4."When the pandemic started, a friend of mine got really obsessed with the fact that you can't leave your home or go near people without a mask — but it never reflected in his own actions. He judged ...

In the Aesop’s fable, the fox tries hard to get his hands on a tasty vine of grapes, but fails in all of his attempts to acquire the grapes; at which point the fox convinces himself that he really ...

"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 ...

One of the great mysteries in both religion and politics is why people continue to hold on to fervently cherished beliefs in spite of evidence contrary to those beliefs. I will give some examples in ...

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 ...

Thomas Plante (@ThomasPlante) Augustin Cardinal Bea, SJ professor of psychology at Santa Clara University, is a faculty scholar with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and an adjunct clinical ...

Do you keep second-guessing your decisions after you’ve made them? Immobilizing yourself? Berating yourself when you finally decide on something? This can be a normal albeit painful way to make ...

You've been presented with two viable options for a new career. The first option is what you've always wanted—the role sounds like a perfect fit. But the second option comes with higher pay and better ...

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 ...

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