Criticism of Mormonism/Cognitive dissonance

Criticism

Many critics of the Church are fond of portarying all members as either naive, ill-informed dupes or cynical exploiters. Unfortunately for these critics, most fair-minded people realize that—just as in any religion—there are many intelligent, well-informed people who become or remain members of the Church. To get around this, some more superficially sophisticated critics appeal to the psychological concept of 'cognitive dissonance' to try to 'explain away' the spiritual witness of intelligent, articulate members.

Source(s) of the Criticism

  • Bob McCue, “Notes for Van Hale’s Radio Show”; e-mail posting (5 September 2004), copy in author's possession.
  • Bob McCue, “Van Hale’s ‘Mormon Miscellaneous’ Radio Talk Show,” Version 3, 20 Sept 2004.

Response

What is cognitive dissonance?

Cognitive dissonance theory was first described in the mid 1950s by Leon Festinger.

Cognitive dissonance explains behavior by pointing out that all people have various beliefs, thoughts, or ideas, called "cognitions." From time to time, these cognitions will come into conflict—for example, someone might believe that their child is honest and law-abiding. However, they might learn one day that their child has been charged with shoplifting. There are now two cognitions in tension:

  • cognition #1: "my child is honest"
  • cognition #2: "my child has been arrested for shoplifting"

These cognitions create conflict, or "dissonance" because they create internal conflict—it is not readily apparent how both cognitions can be 'true'. This realization is a psychologically unpleasant experience, and according to the theory, people seek to minimize or resolve dissonance. This can be done in a number of ways:

the former cognition can be rejected
"I guess my child isn't as honest as I thought he was."
the new cognition can be rejected
"My child wouldn't take something without paying. There must be a mistake." or "It's a lie! He was framed!"
a new cognition can eventually be formed which reconciles the two conflicting cognitions
"My child put something in his shopping cart, and forgot to pay for it on leaving the store. Thus, he was not trying to be dishonest, but it is understandable why he was arrested. It was a misunderstanding."

The important point is that all people experience cognitive dissonance whenever they encounter something that does not match what they have thought or believed previously. People may choose appropriate means of reconciling their dissonance (e.g. accepting new truths, adopting new perspectives, rejecting or modifying previous beliefs) or less appropriate ones (e.g. denying new truths, clinging to false ideas).

The presence of cognitive dissonance alone says nothing about the quality or truth of someone's beliefs. For example, in the third case, the child might really have forgotten to pay for the article, or the parent might have seized on a rather threadbare excuse (not bothering to ask, "How did you forget the radio was hidden under your jacket?") and accepted it uncritically, because rejecting the first cognition—my child is honest—is too painful. The presence, or resolution, of dissonance proves nothing about the facts.

How do the critics misuse it?

Michael Shermer, an agnostic and writer for Skeptic magazine, specifically dismissed the idea that "cognitive dissonance" could serve as a tool to explain away the convictions of religious believers:

It would be a long stretch to classify [millions of white, middle class American Christians] as oppressed, disenfranchised, or marginalized…[millions of apocalyptically-inclined] Americans are anything but in a state of learned helplessness or cognitive dissonance. Indeed, some recent polls and studies indicate that religious people, on average, may be both physically and psychologically happier and healthier than non-believers.[1]

Critics like to pretend that their use of 'cognitive dissonance' is very scientific, and objective. However, they usually ignore one of the most important principles of a scientific explanation: falsifiability.

The criterion of falsifiability...says that statements or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable, observations.[2]

The hallmark of pseudoscience is its inability to be falsified. That is why neither religion or any other philosophical system can ever be called science, or tested by science. “God made it all out of nothing in seven days, and faked the evidence,” says the young earth creationist. “Any Mormon who doesn’t interpret the evidence as I do must be suffering cognitive dissonance,” says the anti-Mormon.

How could a faithful Mormon's behavior or attitude toward the evidence prove that he or she is not subject to the critics' "cognitive dissonance"?

There is nothing which the critic could not shoe-horn into his theory—cognitive dissonance is thus little but a handy club to beat anyone who does not share his interpretation. “Of course you see it differently,“ the critic can kindly, but oh-so-condescendingly assure his Mormon friend. “You’re still in the grip of cognitive dissonance.”

The anti-Mormon (ab)use of the theory is especially vulnerable to the charge of being unfalsifiable, but a lack of falsifiability has long been the chief criticism of cognitive dissonance theory generally:

One continuous criticism of Dr. Festinger's theory is that is may not be falsifiable. That is, there is no solid empirical data that proves without a doubt that people will react in a specific manner in a given situation or when dealing with dissonance.[3]

Dissonance is easier to point to when a group of people is exposed to the same situation and choices under controlled conditions. Trying to tease out why a given individual holds to or rejects religious or philosophical positions is a much taller order. There are no controls on the critics' rampant speculation, since they often wave the idea of "cognitive dissonance" about without having studied a particular believer under controlled conditions (or even without having spoken with the person they are 'diagnosing').

Is turnabout fair play?

