Continuing: Making Peace in the Abortion War

We've started to read and discuss Rachel McNair's Achieving Peace in the Abortion War. So far we've read chapters 1, 2, and 3. Today we'll look at Chapter 4, When Ideas Don't Fit:

Up until 1957, a lot of psychological research had been done on why and how people make decisions. Much work had looked at decision making, but little had been done on the mind after decisions were carried out. Leon Festinger took an interest in this, with a special curiosity for why some people acted in ways that didn't seem exactly logical. How did they rationalize those decisions? That year, he formally introduced the theory of cognitive dissonance.

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Strategies for dealing with cognitive dissonance vary from person to person. But this dissonance is a strain, and people do try to get relief from it. ....

If people have no hint that commitments might have negative consequences, then they don't cause the inconsistency, and are less likely to feel a need to explain it. But if people are responsible for deliberately doing something that has foreseeable negative consequences, then the strain to explain will be greater. ....

For a lot of people, basic self-respect is one of the cognitive elements that is most highly resistant to change. Any idea that boosts their self-esteem is more likely to be accepted and any idea that threatens it is more likely to be rejected. ....

Those trying to reduce dissonance, by any strategy, are going to be able to do it better if they can find other people who agree with them. The more people that can be found who see it as reasonable to ignore the point, or find the alternative explanations plausible, the more it makes sense to the individual. ....

If you've taken action on a belief, then the belief is more resistant than if you haven't. The more important the action, the more resistant the change. An opinion that you've expressed in a letter to the editor is harder to change than one that you've kept to yourself. An opinion you've based a career on is even less changeable. ....