…of one level or another.
What is cognitive dissonance? It is the overlay of reality, experienced through personal experience, on a specific paradigm of perceiving this reality.
To put it simply: a person believes that gifts for New Year’s are brought by Santa Claus, but is practically shown that this is not the case. Here, the system of perception of reality is placed on reality itself. The psyche, accustomed to believing one thing, experiences something completely different in practice.
This causes the brain to overheat and stop functioning. That’s cognitive dissonance. (A very primitive example: when your phone tries to perform multiple tasks that are self-referential and unable to process all these operations, it overheats and temporarily “dies”). Typically, cognitive dissonance heats up the entire system to such an extent that physiology, which is closely linked to the emotional sphere, steps in to protect the psyche.
What do we have in the end? After watching a video of how small, cute rabbits are skinned alive to make angora wool, we are in such an emotional overload that our emotional system comes to our rescue: it stirs us up and searches for a way to release the “dissonance” that’s built up. This is when the “save the poor rabbits” button comes in handy, which leads us straight to making a donation. After making the donation, we find peace with the fact of the cruelty and move on with our lives, as the adrenaline levels drop and we slowly return to our normal chemical equilibrium.
This principle is the basis for many highly successful advertising campaigns. The key is to create some kind of imbalance in the area of cognitive dissonance. This sensation is so unbearable for the psyche that it is willing to do anything to return to a normal state, far from the boiling point.
Thus, a heated argument – is a natural and very understandable (from the perspective of human physiology) way out of cognitive dissonance. And the more unexpected the argument, the hotter we get, the more the cognitive dissonance resonates, the more passion we invest in saying “Don’t come near me, I’m upset! Don’t come near me ever again!”
But the heat subsides, we cool down, and calmly, almost cold-bloodedly, begin to evaluate both the flaws and the advantages of the relationship that we just wanted to tear into tiny pieces and throw into a crater on Mars.
Therefore, arguments, especially hot ones, are almost one of the funniest things that can happen to us because they almost always result in a little explosion, from which in the end no one is harmed. The only harm is what we imagined ourselves in the aftermath of this explosion.
Of course, sometimes arguments are the result of the collapse of belief systems and concepts, but this is something that stands aside, far from our feelings and emotions. Because these arguments, the ones that hurt, happen between us and the people we truly care about. And the more emotional we are, the less cold-bloodedly we can assess the argument, the deeper we experience the cognitive dissonance triggered by the argument, the more likely we are to forget all the “bad” and soon want to experience the joy of the relationship we just wanted to throw into a global sewerю