are untrue, often self-serving or prejudicial beliefs. The psychological foundation of the thesis is the theory of cognitive dissonance. That theory was pioneered in the 1950s by Leon Festinger, who was Elliot Aronson's academic advisor. The book gives a definition: "Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds to two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent / with each other ..." (17). Humans will go to great lengths to avoid suffering the mental stress caused by cognitive dissonance.
Because we humans do not want the cognitive dissonance of having made a decision that, in the clear light of day, might have been ill-advised or arbitrary, we begin to rationalize. The need to justify our beliefs and actions causes us to double-down on them. In the chapter on criminal prosecutors, Tavris and Aronson show how prosecutors will early in an investigation come to believe in the guilt of one suspect. The prosecutors will cling to that conviction even if later evidence points to another suspect. "It is precisely because prosecutors believe they are pursuing the truth that they do not torpedo their own cases when they need to; thanks to self-justification, they rarely think they need to" (182).
The need for self-justification can lead to either a spiral of violence or an opposite spiral of kindness. If I commit a hostile act toward someone, I risk the danger of thinking poorly of myself. To reconcile the fact of my brutality with my inner view of myself as a virtuous person, I have to conclude that the person toward whom I was hostile had deserved that treatment. Conversely, if I do someone a kindness, I will justify that act by thinking more highly of that person. It is important to note that the self-justifications leading to a spiral of cooperative behavior can be just as unmoored from observable fact as the self-justifications leading to a spiral of hostile behavior.
Tavris and Aronson quote with approval a passage in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin where Franklin quotes an older maxim as a guide to his behavior: "He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged." Franklin in this case was exploiting the human avoidance of cognitive dissonance to build alliances in the Pennsylvania legislature.
The boundary between conscious self-justification and unconscious self-delusion gets a bit fuzzy in the area of memory. It is well documented that memories can be rewritten and unreliable. The need for reducing dissonance can cause people to rewrite their memories to justify their current beliefs. Tavris and Aronson spend a chapter detailing how self-justification can edit memories to validate convictions. This can become tragic went therapists implant false recovered memories in patients that lead to the persecution of innocent people.
Festinger's theory has the advantage that decades of experiments have validated this theory in many different branches of psychology. Cognitive dissonance theory has upended claims made by the Behaviorism of Watson and Skinner, claims that humans behave in an economically rational way (Homo economicus), and some claims of psychoanalysis (such as the theory that expressing anger can act as a mental release valve, calming us down).
Cognitive Dissonance and Cultural Evolution
The evidence Tavris and Aronson marshal for their argument is impressive, but I differ with them when it comes to the explanation for why cognitive dissonance is so stressful. Tavris and Aronson argue that humans avoid cognitive dissonance so that our lives are not absurd. "Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and, as Albert Camus observed, we are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd. At the heart of it, Festinger's theory is about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful" (18).
That argument assumes that we all ponder our lives like philosophers and fear being existentially absurd (a very 1950s preoccupation). Coming at the problem from the perspective of cultural evolution, I disagree. Homo sapiens is an intensely social species. We have inborn tendencies (formerly called instincts) to belong to a group. We form prestige hierarchies in order to conform to and learn from the culture of social leaders within those hierarchies. We infer social rules from behavior and then actively enforce those rules.
By focusing on the individual, Tavris and Aronson see the transcendence of cognitive dissonance as a form of personal redemption. Many of their examples show an individual who heals a division in a social group, whether a group of two, such as a traditional marriage, or an entire nation, such as went John Kennedy took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, cognitive dissonance is often between competing sets of values, and those sets of values might be defended by different dominance factions within the larger social group. Letting go of self-justification can be dangerous within the politics of the divided social group, and Tavris and Aronson seem to ignore that danger. You might be lauded and redeemed by the social group for your acceptance of responsibility and rejection of self-justification, or you might be chased off with howls of execration.
I do agree with this statement in the book: "Dissonance is bothersome under any circumstances, but it is most painful to people when an important element of the self-concept is threatened—typically when they do something that is inconsistent with their view of themselves" (41). However, I, as a member of a social group, derive my self-concept from the values of the prestige hierarchies of which I am a part. If the tenets of the prestige hierarchy clash with one another or with the physical world or my own psychological experience, then I try to reconcile them, often by accepting the tenets of my most immediate prestige hierarchy. Tavris catalogs at length (sometimes ad nauseum) ways in which people ignore observable facts because they clash with the unitary worldview of the social group (to draw on a concept of Melvin Pollner).
Again, this social anchoring to cognitive dissonance links it to cultural evolution. Cultural evolution argues that humans will internalize and commit themselves deeply to the practices and beliefs of their cultural community. The community preserves knowledge in the collective brain that no one person comprehends entirely. If humans are the product of genetic-cultural co-evolution, then most humans have to be committed to following beliefs and practices that they do not understand. The tendency for individuals to justify current practices and beliefs to themselves is a powerful mechanism for preserving cultural knowledge.
