Instead of reading, you could also just listen …
One step towards change is through cognitive dissonance.
Nobody likes to hear that they are mistaken. But, if we want to inform our patients and their parents to make better choices, we need to challenge wrong ideas nevertheless.
How do you feel when being contradicted?
What do you feel when someone points out that you made an error? Within the first millisecond, you feel attacked or threatened. In this case, the instinctive response will be to defend yourselves. You raise your guard and fend off any input that challenges the way you might think about the world.
This basic response seems to be hardwired in our minds and seems to be unrelated to age.
But even though, we do not like the sensation of being in the wrong, we need to deal with the tension when our assumptions are clashing with reality. One step towards change is through cognitive dissonance.
How will you act if someone contradicts you?
Will you stick to your opinion and just dismiss any other position, or would you be open to hearing different ways of interpreting the world? Apparently, the response to this question depends on how strong you hold your view in the first place.
How strong you hold your convictions matters!
In a study, L. Berkowitz invited 53 (27 female; 26 male) students from an introductory psychology course at the University of Wisconsin to state their opinion about mercy killing. They were classified within each sex into 3 groups, depending upon their responses to an attitude questionnaire:
They could be:
- consonant with the view presented
- moderately dissonant with the view presented
- or strongly dissonant.
Afterwards, they listened to a tape-recorded speech concerning mercy killing, supposedly given by an authority on the subject.
The study showed that:
(1) the strongly dissonant participants, especially the men, tended to prefer to communicate with others holding views close to their own shaken beliefs.
(2) the somewhat more confident men in the moderately dissonant and consonant groups were more inclined to seek people holding different opinions
(3) though they indicated a preference for writing to fellow group members moderately far from them on the attitude continuum, the moderately dissonant men tended to write the longest messages and were also most likely to ask the others for their opinions.
In essence, you might be most open to alternative explanation concepts if you are moderately certain about your position. The stronger you hold your opinion, the lover the likelihood that you would search out other points of view.
Cognitive dissonance in the surgery
Our patients and their parents come with their ideas about the causes of the disease. I will untangle more common assumptions in my next post. Some of their thoughts are correct, some are slightly off the mark, and some are outright incorrect. In the later case, we would need to correct these misguided ideas. In essence, we would need to trigger cognitive dissonance. One step towards change is through cognitive dissonance.
One illustration of the mechanism of cognitive dissonance is the aim to help someone out of conspiracy theories. Here, the “believer” is personally heavily invested in the view he or she holds. Conspiracy theories look almost like “DIY” for religion. In recent times we saw this unfolding at the margins of the spectrum of opinions, for example regarding vaccinations. The more outspoken the opinion, the smaller the space for joint efforts to tackle the underlying issue of a pandemic.
It is painful when someone contradicts you. One step towards change is through cognitive dissonance.
To move from this difficult starting point towards cooperation demands specific effort. As a very first step, we would need to present ourselves trustworthy. To create a mental opening for the patient and parent for possible alternative explanations for their models, we would need a sense of safety and trust in the conversation.
In a nutshell:
One step towards change is through cognitive dissonance. This is necessary to empower the (paediatric) patient to become a real partner of any treatment plan.
Communication lives on comments … fancy to share yours?