Cognitive Dissonance and Bad Faith

The idea in plain words

You have publicly backed a platform, a product line or a strategy. Evidence arrives that it is not working. You now hold two thoughts that do not fit: “I am a competent person who makes good decisions” and “this decision is failing”. The discomfort of holding both is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Something has to give, and it is usually not the first thought. Instead the evidence gets reinterpreted: the market is not ready yet, the metric is misleading, the critics do not understand.

Philosophy has a name for the lived experience of this from the inside. Jean-Paul Sartre called it bad faith: a way of lying to oneself in which one is both the deceiver and the deceived.

Where it comes from

In 1954 the psychologist Leon Festinger and two colleagues joined, under cover, a small group in the American Midwest whose leader had predicted that a flood would destroy the world on a specific date and that believers would be rescued by a flying saucer. They wanted to see what happened when the prophecy failed. When the date passed without flood or saucer, some members did not abandon their belief. Instead, after a period of distress, the group announced that its faith had saved the world, and began, for the first time, actively seeking converts. Disconfirmation had strengthened commitment, at least among those most invested.

From this study, published as When Prophecy Fails in 1956, Festinger built a general theory in 1957. When beliefs and actions conflict, people experience dissonance and are motivated to reduce it, often by changing beliefs to fit actions already taken. A famous 1959 experiment with James Carlsmith showed people paid only one dollar to tell others a boring task was interesting later rated the task as more enjoyable than people paid twenty dollars. With little external justification, they had to justify the lie to themselves.

Sartre, writing in occupied Paris in 1943, offered the philosophical description. His example was a waiter in a café whose movements are a little too precise, a little too eager. The waiter is playing at being a waiter, Sartre suggested, as if he were nothing but his role, in order to escape the anxiety of being free to be otherwise. Bad faith is the flight from that freedom: treating oneself as fixed by one’s role or past, or pretending not to know what one knows. Its peculiar feature is that it requires a kind of knowing in order to avoid knowing.

What it does to the mind

Dissonance reduction is fast and mostly invisible. People do not experience themselves as rationalising; they experience themselves as seeing clearly. Ziva Kunda’s work on motivated reasoning showed how this works: we hold evidence for conclusions we like to a lower standard than evidence for conclusions we dislike, while believing we are being even-handed.

In organisations the effect compounds. The people closest to a strategy have made the largest commitments to it, publicly and personally. They are also the people who receive the evidence first. Dissonance shapes not only how they interpret bad news but whether they pass it on.

Commitment escalates in the same way. Each public defence of a failing course raises the cost of abandoning it, because abandonment would mean admitting that every defence was mistaken.

Where it shows up

Elop’s Burning Platform memo is unusual because it reduces dissonance in the other direction: it declares the old strategy failed so plainly that defending it becomes untenable. The social media essay touches on how platforms explained evidence of harm. Itanium is a case where years of public commitment by large companies made it harder to concede that the market had chosen differently.

What it asks of someone deciding

Write down your criteria for failure before you start, while you have no dissonance to reduce. Later evidence can then be judged against a standard you set when you were neutral.

Separate the evidence-gathering from the people with the most to defend. A small team whose job is to argue the opposite case, or an outside reviewer, sees what the authors cannot.

Make it safe to change your mind publicly. If reversing course is treated as weakness, people will choose bad faith over honesty. If it is treated as learning, they can afford to see.