"Why won't they admit they're wrong?' And other skeptics' mysteries

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One of the greatest challenges for scientists and educators is persuading people to give up beliefs they hold clear when the evidence clearly indicates that they should. Why aren't most people grateful for the data? It's easy to make fun of others who won't give up ideas or practices that scientific research has shown to be demonstrably wrong--therapeutic touch, alien abduction, the Rorschach Inkblot Test--or beliefs in haunted houses and psychic detective skills that this magazine keeps exposing as fraud or delusion. It's harder to see that the mechanism that keeps these people from admitting they are wrong afflicts us, too--all of us, even skeptics.

The motivational mechanism underlying the reluctance to be wrong, change our minds, admit serious mistakes, and accept unwelcome findings is cognitive dissonance. The theory of cognitive dissonance was invented fifty years ago by Leon Festinger, who defined dissonance as a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent, such as "Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me" and "I smoke two packs a day." Dissonance produces mental discomfort, a state that is as unpleasant as extreme hunger, and people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. Smokers can reduce dissonance either by quitting or by convincing themselves that smoking isn't really so harmful and may even be beneficial. The recent lineup of Republican men who preach that homosexuality is a sin and a "choice" reduce their dissonance when caught in public places with their pants down by saying, "I'm not gay--I was just under stress."

In a sense, dissonance theory is a theory of our mental blind spots--of how and why we block information that might make us question our behavior or convictions. The theory has been supported by many discoveries in cognitive science that have identified the built-in biases of the human mind. One of the most effective ways the mind maintains consonant beliefs is through the confirmation bias--the fact that we tend to notice and remember information that confirms what we believe and ignore or forget information that disconfirms it. (Indeed, one of the reasons that scientific thinking does not come naturally to many people is precisely because it requires the investigator to consider disconfirming--dissonant--evidence for a hypothesis.) Another central bias is the belief that we aren't biased, everyone else is. We see things clearly; what is the matter with those other people? What are they thinking? What they are thinking, of course, is that they see things clearly and we don't.

Dissonance is uncomfortable enough when two cognitions conflict, but it is most painful when an important element of the self-concept is threatened: for example, when information challenges how we see ourselves, challenges a central belief (religious, political, or intellectual), or questions a memory or story we use to explain our lives. When that happens, the easiest way to reduce dissonance is simply to reject the information (it's stupid; it's flat-out wrong) or kill the messenger (he's biased, after all). But even more significantly, when people behave in a way that is inconsistent with their own view of themselves as good, smart, ethical, and kind, they tend to reduce dissonance not by changing those self-concepts but by justifying their behavior to themselves. If I am good and kind, then by definition the bad or unkind thing I did was warranted: They started it. He deserved it. Everyone does it. I was only following orders.

The nonconscious mechanism of self-justification is not the same thing as lying or making excuses to others to save face or save a job. It is more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie, because it prohibits our own awareness that we are wrong about a belief or that we did something foolish, unethical, or cruel. Dissonance theory therefore predicts that it's not only bad people who do bad things. It also shows that good people do bad things and smart people cling to foolish beliefs precisely to preserve their belief that they are good, smart people. This is why, when skeptics wave their reams of reasoned data at people who have just sold their house and cow to follow a delusional doomsday prophet, what they are mostly doing is making the followers feel really stupid. It is much more soothing for the followers to justify their actions by saying, "Thank God we sold the house and cow for our brilliant leader! Our devotion spared the world from disaster." This was precisely the reasoning of the followers of one such doomsday prophet whom Festinger and his colleagues described in their early study of dissonance in action, When Prophecy Fails.

Numerous examples from the vast realms of pseudoscience fill these pages, so let's take an example that, unfortunately, is becoming increasingly common among real scientists. Most scientists pride themselves on maintaining intellectual integrity. Yet, with the breakdown of the firewall between research and commerce, scientists' intellectual independence is being whittled away. Many scientists, like plants turning toward the sun, are turning toward the interests of their sponsors without even being aware that they are doing so. When investigators have compared the results of studies funded independently and those funded by industry, they have consistently uncovered a "funding bias." In a typical example, 161 studies, all published during the same six-year span, examined the possible risks of four chemicals to human health. Of the studies funded by industry, only 14 percent found harmful effects on health. Of those funded independently, fully 60 percent found harmful effects.