It has happened again. A new paper, based on a tranche of unsealed historical documents, casts serious doubt on a piece of social psychology research from the mid-20th Century. Shocker!

This time it’s about some of the fundamental inspirations for the idea of cognitive dissonance—the idea that holding contradictory views in one’s head creates discomfort and a need to change one of the beliefs. So what does the new historical research say? What about all the studies that claim to find evidence for cognitive dissonance—surely the whole thing isn’t a load of nonsense? Listen to this episode to find out.

The Science Fictions podcast is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. They’ve recently been publishing a whole host of podcasts, including the one we mentioned this week, on “the economics of the baby bust” (that’s the opposite of a baby boom, by the way). You can find it and many other podcasts at podcast.worksinprogress.co.

Show notes

* The new paper, “Debunking When Prophecy Fails”

* And the related paper “Failed Prophecies are Fatal”

* The lobotomy article in the Washington Post

* Scott Alexander on using facts to persuade

* Dan Engber on the same

* Matti Heino on the original Festinger & Carlsmith (1959) paper

* The paper itself

* The GRIM test (with an online tool to do it yourself)

* 2024 multi-lab replication attempt on cognitive dissonance

* 1983 study that was replicated

Credits

The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

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Episode 90: Cognitive dissonance

Science Fictions