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Cognitive Dissonance

Image capturing the pressure of conformity as seen in Asch's experiments, emphasizing the isolation of dissent.

The Hidden Code of Connection – Part 2 : Compliance and Conversion: Navigating the Pressures of Social Influence

The Hidden Code of Connection 1 Architects of Reality: How the Social Mind Predicts the World 2 Compliance and Conversion: Navigating the Pressures of Social Influence 3 Justifying the Unthinkable: Authority, Aggression, and Moral Compromise 4 Us vs. Them: The Psychology of Intergroup Conflict and Identity 5 Hardwired for Affiliation: Love, Loss, and the Need to Belong ← Series Home Shaping Reality: How Attitudes are Built and Deconstructed Attitudes form the content of our mental models, defining our ideology, values, and aspirations. Since attitudes predict behavior, they are integral to our identities and actions. One of the most basic mechanisms of attitude formation is the mere exposure effect, demonstrated by Robert Zajonc in 1968. Zajonc exposed participants to nonsense characters for different durations and found that people tended to like the characters that had been presented for longer. This robust effect suggests we like things we are familiar with because familiarity translates to predictability, supporting the social mind’s need to build a stable model of the world. ...

Image of a broken statue head showing internal struggle, representing the experiencing and narrating selves.

Arenas of Influence – Part 3: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Arenas of Influence: Shaping Belief in the Digital Age 1 Arenas of Influence – Part 1: The Politician's Playbook 2 Arenas of Influence – Part 2: You Are What You Buy 3 Arenas of Influence – Part 3: The Lies We Tell Ourselves ← Series Home Experiencing self Transient sensations and emotions Kahneman Narrating self Coherent fictions and plans Behavioral psychology Peak-end rule Prioritizing dramatic moments Memory bias Consistency Shield against admitting error Psychological defense The Tyranny of the Narrating Self The human experience is characterized by radical discontinuity—a constant flux of transient sensations and fleeting emotions perceived by the “experiencing self”. To impose order on this chaos, the mind constructs the “narrating self,” a psychological entity perpetually spinning coherent, simplified fictions about the past and making plans for the future. This narrator is inherently duration-blind and often unreliable, prioritizing dramatic moments (peak-end rule) and internal coherence over factual accuracy. ...