This is not to say that cognitive dissonance cannot play a role in religious belief. It might play a role in some Mormons' refusal to accept an uncomfortable truth. It could also play a role in the critics' experiences, in which their expectations and beliefs did not meet their perceptions of reality. Each critic is the only one able to make that assessment.

But, lacking access to others’ reasoning and spiritual experiences, a critic cannot objectively judge the influence (if any) of cognitive dissonance in others’ decisions. He can worry about the dissonant beams in his own eye; others’ motes are out of the reach of his self-justifying inquiry.

Many critics seem unwilling to recognize that men and women of good will and sound intelligence might honestly disagree on the interpretation of evidence, even if considered with all the objectivity they can muster. This is, for example, why some people will buy stock at a price at which other people are eager to sell. (But perhaps the entire economy is merely an exercise in cognitive dissonance?)

LDS critics often have a naïve, super-simplified view of the historian’s work whereby anyone who disbelieves a religious account is somehow automatically more free from bias than a believer. Such a stance ignores the fact that unbelievers may feel at least as great a stake in disproving uncomfortable and uncompromising religious claims as believers might in supporting them. It is therefore no surprise that critics label interpretations with which they do not agree as examples of “cognitive dissonance” in action, while the critics' positions are portrayed as merely the product of dispassionate analysis.

One critic fond of this 'theory' tells us:

The most important part of this analysis, by far, is to recognize that the forces we are about to discuss [cognitive dissonance] operate mostly at the subconscious level. To the extent we drag them into the conscious realm, they largely stop operating.[4]

“Subconscious” forces which are used to explain behavior, especially by the outside observer, are a classic unfalsifiable hypothesis. How can we know that a “cause” which has been supposedly dragged from subconscious to awareness is the genuine article?

Why isn’t our “discovered” reason simply a rationalization, which is driven in turn by an even deeper “subconscious force” and so on down forever? Since a person is—by definition—unaware of unconscious processes, how can the critic know with any confidence that the "forces we are about to discuss" look anything like the unconscious ones?

How can you say that A and B are the same thing if no one can get a certain look at A?

If this is difficult in oneself, how much harder is it in another person, to whose mind and experience the outsider has no direct access? Despite these major hurdles, the critics seems to presume that they can reliably determine what others’ unconscious processes are and “drag them into the conscious realm.” Freud would have been envious.

The critic then makes the equally strange assertion that these effects “largely stop operating” if we are but aware of them. Even if the critic, by the greatest fortune, has indeed identified a proper “subconscious force”—something of which he can never be sure—this belief is extraordinarily optimistic. Anyone who has spent any time in counseling or mental health work knows that awareness of a problem rarely provides a direct line to altered thinking or behavior. If it did, therapy would be just a dump of information to the patient.

The critic goes on:

The message that booms through the above evidence to me is that the denial inducing nature of cognitive dissonance makes it difficult to self-diagnose.[5]

Unfortunately for the critic, if we assume that this is true, then critics are equally vulnerable to the same treatment. The Mormon could just as easily respond that an anti-Mormon's perspective is all due to cognitive dissonance. He just doesn't know it, because such a condition is "difficult to self-diagnose."

This illustrates that whatever else might be said about the flaws in this theory—the lynch-pin (“most important part…by far”) of which is an unfalsifiable and unverifiable claim about subconscious motives—it is not rational and not scientific.

But, appeals to "cognitive dissonance" allow the critic to fit the evidence to his biases, and “diagnose” flaws in others. No matter how much his Mormon target might insist that the critic does not understand the Mormon's point of view or evaluation of the evidence, this just serves as stronger evidence to the critic of how deluded the Mormon is. Cognitive dissonance in the critics' hands is nothing but self-fulfilling prophecy, or a variation of the observer-expectancy effect. It is full of fallacies, a substitute for rational discussion of the evidence and the witness of the Spirit.

Conclusion

"Cognitive dissonance theory," when applied in the critics' idiosyncratic way to explain away the witness and convictions of others, is hardly scientific. The critics' efforts fail on many grounds:

  • it cannot be falsified
  • the critic can explain and dismiss any attitude, any belief, or any conviction
  • the critic relies on claims about hidden, unverifiable, “subconscious” motivations as explanations
  • the critic arrogantly assumes that the interpreter knows more about the person and his/her experiences than the person him/herself, even if the subject disagrees with the analysis

And, any argument which the critic uses against a member can be used in just as strong a form against the critic in turn.

Endnotes

  1. [note] Michael Shermer, How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (New York: WH Freeman and Company, 1999),211–212.
  2. [note] Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1963), 33.
  3. [note] M. Bruce Abbot, “Cognitive Dissonance Theory,” class notes for ADV382J, University of Texas at Austin, September 2003 (accessed 31 October 2005). *
  4. [note] Bob McCue, “Notes for Van Hale’s Radio Show”; e-mail posting (5 September 2004), copy in author's possession.
  5. [note] Bob McCue, “Notes for Van Hale’s Radio Show”; e-mail posting (5 September 2004), copy in author's possession.

Further reading

FAIR wiki articles

Relevant logical fallacies

FAIR web site

External links

Printed material

  • Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy fails a Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1956).
  • Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957). ISBN 0804701318
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