Prepared by Dan Eden for viewzone.com
When "Robbie" the robot was told to shoot a weapon at a man in the movie Forbidden Planet, his electronic brain sparked and short-circuited. His creator had programmed him to never harm a human and so the conflicting ideas paralyzed him.
Human beings often are presented with opposing thoughts also, but our brains have developed a way of resolving these conflicts through a process call cognitive dissonance.
We are taught, like "Robbie," that killing is prohibited -- but what about war? And many anti-abortionists support the death penalty... conflicting behavior is all around us. So how exactly does that work?
Simply put, congitive dissonance theory states that when you have two opposing ideas (or ideologies) at the same time, you will act upon the one that causes the less distortion to your ego.
Cognitive dissonance is all around us. We live in a world full of contradictions. Children are killed in Gaza in the name of peace. Feminists wear makeup, short skirts and high heels. Conservationists like Al Gore fly around in private, fuel guzzling jets. Anti-gay Christians tap their feet in public bathroom stalls... these opposing ideologies are all resolved somehow, somewhere, deep in our human psyche with cognitive disonnance.
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