Far Cry

Hey everyone!

Have you ever, even once in your life, done anything that conflicted with your beliefs?

It could be anything. Maybe you were dieting and sneaked in some cake. Maybe you consider yourself an animal lover but you kicked a puppy once. Or maybe you skipped class even though you think school’s really important.

Chances are, acting against your beliefs made you feel a little bit uneasy. It turns out, that uneasy feeling is called cognitive dissonance! Festinger (1957) put forth this groundbreaking theory about how our behaviors counterintuitively end up shaping our behaviors. Chances are, if you did one of those things I mentioned earlier, you changed your attitude in order to feel better about the choice you made. “I don’t need to diet.” “Dogs don’t count.” “School’s not that important.” By modifying you attitude to justify whatever action you chose to take, you made yourself feel better and reduced your cognitive dissonance.

A whole host of different situations cause cognitive dissonance in people, but the most relevant one for me right now is facing equivalent choices. Many people experience this when deciding which college to attend. (Personally, I fell in love with Southwestern when I visited the campus, but that’s beside the point.) They agonize over the choice and make huge lists of pros and cons. They worry that if they choose “wrong,” they’ll wind up miserable.

However, according to Brehm (1956), people have the uncanny ability to make themselves feel better about these difficult choices. As soon as the choice is made, people convince themselves that the pros of the selected option far outweigh the pros of the other choice. Similarly, the selected option’s cons are nothing compared to all the cons of the other choice. This happens even though just a few days beforehand, they were more or less identical.

In my case, I’m facing some half dozen different career paths. I like I/O psych, stats, forensic psych, behavioral economics, and now this whole social psych field. I’ve got about a month before graduation, when I’m dragged kicking and screaming into the Real World where I need to have some sort of career that pays better than minimum wage in order to support myself.

While I know I can change career paths (and my whole plan after graduation is “get a job in one of these fields and see how you like it), I’m still very nervous about making the “wrong” choice and getting stuck in a job I hate. My hope is that whatever I decide, the magic of cognitive dissonance reduction will make me love it.

And that brings me to today’s song. “Fly by Night” by Rush. (I’m really enjoying the challenge of limiting myself to just Rush songs.) This song is about Neil Peart’s decision to leave Canada at some point in his life. People on a lyrics site for song meanings whose userbase takes everything far too seriously claim that Peart wrote it in the airport in England; in other words, he wrote it after committing to his decision. So, when he says “[his] ship isn’t coming and [he] just can’t pretend,” he’s exaggerating the negatives of the option he forsook. And the lines about the “new life ahead” that “begins today” imply he’s comforting himself with the potential for opportunity, even though he’s risking his life for it. Here’s the song, complete with 70's hair:

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Brehm, J. W. (1956). Post-decision changes in desirability of alternatives. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52, 384–389.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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