Change Your Mind and The Rest Will Follow? No En Vogue, no.

 Secretly, the temple priest has children locked in her basement. The creepy green hag quietly protects a single village on the edge of her forest, yet steals livestock from the rest. The greedy, roguish pickpocket quietly funnels money into a capital-city orphanage. Cliche set ups such as these are so common as to be tropes in many fantasy settings. Playing with characters who act in ways contrary to their stated beliefs or who seem to embody contradictory sets of faith and practice are common because they’re so human, so relatable to our real lives. It’s time to talk about cognitive dissonance.

Smokers can tell you how unhealthy they know the practice to be. The Scrooge-like miser ca alson recite the holy scripture’s prohibition against over-accumulation. The minivan with a “Local First” bumper sticker currently sits in the big box store parking lot. Each a perfect example of the disjunct between thought and action. 

Dissonance is supposed to be distressing since it points to a lack of consistency between belief and practice. And according to Leon Festinger’s theory, it is posited that we try to resolve dissonance through either a) changing our behavior or b) changing our beliefs. Frustrating to those of us who have tried to align our actions with our beliefs, our actions are a lot more deeply entrenched than the thoughts we have about them. It’s just a lot easier to (metaphorically) leave those children in the basement than to face the reality that keeping them there is somehow not in harmony with our Lawful Good alignment.

There are at least three strategies that people have developed to deal with their dissonant behavior. The application of cognitive dissonance theory to D&D is as plain as twisted human motivation. Dungeonmasters might consider seemingly-incongruent NPC behaviors as true-to-life when developing their worlds. An NPC can act in many ways that go against their self-presentation (like the kidnapping priest or benevolent forest hag),. 

First, is the “out of sight, out of mind” strategy. When information is likely to challenge our personal beliefs or point out a discrepancy between our beliefs and actions, it’s easiest to just avoid it...especially if it’s likely to increase our cognitive dissonance. The priest might have a choir practicing loudly to muffle the sounds of those whiny basement children. The hag might have her support delivered to the village through an intermediary so that she never has to see their smiling grateful faces.

The second strategy pops up after a particular decision has been made. Dissonance is greater if we consider the decision to be important, if we’ve spent a lot of time going back and forth about the decision, or if the decision is difficult to reverse. In those cases, people tend to want a lot of reassurance to beat back those feelings of dissonance. Perhaps the priest has an acolyte whose sole purpose seems to be to remind them of their goodness and mercy; perhaps the hag has a familiar who promises that helping that poor village is only temporary. She’ll surely eat those tasty village children some day.

My favorite part of this theory is this third strategy. While conventional wisdom would have us believe that we need to change people’s beliefs before we change their actions, the opposite seems to be truer.  Change someone’s actions and their beliefs will fall into alignment. Get the couch potato exercising and they begin to believe in the value of physical activity. Moreover, it typically only takes a minimal justification to flip a person’s action/belief from dissonant to consonant. A small reward can be sufficient to change a seemingly dissonant belief. 

Since Cognitive Dissonance Theory’s (CDT) initial articulation, most contemporary researchers subscribe to a slightly revised version of the theory’s major steps:

1. Attitude/Behavior Inconsistency

2. Dissonance Emerges

3. Attitude Change

4. Dissonance Reduced

According to CDT’s revision, dissonance doesn’t arise because we’re contending with a logical inconsistency, but rather an emotional and ego-invested one. We’re not acting rationally but we are rationalizing our behaviors. Often we are ego-involved enough to want to maintain our self-esteem and consistent view of our “self”.  It should be noted that the priest will likely be experiencing a lot more dissonance about keeping those children captive if she built the cells herself, identified which children to take, stole them away in the night, and keeps the cell keys around her neck. Effort and investment increase dissonance.

Dissonance will be further increased if the priest has to hear from distraught parents about how hard it is to go on without their children. If the priest feels personally responsible for her actions (rather than at the behest of her god), her dissonance will likely be higher, too. I can think of how this might apply to dissonance felt around mandates coming from any given authority. (“I might not like funding the military, but I have to pay my taxes.”) The inverse is also true. Our green hag from earlier might feel very little dissonance for protecting the forest village if she was compelled to by a powerful archfey.

Third, ego-involvement might take the form of self-esteem wherein the higher that esteem, the greater its ability to reduce dissonance. Most of us tend to want to think of ourselves as moral, adaptive to our environments, and “good” (within our particular alignment). And here is a good place for DMs and players to each take CDT’s ideas into their game. Your PCs and NPCs might be able to avoid feelings of dissonance through a robustly developed sense of self and/or a belief in the conjunction between their alignment and their actions. Chaotically Evil creatures acting chaotically evil are probably having a devil of a good time (although, of course, Devils in 5e are Lawful Evil).

Practically, CDT says something very interesting about behavior and attitude change. Considering selective exposure, post-decision dissonance, combined with minimal justification may help sway the priest to align her actions with her beliefs. Or, more interestingly, if the players can get her to release the children, her beliefs about kidnapping will probably change in response.  Get someone to change their actions freely and in public, and their beliefs are likely to change as a result. Their beliefs are likely to follow and align with the actions they’ve taken. CDT seems very comfortable in focusing on behavior change and allowing the mind’s beliefs to follow.