4."When the pandemic started, a friend of mine got really obsessed with the fact that you can't leave your home or go near people without a mask — but it never reflected in his own actions. He judged ...

In 1934, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit eastern India, killing thousands and devastating several cities. Curiously, in areas that were spared the worst destruction, stories soon spread that an even ...

I have been struck in several recent conversations by how clever our minds are at deceiving us, warping reality to fit our preconceived notions of what kind of people we believe ourselves to be. These ...

In the Aesop’s fable, the fox tries hard to get his hands on a tasty vine of grapes, but fails in all of his attempts to acquire the grapes; at which point the fox convinces himself that he really ...

Cognitive dissonance is what happens when a person holds two sets of beliefs at odds with each other. The human brain doesn’t like logical inconsistencies, so someone experiencing cognitive dissonance ...

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New research has deepened our understanding of why pescetarians choose to eat fish but not the meat of land animals. The perceived distance between marine life and participants in the study was a key ...

If nations can suffer from cognitive dissonance just as individuals can, it’s easy to see why we elected Donald Trump. A good place to start thinking about this is football: As I often do in late ...

When the foreign policy of a country as large and significant as the United States is governed by a case of cognitive dissonance, terrible things happen. These terrible things are, in fact, already ...

"Cognitive dissonance" is a fascinating term to ponder. My understanding is that it has to do with the distress created when one encounters something that is: 1, undeniable and irrefutably true; 2, ...