Tavris and Aronson make an oddly optimistic statement early in chapter one. "The good news is that by understanding how this mechanism works, we can defeat the wiring" (12). They maintain this position even after they demonstrate repeatedly that humans are hardwired to systematically fail to read the objective world accurately in order to minimize cognitive dissonance. Tavris and Aronson offer sound advice for how to mitigate pathologies of dissonance. With practice and discipline, some humans can defeat some of the dissonance some of the time, but we certainly cannot defeat all of the dissonance all of the time, even if we understand how the mechanism works. Why? The flawed wiring gives its possessors a competitive advantage in the realm of cultural evolution. It's not a bug; it's a feature.
Evolutionary Psychology versus Cultural Evolution
Back in August of 2023, I compared claims made by Freudian psychoanalysis with an evolutionary theory of self-deception as presented by Simler and Hanson (citation below).
The theory of cognitive dissonance is similar to but not identical with the theory by Anna Freud that we humans deceive ourselves to reduce psychic pain. (I got this reference to Anna Freud from the Simler and Hanson, and they got it from her 1992 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence.) The difference between Tavris and Freud here is that Tavris is talking largely about conscious self-justification, while Freud is talking about subconscious self-deception.
Simler and Hanson belong to the school of evolutionary psychology that includes Robert Trivers and Robert Kurzban (I have studied Simler and Hanson's book, but I have not studied the books of these earlier writers). That school argues that the human mind has many separate mental modules. Self-deception is driven by the fact that the conscious mind is just one module among many. It offers justifications for beliefs and decisions arrived at collectively by a group of modules.
Simler and Hanson argue that the conscious mind often doesn't know why the rest of the mind is taking the actions it does. The conscious mind is at times like the left hemisphere of the brain of a patient whose corpus callosum has been severed and which has to confabulate reasons why the right hemisphere of the brain took an action (such as laughing at a cartoon). The conscious mind is more the Press Secretary than the Executive. Those collective and enigmatic actions often advance the reproductive fitness of the individual human in violation of social norms that were put in place to control selfish behavior. Simler and Hanson would be more likely to approve of another quote from Franklin's Autobiography: "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."
Cultural evolution does not depend on the mind being full of many independent mental modules. For cultural evolution, only one module needs to exist, one that facilitates the in-born tendency toward cultural learning (and cultural teaching). If there are multiple modules (such as one for facilitating sexual reproduction or one for the generation and comprehension of language), then the module for cultural learning is the most important for differentiating humans from other primates. Over the last forty years, the hypothesized many modules of evolutionary psychology have been elusive. Cultural evolution's ability to get by with only one or a few modules is a distinct theoretical advantage when it is compared to evolutionary psychology.
The theory of cognitive dissonance can ditch the argument that it arises from psychic pain in favor of the argument that it arises from a drive to belong to a social group with internalized cultural imperatives. This change is actually compatible with the idea from evolutionary psychology that the human drive for consistency is primarily social. By retaining cognitive dissonance but dropping the psychic pain, one can retain many of the features of cognitive dissonance with its long history of experimental confirmation without claiming that it is driven by Freudian mechanisms or existential angst. Retaining cognitive dissonance with cultural evolution allows one to avoid the problem of finding those elusive many mental modules of evolutionary psychology.
Note on AI Use: In the past, I have not used AI LLMs to assist with crafting blog entries. However, while I was composing this entry, I wanted to find out quickly if Robert Kurzban's book Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite discussed cognitive dissonance, so I asked Google Gemini. It claimed that Kurzban's book did discuss cognitive dissonance in detail. Gemini further explained that Kurzban's many mental modules were a rebuttal to the Festinger concept that cognitive dissonance is caused by a desire by a unitary conscious mind for mental consistency. I was already trying to contrast the books by Tavris and Simler, but the Gemini commentary gave me confirmation that the two schools of thought had sparred directly in the past. Therefore, Gemini provided not only a book summary but an idea or two that I have adopted.
I then went to the library to confirm the claims Gemini had made about Kurzban's book. I confirmed Gemini's claims. Then I looked for any evidence in the paper copy of the book that Kurzban was aware of the theory of cultural evolution. No evidence. In the bibliography and in the index, there are no references to Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, or Joseph Henrich. Kurzban stays firmly within the school of Tooby and Cosmides.
Bibliography
Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.
Kurzban, Robert. Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite: evolution and the modular mind. Princeton UP, 2010.
Simler, Kevin and Robin Hanson. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Oxford UP, 2018.
Tavris, Carol and Elliot Aronson. Mistakes were Made (but not by me). 3/e. Mariner, 2020.
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