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Cognitive Dissonance

Bikewer

Penultimate Amazing
Joined
Sep 12, 2003
Messages
13,242
Location
St. Louis, Mo.
At the same time the Republicans are were arguing vociferously as to the need for the wealthiest Americans to keep the Bush-era tax cuts (apparently only a few thousand families), it was just reported that the US has reached a settlement with the German Deutchebank over their facilitation of hiding assets of wealthy Americans to avoid..... Paying taxes.
Some billions of dollars worth of taxes, according to the NPR report.

The plight of the wealthy....Poor babies.
 
Yes but...
The money they save with those tax cuts (and dodges) helps to pay for jobs for the less-fortunate!

So why do you hate America?
 
At the same time the Republicans are were arguing vociferously as to the need for the wealthiest Americans to keep the Bush-era tax cuts (apparently only a few thousand families), it was just reported that the US has reached a settlement with the German Deutchebank over their facilitation of hiding assets of wealthy Americans to avoid..... Paying taxes.
Some billions of dollars worth of taxes, according to the NPR report.

The plight of the wealthy....Poor babies.

Where does the cognitive dissonance come in?
 
Where does the cognitive dissonance come in?

It doesn't because it's just an old social psych theory by Festinger, Carlsmith and others that basically stated that if you held two conflicting beliefs (cognitions), you would be motivated to change one or the other to reduce the dissonance. The supporting evidence was some extremely contrived situations where the student "participants" were lied to at least four times in the course of the study.
It was merely a reheating of the Freudian ego defense mechanism of "rationalization".
 
Alright, then: Where does the hypocrisy come in?
Here:

At the same time the Republicans are were arguing vociferously as to the need for the wealthiest Americans to keep the Bush-era tax cuts (apparently only a few thousand families), it was just reported that the US has reached a settlement with the German Deutchebank over their facilitation of hiding assets of wealthy Americans to avoid..... Paying taxes.
Some billions of dollars worth of taxes, according to the NPR report.

The plight of the wealthy....Poor babies.
 
The "cognitive dissonance" title was partly tongue-in-cheek.... It's supposed to cause distress; even pain.
So, our august legislators would have been aware (we can presume) of the ongoing legal actions mentioned while at the same time arguing that the wealthy really needed those tax breaks....
 
It doesn't because it's just an old social psych theory by Festinger, Carlsmith and others that basically stated that if you held two conflicting beliefs (cognitions), you would be motivated to change one or the other to reduce the dissonance. The supporting evidence was some extremely contrived situations where the student "participants" were lied to at least four times in the course of the study.
It was merely a reheating of the Freudian ego defense mechanism of "rationalization".

Is there now a better theory?
 

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