In this episode, we discuss the landmark 1959 study that popularized the term “cognitive dissonance,” and we dive into the current state of dissonance research with Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, a political scientist who studies how cognitive dissonance affects all sorts of political behavior. Lubrano is the co-host of a podcast about activism called What Do We Want? She also wrote a book that’s coming out in May of 2025 titled Don’t Talk About Politics which is about how to discuss politics without necessarily talking about politics.
science
In this episode, the story of a doomsday cult that predicted the exact date and circumstances of the end of the world, and what happened when that date passed and the world did not end.
Also, we explore our drive to remain consistent via our desire to reduce cognitive dissonance.
When you notice you’ve done something that you believe is wrong, you will either stop doing that thing or stop believing it is wrong.
And if you come across some information that disconfirms one of your beliefs, you’ll either change your belief, challenge the validity of the challenging information, or go looking for some information that suggests no, in fact, you are totally right.
In 1974, two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, as the New Yorker once put it, “changed the way we think about the way we think.” Before their landmark research went viral (in the way things went viral in the 1970s), the prevailing wisdom was that human beings were, for the most part, rational optimizers always making the kinds of judgments and decisions that best maximized the potential of the outcomes under their control. This was especially true in economics at the time. The story of how they generated a paradigm shift so powerful that it reached far outside economics and psychology to change the way all of us see ourselves is a fascinating tale, one that required the invention of something this episode is all about: The Psychology of Single Questions.
In this episode we return to The Dress and the psychological lessons offered by one of the most viral moments in the history of the internet via an episode of Decoder Ring in which David McRaney shares some insights from his book, How Minds Change, with Willa Paskin.
In this episode we sit down with Warren Berger, the author of A More Beautiful Question – and a man who has made a career out of classifying, categorizing, and making sense of all the many varieties of questions we ask, when we are likely to ask them, and how that can lead to all manner of outcomes, some positive, some negative.
In this episode, we discuss the landmark 1959 study that popularized the term “cognitive dissonance,” and we dive into the current state of dissonance research with Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, a political scientist who studies how cognitive dissonance affects all sorts of political behavior. Lubrano is the co-host of a podcast about activism called What Do We Want? She also wrote a book that’s coming out in May of 2025 titled Don’t Talk About Politics which is about how to discuss politics without necessarily talking about politics.
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