Carrying on with our series on cognitive biases, today I want to talk about cognitive dissonance and how it effects people in general, and more specifically flat-earthers.
Cognitive dissonance is what a person feels when something they believe in strongly, is challenged by new evidence.
This is why flat earthers are the perfect group of people to study cognitive dissonance. Because if a person believes the earth is flat, they are bombarded every day with evidence to the contrary. Therefore the amount of dissonance they feel is so manifested that it makes it very easy to view and study.
Let's take a look at how cognitive dissonance might arise in the first place with a good old thought experiment.
Imagine a person who has for some reason managed to grow up in Antarctica. More specifically in the Soviet Vostok Station, which is officially the coldest place on earth.
Let's call this person Sam. Now even though Sam's parents are polar scientists, they somehow don't know very much about the world beyond the ice. So they have taught Sam that the sun is made out of a ball of ice.
Sam being the same as all children on earth, is genetically programmed to believe what his parents tell him, and so grows up with the notion that the sun is indeed made of ice.
Then one day as a young man of twenty one years old, he decides that he wants to interact with other human beings and leaves Antarctica to go to Las Vegas.
Whilst in Vegas he goes out to the Nevada desert and he is very hot. He asks a stranger why he is so hot. The stranger looks at him funnily and tells him it's because the sun's heat is so fierce in the desert.
But of course Sam knows the sun is made of ice and doesn't give off heat. Later that night he returns to the desert and notes that it is very cold.
He wracks his brains all night and falls asleep outside. In the morning when the sun rises, Sam is hot again.
At this point Sam is experiencing cognitive dissonance. He knows that the sun is made of ice, he also knows that ice is cold. Yet he feels heat when the sun is present in the sky, and cold when it isn't.
Sam now needs to reduce his cognitive dissonance in order to align his cognitions (perceptions of the world) with the new evidence.
Sam's brain is left with four choices:
Change the behaviour of the cognition - I will stop believing that the sun is a ball of ice.
Justify the cognition, by changing the conflicting cognition - The sun is not creating this heat, it is the sand.
Justify the cognition by adding new cognitions - The air around the earth gets thicker towards the middle and that traps heat made from people breathing.
Ignore or deny information that conflicts with existing beliefs - It is not in fact any hotter here than at the South Pole.
Sam ends up choosing a mixture of choices 2-4, depending on who he's talking to.
So back to the flat earthers, or rather two specific ones. A Youtuber called Tigerdan925 and 'Mad' Mike Hughes, the flat earth rocketman.
Tigerdan925 believed that the earth was flat, and so somebody challenged him to draw a flat earth map that worked as well as a 'glober' map.
After several weeks of trying, which involved moving continents around to try and suit his model. He realised that the thing he had believed all of these years was completely ridiculous and quite publicly rejected the notion. In other words he went for option 1.
Mad Mike Hughes built a steam powered rocket that he hoped would somehow get him into space, and bring him back to earth without killing him.
Obviously he didn't get high enough, only around 570 metres (circa 1500 feet). However he did disprove one flat earth model, which is that gravity is an illusion made real by the fact that the earth is accelerating up at 10 metres per second squared (10 m/s2).
If this was the case then anything accelerating quicker than this would be able to get into space. Even though Mike's rocket got to a speed of around 500 k/ph it didn't reach escape velocity and came back down to earth.
Mike plan's to build another rocket, even though a flight in a commercial plane at sunset or sunrise will not only take him much higher, will prove to him that the earth is round. Mike is going for options 2-4.
He chooses to restore the balance that cognitive dissonance has robbed him of, by making more and more elaborate stories to make his theory fit.
What makes Tigerdan925's retraction so amazing, is that it is much harder to retreat from a belief when that belief has been publicly ratified. In other words, if you tell people about your belief, and you even try and convert others to that belief. Then it is very difficult to later walk away from it. However that is exactly what Tigerdan925 managed to do; bravo sir!
As far as Mad Mike's concerned I fear the same won't be able to be said about him. The fact is Mad Mike has had plenty of evidence to show him that his thoughts about a 'frisbee shaped' earth is a complete and utter nonsense.
He also knows there are far better ways to prove that flat earth theory is idiotic at best, wildly dangerous at worst. However he did something that was doomed to failure from the beginning, because that made him feel better.
And there we have it, cognitive dissonance makes us feel bad, and so some of us choose to make that bad feeling go away by making up stories.
For the rest of us, we simply have to deal with the realities of our lives and move on . . .
