Two contradictory items came to our attention almost simultaneously a few weeks ago. The first item was a New Yorker article by Shayla Love entitled “Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?” The second was an article on a measles outbreak that presented about as clear and concrete an example of cognitive dissonance as could be imagined. Unfortunately, it was not imagined. It was real.

Cognitive dissonance, as we point out in our two videos on the subject [https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/cognitive-dissonance and https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/cognitive-dissonance], is the psychological discomfort that people feel when their minds entertain two contradictory concepts at the same time. When the concepts have ethical dimensions—e.g., “I shouldn’t insider trade because I am a good person, but I want to insider trade because I have a chance to make a lot of money”—this mental discomfort is called moral dissonance or ethical dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is a Swiss Army Knife sort of psychological concept that has been broadly applied in several settings. A key paradigm is this: Subject X believes A. Evidence indicating that A is not true is presented to X. X now suffers from cognitive dissonance, which X might resolve or at least minimize by totally changing beliefs, by rejecting the evidence and maintaining beliefs, or perhaps modifying beliefs somewhat.

Cognitive dissonance’s origin story involves a small cult called the Seekers whose leader promised that the world was about to end in a great flood and aliens would come to earth and save only the Seekers. After the promised date for this apocalypse—December 21, 1954–came and went without either aliens appearing or floods occurring, one might think that the cult members would have seen the error of their ways and gone looking for another group of crazies to join. Instead, reported famous psychologist Leon Festinger, they became even more devoted to the cult’s leader and her prophecies than they had been before.

The New Yorker article reports that recent research shows that Festinger’s researchers had infiltrated the Seekers to such an extent that their influence on the group’s decisions undermines any conclusions as to why the Seekers maintained their devotion to their leader even after the failed prophecy. In some measure they seem to have been encouraged to do so by the psychologist’s helpers.

The serious questioning of Festinger’s landmark study joins the debunking of some other classic studies, proving with some degree of certainty that in the early days of psychological research, methods and practices were not nearly as sophisticated and reliable as they are today. Similar debunking has led to serious questioning of Philip Zimbardo’s infamous Stanford Prison Experiment (supposedly showing that good people could be easily induced to do bad things by putting them in stressful settings and giving them power) and Stanley Milgrim’s famous experiment on obedience to authority.

However, the fact that Milgram’s experiment was deeply flawed does not mean that there is no such thing as “obedience to authority,” which is the tendency people have to please people in charge. [https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/obedience-to-authority and https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/obedience-to-authority]. There is, indeed, overwhelming evidence that obedience to authority is actually a thing.

Ditto cognitive (and moral) dissonance. For example, the second item we encountered recently was a Texas Tribune article about a community of Mennonites in or near the West Texas town of Seminole who were holders of anti-vaccine beliefs. Informed by public health experts

that measles is a highly contagious disease that can cause blindness, brain swelling, and even death, especially in young children, large numbers of the Mennonites ignored the scientific evidence and failed to vaccinate their children though the measles vaccine is quite safe and 97% effective, having reduced annual children’s deaths caused by the disease from 400-500 per year in 1963 when the vaccine became widely available to essentially zero in the United States.

Consonant with the public health authorities’ warnings, the Mennonites’ low vaccination rate led to our country’s largest measles outbreak in 30 years. Centered largely in the area around Seminole, it hit at least 762 Texans, hospitalized 99, and killed two children (both Mennonites). As with the Seekers, one might think that this new evidence supporting public health authorities’ warnings would temper the anti-vaxxer views of the Mennonites. But just as the failure of the space aliens to appear as prophesied arguably caused the Seekers to redouble their beliefs expressed by their cult leader, the appearance of the measles epidemic as forecast by public health officials led the Mennonites to harden their anti-vax views as the Texas Tribune article details.

The Mennonites’ beliefs and actions definitely contain a moral component so that one may say that moral dissonance is involved. By rejecting sound scientific evidence, they prevent their community from achieving and maintaining herd immunity, endangering others as well as their own members and potentially causing the U.S. to forfeit its measles elimination status that it has had for a quarter of a century, as the Tribune points out.

We suspect that if you try to convince a person wearing a red MAGA baseball cap that President Trump is a buffoon or a person wearing a “No Kings” shirt that he is anything other than a buffoon, you’ll see additional evidence that cognitive dissonance, at least in this paradigm of the concept, is really a thing.

 

Sources

Brock Bastian & Steve Loughnan, “Resolving the Meat-Paradox: A Motivational Account of Morally Troublesome Behavior and Its Maintenance,” Personality and Social Psychology Review Vol. 21 No. 3, pp. 1-23 (2017).

Lindey Byman, “Blamed for the Nation’s Historic Measles Outbreak, West Texas Mennonites Have Hardened Their Views on Vaccines,” Texas Tribune, Dec. 17, 2025, at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/12/17/texas-measles-mennonite-seminole-aftermath/.

Joel Cooper, Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory (2007).

Ross Douthat, “How to Reach the Unvaccinated,” New York Times, July 20, 2021, at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/opinion/covid-vaccine-hesitancy.html.

Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957).

Leon Festinger, et al., When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (1956).

Thomas Kelly, “Debunking ‘When Prophecy Fails,’” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 62, No. 1 (2025), at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jhbs.70043.

Shayla Love, “Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?” New Yorker, Dec. 17, 2025, at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/is-cognitive-dissonance-actually-a-thing.

Guido Palazzo & Ulrich Hoffrage, The Dark Pattern: The Hidden Dynamics of Corporate Scandals (2025)

Keith Payne, Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide (2024).

Scott Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (1993).

Joel Shannon, “It’s Not Real’: In South Dakota, Which has Shunned Masks and other COVID Rules, Some People Die in Denial, Nurse Says,” USA Today, Nov. 17, 2020.

Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom (2015).

David C. Vaidis et al., “A Multilab Replication of the Induced-Compliance Paradigm of Cognitive Dissonance,” Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1-26 (2024).

 

Videos:

Cognitive Dissonance: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/cognitive-dissonance and https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/cognitive-dissonance.

Obedience to Authority: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/obedience-to-authority and https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/obedience-to-authority.

 

Blog Posts:

“We Are Killing Ourselves with Cognitive Dissonance” (2021), at https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/we-are-killing-ourselves-with-cognitive-dissonance.

“Not-So-White Nationalists: A Story of Moral Dissonance” (2019), at https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/not-so-white-nationalists-a-story-of-moral-dissonance.

“Cognitive Dissonance and the Case of the Unindicted Co-Ejaculator” (2017), at https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/cognitive-dissonance-case-unindicted-co-ejaculator.