[Maru]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

Hold on a second. That's a completely inaccurate description of cognitive dissonance! He describes it as;

"When there's something that they were sure was true about the world or themselves that was shown to be completely not true."

The rewriting the narrative part is fine, and it happens THEN, too, but he's talking about something closer to straightforward denial.

Cognitive Dissonance is when a person in themself holds separate views that directly contradict each other (NEITHER need be objective fact, all that matters is that they are contradictory beliefs), and needs to perform mental gymnastics to hold onto both beliefs without ending up in an existential spiral (where one of the beliefs will inevitably need to be abandonned). It's not necessarily about new or external information.

He's talking about people holding irrational beliefs and being confronted with objective facts that disprove those beliefs. That isn't the same thing.

Yeah, I didn't really listen to his initial description as I took my eyes of screen til he got to the point (I was multi-tasking), but if that is how he phrased it, then I think you have a great point...

I agree with him that denial is a tell of CD. However, denial alone is not exactly CD as you say... I think many people start there, but someone who just has denial of something until they have further proof, they will eventually disengage as their points are deflated one by one, but it may take a little longer for them to come to a shift in their POV as they are stubbornly entrenched there...

Someone in CD though, they will take it further and further until there's a disarray... but instead of just simple denial, it distorts where everything in the world has to meet with one's expectations despite that self-contradicting reality... not many people know they're in this state though, they think they're maybe in the denial/stubborn opposition phase at most, and that they're sticking to their guns, etc... that they just haven't seen enough evidence, not that their own world view is a distortion of the external... because it is so deeply entrenched with their sense of self, I would guess. (Edit) Anyway I think CD creates a mental roadblock...whereas denial is more emotional, etc.

Anyway, the video is focuses on the tells and I think his tells work very well for social media. In real life, it's more difficult to predict I think... because getting people to expose themselves in that way, they would have to be fairly deeply entrenched in CD, in other words completely unaware of their conflation... Whereas online, with anonymity, I think ppl's CD is more likely to be there, as there's often a comradery of folk there to support the delusion...