Cognitive dissonance

This is easiest explained by way of a simple experiment.

If you have seen any reporting from the UK Covid Inquiry you will have heard that the decision to discharge people with Covid from hospital and send them to care homes was made by politicians who ignored any scientific input and made notes explaining people in care homes were pretty much done with their lives anyway. There has been universal outrage.

It is currently education department policy that children and teachers who are testing positive for Covid should never-the-less attend school “if they feel up to it”. This has nothing to do with children not missing out on education - you don’t learn if you are sick you just make other people sick - it is that children need to be in school so that their parents can go to work. This policy is political and not based on any scientific input.

Cognitive dissonance is that feeling you can sense while reading this - intellectually you know these are the same thing, it should really be even worse that we are sending every child to get infected with Covid over and over, but you already know you are not going to stop your children going to school, you can’t exactly focus on the reason, you will be already rehearsing arguments like, they can’t keep missing their education, they are going to catch Covid sometimes anyway, they’ve had Covid and seemed to recover fine.

Human psychology is powerful, our minds block things that are too awful to think about. If you read the page on the immune system it will have kicked in again. You accept the facts re HIV because it is abstract, it happens to other people. But then read that Covid does the same but is a lot more infectious. As you read that your mind says that it just can’t be true, you would have heard about it, better not to click on the links to the published research though, they will be biased, I bet there are other scientists saying it isn’t true.

Unfortunately humans also have strong positivity bias (pretty obvious, we lock into information that is more positive), confirmation bias (we place more weight on things we hear and read if they align with what we want to believe), normalcy bias (this is why humans don’t prepare for disasters well and is sometimes described as the most dangerous bias we have - i’m sure it won’t be as bad as they say). We also suffer a very strong conformity bias (almost everyone had no problems wearing a mask during lockdown but even people with some understanding of the danger of Covid today are hugely reluctant to put on a mask on a train where they don’t know anyone.)