A challenge to human evolution—cognitive dissonance

Abstract

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE CHALLENGES A POSSIBILITY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION Cognitive dissonance (CD) is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting elements of knowledge. CD is among “the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology” (e.g., Alfnes et al., 2010, p. 147). It is well known that this discomfort is usually resolved by devaluing and discarding a conflicting piece of knowledge (Festinger, 1957; Cooper, 2007; HarmonJones et al., 2009); we discuss it in detail below. It is also known that awareness of CD is not necessary for actions to reduce the conflict, and these actions are often fast and momentary (Jarcho et al., 2011). CD is particularly evident when a new scientific theory is developed. It takes a while to accept the new knowledge. However, I would like to emphasize that even a mundane element of knowledge to be useful it must differ from innate knowledge supplied by evolution or from existing knowledge acquired through experience. Otherwise the new knowledge would not be needed. For new knowledge to be useful it must contradict existing knowledge to some extent. Can new knowledge be complementary rather than contradicting? New knowledge does not come from nowhere, knowledge grows by analogy, by differentiation of previous knowledge, by using what already exists. This is the reason for several empirical laws: Zipf ’s law, the power law, Pareto laws. All of these laws essentially express equivalent statistical properties of systems, in which new entities (or usage) evolve from pre-existing ones (Simonton, 2000; Newman, 2005; Novak, 2010). For example, according to Zipf ’s law the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its statistical rank; this empirical relation is observed in most languages and in many other similar systems (this was theoretically proven in the given references). Since new knowledge emerges by modifying previous knowledge, there must always be conflict between the two. Because of this conflict between new and previous knowledge CD theory suggests that new knowledge should be discarded. This process of resolving CD by discarding contradictions is usually fast, “momentary” and according to CD theory new knowledge is discarded before its usefulness is established. This is the paradoxical conclusion of CD theory. To summarize, according to CD theory knowledge has to be devalued and discarded. But accumulation of knowledge is the hallmark of human evolution. It follows that the fact of human cultural evolution contradicts this well established theory. This paradoxical aspect of CD has not received appropriate attention during more than 50 years of the development of CD theory.