Does cognitive dissonance perpetuate misogyny, or just reflect it?

[JeanneDeMontbaston]

Hi all.

I am aware the title is feminist jargon. By 'cognitive dissonance', I mean, that state where you subconsciously hold two incompatible views. Eg., you know perfectly well that, statistically, most rapes do not happen in dark alleyways, and yet, you feel more frightened there than with your random male friend.

As I understand it, holding a position of cognitive dissonance is tiring and stressful. I wondered if it actually makes us transfer blame onto women, so that we don't just hold these contradictory positions about gender, we actually absorb the idea they're somehow women's fault?

I am thinking this because I remember going through that stage (which I think a lot of women mention) of feeling, first, angry about feminism and angry that women were 'rocking the boat' by challenging all my dearly-held cognitive dissonances.

Now, it could be that cognitive dissonance is just a reaction to living in a misogynistic society. Or, it could be that there's something in cognitive dissonance itself, that pushes us to shift the blame onto the subject of the dissonance (ie., women/gender roles). What do you think?

NB - as you might tell from my tortured syntax, this is a research question I am working on. Please be gentle!

Initially it seems odd, but cognitive dissonance certainly leads people into some very tangled logical webs as they desperately try to keep up the two contrary ideas. They can end up being barely rational on the subjects they're avoiding, certainly very confused. And then on an emotive subject (as it usually is - else why bother) that can lead to emotions being bottled up and lashing out fairly randomly. So I can see that the blame scenario might happen.

One thing about being female though is that we're socialised to avoid lashing out if possible - I suppose that could make an eventual problem larger.

Yes, that's a very good point, thanks. So there is a cognitive dissonance issue, and an underlying female socialization issue.

I have noticed that women on here (including me) often seem to get really upset by the challenging of cognitive dissonance. And maybe we do struggle so much because we're not socialized to go on the attack and be angry? I'm not sure.

People like the comfort blanket of their own constructed anger. The more false that belief is, the more aggressively its defended, particularly whenit is at most risk of disappearing.

Partially this is because it reminds you that you should have thought differently in the past and not self limited to the degree you have, and its this feeling of not being sure that you can trust yourself to advise you on the best action that makes dissolving 'comfort' dissonance so stressful..

Why, though? Why do we like our own anger? Because it must be so tiring, mustn't it, to keep being angry?

I take your point about this uncertainty about trusting yourself being a really uncomfortable issue.

But then, it's not perfectly logical, is it? Because even while you're giving in to doubts when you start unpicking cognitive dissonance, it ought to be reassuring because you're realizing you're getting closer to the truth?

For example a friend of mine was so aggressively 'feminist' she saw and raged against risks and sexism that clearly wasn't there, for example being near drunk young chavvy men she would say 'we are going to be beaten up' 'they said I had a nice arse bastards' etc she was convinced people were 'always' raped in this park or another and got really angry if anyone said anything different. It took her a long time to enjoy living anywhere because of the risks she had read about and transposed onto everything around her.

The sad thing is that if you tell people at work, for example, that they are disadvantaged, they (as a group average) will under perform and thus open up a justification for slowing progression and lowering wages for that group (theres workplace reasearch about this) the work around working class self-imposed aspiration limiting and rural self-imposed aspiration limiting is another example the 'city jobs are 'fantasies' for regional rural poor but 'possible realities' for urban wealthy, even where similar low quals. form the route in.

I think this can be transposed to feminist dissonance too perhaps?

Ouch. That's terrifying about your friend (and, I would say, odd that she saw this as 'feminist' - at least to me).

I do know about confirmation bias. I think that must be a big part of it all.

But then, I can't balance it up (all these negative things) with the positive feeling you get when you do get past an instance of cognitive dissonance. Personally, it's felt hugely freeing to do that, and I did have the sense that I'd unconsciously been putting a huge amount of mental effort into sustaining the dissonance. Does that make sense?

So I was thinking that maybe sustaining the dissonance is also what stresses us out and makes us angry.

Why be angry? Because it isn't that tiring initially, it can be quite energising, at least in the short term. And it is a barrier between you and getting upset, which is tiring.

But it is a bad path to be on in the long term.

Ah, yes, that's a fair point. Especially about it being a barrier between you and getting upset.

So what about male cognitive dissonance? Because it seems as if we've got on to talking about cognitive dissonance just amongst feminists/women, but I don't really know how men experience it.

Definite short-term advantage to getting angry over upset if a bloke walks up to you and tries something on. In anger you can hit back (if not too surprised, in which case you'd freeze).

Men, well, at a guess they are socialised to be more likely to bottle and then lash out as well. So they'd get a double whammy. Probably why statistically male abuse victims go on to abuse while females find themselves becoming victims. Also that puts them on to the depression route.

That is interesting about abuse.

But I don't see how that is a cognitively dissonant response - unless you mean, having internalised the damage of abuse, you resolve the cognitive dissonance by deciding abuse isn't abusive (and becoming an abuser)?

Both, I'd say. It's a negative feedback loop. You're in what seems like an impossible situation (misogynist boss at work, say), cognitive dissonance becomes your coping strategy (well documented in psychology literature - because you're powerless, it's this or go nuts), the cognitive dissonance then causes you to shift the blame onto other people (it's not him, it's Brenda in accounts being all bra-burny, and I'm doing fine because I'm sensible enough to laugh at his "banter"), which in turn means his misogyny never gets challenged and gets even worse.

