How to Break a Person's Cognitive Dissonance

-Pastor Melissa Fain-

Last Wednesday I spent a few minutes talking about Cognitive Dissonance. 

To sum up:

Cognitive Dissonance is when a person holds two or more contradictory ideas or values at the same time, creating stress. Often times the item creating the dissonance is something that holds great investment, so to break with it would cause major loss.

There are four kinds of cognitive dissonances:

1. Belief Disconfirmation: This is when one creates a new belief out of a failed belief. (i.e. Harold Camping said the end of the world would be May 21st, 2011. When that date came and went, he suggested the judgement was what happened, and the literal rapture would be October 21st, 2011. That too was found to be false.)
2. Induced Compliance: This is when actions are suggested to be one way when they are actually not. (i.e. Netflix's The Push convinced people through induced compliance to eventually push a man off a building.)
3. Effort Justification: This is getting a person to voluntarily engage in unpleasant activities to achieve a later goal. (i.e. NXIVM- A cult that kept compliance by getting members to give up secrets, taking nude pictures, and putting down lifetime savings to use as ransom to keep the members in.)
   
4. Free Choice: This is where a person makes another person choose, lowering the value of the non-choice, and raising the value of the choice. (i.e. The strawman fallicy is meant to lower the value of the non-choice, while raising the value of the obvious choice, and in choosing the obvious choice you raise the value. (Article on free choice dissonance.)
   

I concluded by saying it's easy to fall into these. They are like traps. What I didn't say is that we always have a choice when we fall into these dissonances. Either we change the behavior, justify it, or outright ignore it. Unless we change it, we could find ourselves in a cycle of justification or ignorance to make the situation worse.

I did say that breaking free becomes so much more difficult once one falls into that trap. I suggested grace in this case. Many feel the anxiety of the stress from cognitive dissonance, but can't name what is causing that stress or is too deep into ignorance.

Breaking someone free from the dissonance:

I have inundated myself with videos on cults recently. They are difficult to watch, but I want to figure out how the ones who broke free did it. What is the compelling factor that can help someone see the magnitude of dissonance in their life? I've seen two recurring themes:

1. Something more powerful than the dissonance is threatened: In most cases the more powerful factor is family.  People will stick around or leave for family. They will suffer through cognitive dissonance for their mom or grandma. It's the reason many of the big cults are built on keeping the entire family within it. Someone within the family might feel the stress of two contradictory ideas, but will justify staying because the rest of the family appear comfortable, or so it seems. I have personally heard the stories from across multiple families that they were sticking around a specific church for their sister or mom, or [insert family member here]. They will sacrifice their investment if they feared for the welfare of their greater choice.
2. An earthquake happens: The amount of cognitive dissonance someone is living with is called the magnitude. The other way people are broken out of their dissonance is the magnitude gets too big to handle, and the only choice is to change the behavior.  This is not pretty. Hard breaks are eye opening and leave deep wounds. As far as I'm aware, I haven't found a way to "earthquake" someone out of cognitive dissonance. Usually, it's the system itself that just puts too much on the person, breaking them.