98% of people fail this quiz. A lesson In cognitive dissonance.

There’s a phenomenon in psychology that affects all of us. It explains things like why Q-Anon supporters are so stubborn, but also things like why we collectively keep letting factory farms cause so much suffering.

And to explain what we’re talking about, let’s start by playing a game, moral or immoral. We’ll give you a set of events, and you tell us whether you think they are moral or immoral.

1. In 2018, a man by the name of John Curno made a habit of showing up on a farm and penetrating cows while pleasuring himself.

2. In 2015, another man, John Scott Falbo II, ran over a group of ducklings with his lawnmower, macerating them alive, because quote “They were in my path so I just kept mowing”.

3. And more recently, Jozef Daria cut the throat of his pet chihuahua as part of a “religious ritual” that he was performing.

Now, would you consider those actions to be moral? What do you think should happen to those people? Well, as it turns out, society has decided that all those actions were immoral, and the people in question were all punished. John Curno was banned from ever going on a farm again, John Scott went to jail for a year, and Jozef Daria was sentenced to a two-year community order.

Ok. Round 2. Let’s run through a similar set of events in a slightly different context.

1. In the dairy industry, dairy farmers routinely penetrate cows to get them pregnant, because, well, they need to have babies in order to produce milk.

2. In the egg industry, male chicks who are unable to produce eggs, are deemed useless and killed on their first day of life, typically by being macerated alive.

3. The most common way animals are killed in slaughterhouses is by having their throats cut.

Would you consider those events to be moral? In this case, the experience for the animals is the same, and since we have no nutritional need for any animal products, the actions are just as unnecessary, but society has decided that they’re perfectly moral.

In those industries, those actions are standard legal practices. The animal agriculture industry does them to billions of animals every year, and not only that, we pay them for it.

So what is going on? Why is John Curno described as dirty and pervy but we pay dairy farmers to do what he did? I mean, do we really want the secretions that come out of cows’ udders that badly?

Most obviously, these contradictions exist because we are completely removed from the process of what we are paying for. Many of us are simply not aware that these are among the standard legal practices of the animal agriculture industry.

However, when we become aware of what it is that we are supporting and are forced to grapple with these hypocrisies we display what is called cognitive dissonance.

The term cognitive dissonance was coined in the 1950s by Leon Festinger when he read about a cult that believed the world was going to end due to a great flood because, apparently, aliens told them so. These aliens had also said that they would show up in a flying saucer and save them by flying them to another planet.

Obviously, the flood never happened, but what interested Festinger, in particular, was not the belief itself, but how the cult members would react and cope with the event not occurring. Some returned to their normal lives, but others, particularly the ones who were deeply invested in the cult, and did things like quit jobs and end relationships for the sake of it, doubled down on their beliefs and started rationalising, by saying for example, that they had spread so much light that they saved the world from the impending tragedy.

A very similar example played out recently when followers of the Q-Anon cult were forced to confront the failed prophecy of the so-called Storm that they had been preparing for. Some followers turned their back on the cult, realising that they had believed a lie, whilst others became more entrenched in their views, finding rationalisations for why the prophecy had not unfolded as they had been told and believed that it would. 

These are examples of cognitive dissonance. So what exactly is cognitive dissonance?

Basically, cognitive dissonance describes the uncomfortable tensions that arise when we find contradictions within our beliefs, actions and reality. This tension can either lead us to change the inconsistent elements of our beliefs and actions to reduce the dissonance or to attempt to find rationalisations that seek to explain the contradictions.

It’s the tension between the unwavering belief that a flood was supposed to occur and the reality that nothing happened.

Or, the tension between interpreting a man macerating nine ducklings as wrong, while knowingly eating eggs that come from an industry that does the same thing to billions of male chicks every year. Our belief that hurting and killing animals is wrong, is inconsistent with the behaviour of supporting industries that hurt and kill animals.

This causes tension, and so to resolve that, we can either change our behaviour and go vegan, or rationalise our behaviour by believing things like animals can’t really feel pain, vegans are the preachy ones, or eating animal products is necessary.

In truth, part of the reason why this example of cognitive dissonance is so fascinating is that it doesn’t revolve around a cult that appears suddenly and preaches something that is wildly outside of the societal norms but is instead about a multi-generational belief that is the social norm and yet represents one of the most obvious contradictions that we as a society have when it comes to our behaviours and beliefs. 

After all, if it’s wrong for John Scott Falbo II to macerate ducklings on his lawn, how is it not wrong to macerate male chicks in hatcheries? And if it’s wrong to cut the throat of a dog, how is it not wrong to cut the throat of any other animal?

Of all the examples of cognitive dissonance, our treatment of animals is one of the ones we as a species are forced to grapple with the most. We are literally forced to confront it every time we sit down to eat.

So the question is, do we make the changes necessary to remove the dissonance from our beliefs, or will we go round and round the hamster wheel of rationalizations, hoping, in vain, that those contradictions will magically disappear?

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