Now of course, it may be that the situation only "seems" impossible, and that by collectively challenging it you could deal with the real problem, him. But on an individual level this is immensely risky. A little bit of cognitive dissonance plus throwing Brenda to the sexist lions brings an instant, if modest personal payoff (modest because it's never as big a payoff as misogynist boss is getting from his behaviour, but you're a hell of a lot better off than Brenda). Collective action has a potentially high pay-off (you end up with a workspace where everyone gets treated equally, hopefully via the sacking of misogynist boss), but equally carries an extremely high risk (you and Brenda are out of a job, and bringing sex discrimination cases for constructive dismissal is a very uncertain process).

Oops, cross post with Jeanne - my "both" was meant as an answer to OP, not a response to the abuse question.

That makes sense, lurcio, thank you!

This is really helpful.

The classic marker of abuse is being informed, one way or another and usually several times a day, that it: isn't happening; is your own fault; you deserve it. That gives people very conflicting emotions. I wouldn't say all abusers are necessarily resolving into thinking abuse is ok either, like I said it's bottle-and-lash-out, at least some of it.

People can also go through experiences they'd rather forget or re-write, or have re-written for them. That can give you a very nasty mental health problem.

That's what I think anyway.

At the risk of being flippant... Cognitive dissonance: because in the real world we can't put sexist boss in a gimp mask. (God, I love the film 9 to 5 - why are there no films that good coming out of Hollywood now? Yet another example of how sexism has become insidious and under the radar and the fight for equality is going backwards.)

Thanks, gibbering, that makes sense.

lurcio - well, yes.

Ok. But: if a man has cognitive dissonance about something to do with gender - say, he worries that his wife or daughter is in danger when they're out after dark, but knows statistically it's his son he should be worried about - does he then feel angry when the cognitive dissonance is exposed? Is it in his interests to maintain that cognitive dissonance?

Kajsa Ekis Ekman has a very interesting section of her book 'Being and Being Bought' where she talks about the cognitive dissonance experienced by men who buy sex. On the one hand, the john thinks that he's special, that he's not like the other johns, that the prostituted woman actually likes him for himself, that he shows her a good time etc. The happy hooker myth is therefore very important to these men. This is clear from the comments they leave on websites rating prostituted women (which I strongly advise you not to look at, so dark...)
But the john also know this isn't true. He knows that he's just a client and that she doesn't actually want to have sex with him. He's not really special at all and he hates and blames the prostituted woman for this - how dare you fail to live up to my fantasy! How dare you make me feel like less of a man! This may well be one of the reasons that women in prostitution are subject to so much violence.

And I absolutely agree with Buffy that a focus on ideological systems is appropriate here. The psychology of the individual is not sufficient.

buffy - I was really thinking about male cognitive dissonance, as my later posts were meant to suggest. I didn't manage to say that properly.

My thought is that men (as a group) get angry when they are required to sustain cognitive dissonance about women, because they can feel the effort of sustaining that. So, they try to remove to CD with strategies like 'oh, but all women actually are liars/cheats just as I thought' or 'oh, but I am a nice man so not part of the problem' - that sort of thing.

If that's true, then cognitive dissonance as it's communicated through cultural narratives like rape myths, is going to perpetuate this anger and frustration, and therefore, to perpetuate misogyny.

If it's not true, then male CD simply reflects the pre-existing condition of misogyny: men feel CD about women/gender because we live in a misogynistic world, and some of them resolve that DC with strategies like 'but I am a nice guy!' not as a means of perpetuating misogyny, but just as an unintended consequence of the pre-existing condition.

Cross post.

riveting -yes, what you say in your first post makes sense.

I'm not focussed on the individual, btw.

Ah, I see where you're going Jeanne (and riveting's post is fascinating). But the "nice guy" strategy could also perpetuate as well as being an unintended consequence - it's the whole business of male privilege, and how even nice, non-sexist men benefit from being part of the collective that includes sexist arseholes. (Agree with Buffy that the collective angle is more useful than individual psychology alone).

What does a rejection of cognitive dissonance in a man look like? A move from "but I'm a nice guy" to "while I try to be a nice guy I have to accept that we live in a fucked up society where it is rational for women to think of me as Schrodinger's rapist"? (I'm assuming that the johns Riveting speaks about are so invested in finding strategies to continue their behaviour that they will not reject cognitive dissonance come what may).

I've never written a straightforward OP in my life. Glad we're on track now.

I think that's what rejection of it looks like, but it's really hard to figure out.

The thing I'm really looking at is fictional narratives that try to instil cognitive dissonance - there's a long history of men being quite disturbed by them, but also (obviously) buying into the CD they try to inculcate. It just made me think about what's at stake here. And you see, that is a cultural issue, rather than one about individual men.

I'd be really interested to have examples of what you have in mind about fictional narratives (it's something I've become increasingly interested in since starting to try to write a bit of - bad- fiction myself: in my case how to write feminist fiction while still having believable characters in a realistically messed up world - partly because I know some of what I write is read by young adult women, and I don't want to add to the pile of cognitive-dissonance-inducing crap out there).