MOST OF US have experienced conflicting beliefs at one time or another. For instance, you know that drinking too much alcohol is bad for your health, but you pour yourself a second glass of wine ...

"We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." –Daniel Kahneman Cognitive dissonance, a psychological phenomenon first identified by Leon Festinger in 1957, refers to the ...

We are seeing the latest example of the scary power of the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance to distort our thinking. Though I am outraged at the harm done by misinformation — death threats to ...

Thomas Plante (@ThomasPlante) Augustin Cardinal Bea, SJ professor of psychology at Santa Clara University, is a faculty scholar with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and an adjunct clinical ...

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 ...

Do you keep second-guessing your decisions after you’ve made them? Immobilizing yourself? Berating yourself when you finally decide on something? This can be a normal albeit painful way to make ...

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 ...

Conversation among us is peppered with observations of the division within the American population. The division is revealed in a number of forms. It may be the acknowledgement of the political gap ...

It increasingly appears to be the case that some MAGA Republicans desire to replace American democracy with autocracy. President Joe Biden’s “Soul of America” speech forcefully called them out. Those ...