How - Dov Seidman [63]
DOING CONSONANCE
You don’t have to be a passive victim of dissonance; you can learn new HOWs of thought that can help you to see it coming and employ conscious strategies to minimize its ability to colonize your brain. The first step, obviously, is to become aware of how dissonance affects the mind and the emotions, which we have already done. The second step is to interrupt that emotional reaction, and then substitute one of several strategies to resolve the conflict.
The most common resolution strategy involves changing one of the held ideas.17 Say, for instance, that you hold the belief that, in general, suppliers cannot be trusted and must be carefully monitored at all times. Suddenly, you realize that a number of your suppliers recently caught ordering mistakes and, rather than exploit them for their own profit, reported them to you for correction. In order to reduce the embarrassment you might feel from having misjudged the situation, you could choose to review your contract monitoring procedure in light of your new perception. In this way, you turn emotion into improved decision making. 18
Another technique is to bolster the new idea, thus giving it more weight in relation to the previously held idea. One study demonstrated this quite clearly. Researchers told a group of subjects a sexist riddle and, after they laughed at it, made them aware of its discriminatory nature. They then gave them a test to measure their attitudes toward feminism and compared the results to those of a group who had not been told the joke or confronted about its derogatory nature. The joke group tended to overemphasize answers that demonstrated sensitivity to equal treatment. By having the new idea bolstered, the joke group was more easily able to balance their previously held, sexist beliefs with their newly sensitized notions of gender equality.
When the desire to achieve is strong enough, you sometimes trivialize a conflicting idea that prevents action. A rock climber faced with a fear of heights might find a way to mock or ridicule his fear in order to accomplish his goal. Once the goal is accomplished, the emotions from the two dissonant ideas tend to dissipate. When the challenge to deeply held beliefs activates strong emotional responses to new information, emotional expression can also remove the mind-clouding effects of dissonance. Talking about the emotions helps to normalize them, which minimizes their distracting influence. Lastly, if you can identify the source of dissonant ideas, sometimes simply avoiding the cause of them can be an effective strategy for keeping your head in the game.
All of these techniques of dissonance reduction can improve decision making and learning and help you actively reduce the internal noise that dissonance brings.
FRICTION
Imagine a dynamic and successful young businessperson with a major university MBA and a bright future. Her boss has been entrenched in his position for some time. One day, she receives a seemingly innocent e-mail from her boss about a job opening at another company. The note says something like, “I heard of this great opportunity. Do you happen to know of anyone who might be interested?” The job, suspiciously, fits her to a tee. One of the things they teach you in big college MBA programs is that a superior threatened by a rising young star will often try to protect his or her own position by indirectly removing