🦄 Startups & VC 1d ago · Mal James

We tend to think our actions follow from our beliefs — but cognitive dissonance means we often rewrite our beliefs to justify what we’ve already done, not the reverse

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We tend to think our actions follow from our beliefs — but cognitive dissonance means we often rewrite our beliefs to justify what we’ve already done, not the reverse
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In 1959, Stanford students sat through a deliberately tedious task, then were paid to tell the next participant it had been fun. Some were paid $20 to lie. Some were paid just $1. When asked afterward how enjoyable the task had actually been, the $1 group rated it higher than the $20 group. The people with the weakest external reason to lie ended up believing the lie the most.
That result, from Festinger and Carlsmith’s 1959 study, is the cleanest demonstration we have of something most of

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