Bateson, Festinger and the recursive role of cognitive dissonance in social organization.
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Dec. 15-19, 2004. Atlanta, GA.
David G. Casagrande
abstract
Using ethnomedicinal data from research conducted among the Tzeltal Maya of Chiapas, Mexico, I suggest partial explanations for two paradoxes of socio-cultural systems: why people often behave in opposition to their beliefs and why belief systems often fail to respond to environmental change. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance can be applied to internal logical inconsistencies in shared cognitive models. Bateson’s ecology of mind and communication emphasizes the influences of environmental information and social relationships on human thought across scales of analysis from the individual to the collective, which can lead to complex and asymmetrical potentials for environmental information feedback. I argue that daily behavior of individual Tzeltal can become inconsistent with widely shared abstract beliefs and much of Tzeltal social discourse involves collective strategies to avoid, manipulate or otherwise ameliorate resulting cognitive dissonance. Political power can be conceptualized as the ability to manipulate cognitive dissonance to maintain social cohesion, but with the potential cost of reducing adaptive information feedback and preserving maladaptive logical inconsistencies at both the individual and collective scales of analysis.