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A violent New Year's Eve across Germany was capped off with an attack on a female livestreamer, who was assaulted in Cologne.

A few years ago, I did a big write up on cognitive dissonance and American voters. This paper was the final requirement for the writing program at Liberty University, and in a roundabout way, kickstarted my deeper study into persuasion and propaganda. I feel that cognitive dissonance is often misunderstood, as most people seem to think it simply represents a state of confusion. This is true, there is definitely a state of confusion known as dissonance, however, the dissonance usually arises when an individual’s behavior doesn’t align with beliefs, or when they are confronted with new information that contradicts their beliefs. Most of the cognitive dissonance research revolves around the strategies adopted by the individual to reduce the psychological discomfort. For instance, when a person is confronted with information that challenges his or her fundamental position, they may choose to research the new information and adopt it to reduce dissonance, or they may make excuses for whatever reason they may be holding on to their previous beliefs. In all truth, sometimes new information can be wrong, and the more rooted someone is in their beliefs, the more likely it is there will be no dissonance at all, in my opinion. Another means of reducing dissonance is called effort justification. This is where the work put into achieving a certain objective is defended even though the objective may not have been reached. B. F. Skinner explains it by saying that “those who work productively because of the reinforcing value of what they produce, are under the sensitive and powerful control of the product.” What does this mean? It means that personal effort put into any action can be a controlling mechanism for the individual. Look at COVID and mask mandates. People insisting on wearing masks despite the contradictory information concerning their effectiveness, were under the control of their own virtue signaling. It was a means of reducing the dissonance they felt when confronted with the truth of mask wearing efficacy. They simply adopted the attitude that it was for the greater good. A lot more can be said about reduction strategies. This article, however, is going to discuss another aspect of cognitive dissonance that people need to be made aware of. This is the method being used to teach it to gullible students. Brace yourselves now…. It is important to understand that cognitive dissonance research falls under a larger paradigm concerning attitudes and attitude change. The investigations that have taken place since Leon Festinger first coined the term cognitive dissonance, in 1957, have been done from the perspective of understanding what drives a person to change their attitudes. Cognitive dissonance is but one of many avenues that fall under the persuasion/attitude change umbrella. What I will be discussing now revolves around college professors, and perhaps even high school teachers, and how they are presenting the theory to their students. Instead of simply teaching them about the theory itself, some professors are using it as a means to an end − as a manipulative strategy to induce attitude change in their students. Children and young adults who may hold counter-attitudinal positions to what their professors are teaching are being told their opposition, or discomfort if you will, is cognitive dissonance. Yes, you read that correctly. Student’s that are responding in opposition to their professor’s anti-American, left-wing diatribes, are being told – in some instances – that they are experiencing cognitive dissonance, and that feeling of discomfort can be reduced by going along with the program. For example, George Mason University Professor, Paul Gorski, writes in an article entitled Cognitive Dissonance as a Strategy in Social Justice Teaching, that he likes to create dissonance by asking his students if they believe the founding fathers were all Christians. He then presents them with information commonly cited among leftists claiming they were not Christians, but deists. This is a term used to describe someone who may adhere to the belief in a God, but not necessarily a specific religious doctrine. He states that the idea of our founders being Christian places White people in a “privileged bubble.” This is already problematic as the lesson is hinting at severe leftwing bias. It is, according to Gorski, his job to break that bubble and guide the students to a new understanding of reality once they come to grips with the truth. “As an educator, it is my work to create a context in which these new relationships will, indeed, be constructed, rather than one in which students hide or flee from the dissonance that underlies these golden opportunities for learning. Continuing with the activity, then, I might ask, “What if I told you that most of the land-owning White men we call ‘Founding Fathers’ were not Christians at all? Or that many of these men, including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, identified as deists—people who believed in a higher universal power or God, but not in organized religion or supernatural revelation?” (Gorski, 2009) He goes on to say that it is his job to create an environment where students are learning to respond to new information in a way that allows them to feel comfortable in accepting new realities, while at the same time, “strengthening their wills” against the temptation to employ intellectual body armor to protect old, and outdated beliefs. When I was a student in the Northeastern State Social Work Program, my professors employed a very similar strategy. One in particular, asked the students if anyone had grandparents who didn’t vote for Obama, while subtly implanting the idea that the reason may be because of racism. This certainly created a sense of dissonance in many of the students, and I watched in amazement as many of them struggled with this idea in their head while accepting it as a possibility to reduce the feelings of discomfort created by such a decietful tactic. Another article worth looking at, in the Journal of Teacher Education, is called – Reducing Resistance to Diversity Through Cognitive Dissonance Instruction: Implications for Teacher Education. This paper revolves around cognitive dissonance as a means of overcoming resistance to multicultural education. The author writes that creating an awareness of dissonance – or discussing cognitive dissonance – before the students automatically resist what they are being taught, could be a good strategy to get them to reflect on what they are hearing, encourage critical thinking, and create a classroom environment conducive to learning. All of this is fine; however, they are being manipulated into believing their initial reactions to what they are hearing are wrong, or worse yet, racist and bigoted. To illustrate this, the authors use the essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, by Peggy McIntosh. Ironically, this is the same essay I had to write a position paper on when I was told I wasn’t fit to be in the social work program at NSU. I was a student in 2010, and the paper being discussed was published in 2001. In this paper, the professors discuss an experiment that they conducted by having students write their own response to the Mcintosh essay. These responses were analyzed in terms of agreement/disagreement to discern how effective the introduction of cognitive dissonance theory was in lowering resistance to leftist indoctrination. The results were interesting. First, the authors said that more research is needed on how to obtain an accurate measurement of potential resistance levels before and after the topic of cognitive dissonance is introduced. It was found, however, that students who were exposed to dissonance education were less resistant to the ideas in multicultural education than students who were not exposed to it. In other words, they are studying how to most effectively get your children or grandchildren, to discard their own values and beliefs and willingly adopt new ideas under the guise of being told, their resistance is cognitive dissonance.

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