Speaking Out

BY JOHN FER

Cognitive dissonance—the discomfort of holding conflicting thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially during decisions or change—is a powerful force that U.S. government messaging often overlooks. This blind spot is one our adversaries are quick to exploit, as I’ve seen firsthand in my work as a public diplomacy officer.

For example, in July 2021, a friend in Tbilisi noted what he saw as U.S. hypocrisy: Washington appeared tougher on Georgia over LGBTQ+ issues than on oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia, which President Biden had just visited to address energy concerns. “Would you lay off if we had oil?” my friend quipped.

Russia and its allies wasted no time amplifying such perceptions. Less than a year later, Russia’s Orthodox Patriarch claimed the U.S. supported Ukraine so Kyiv could hold Pride parades—a message that resonated in Georgia, a country where at the time 84 percent of the public believed homosexuality was “always wrong.”

Domestically, U.S. messaging at the start of the war in Ukraine emphasized sanctions as a tool to pressure Russia into changing its behavior. Yet two years later, reports that Russia’s economy had not only weathered sanctions but was projected to outpace Group of 7 (G7) growth undermined confidence in that strategy. This may have contributed to delays in approving further military aid.

Policymaking and its associated messaging often involve inherent inconsistencies, yet we seldom assess the impact of the dissonance these inconsistencies create. Left unmeasured and unchecked, this dissonance risks alienating audiences—and if it happens often enough, we may lose them entirely. This doesn’t mean abandoning our values, but it does mean systematically analyzing how much dissonance our messages create and how long specific audiences can tolerate it.

By recognizing cognitive dissonance as a fundamental part of communication and assessing its effects before, during, and after messaging, we can mitigate its harm and better advance U.S. strategic objectives. This requires a deliberate acknowledgment that prolonged exposure to dissonance erodes trust—and once trust is lost, it is nearly impossible to regain.

A Hardwired Phenomenon

While not unique to diplomacy, cognitive dissonance in our field provides a powerful lens to examine how professionals confront and reduce this tension. Cognitive dissonance is a hardwired phenomenon we ignore at our own risk.

Leon Festinger, who pioneered the concept at Stanford in 1958, wrote: “Just as hunger leads to activity aimed at hunger reduction, cognitive dissonance leads to activity aimed at dissonance reduction.”

Physiologically, we are wired to seek consonance, the opposite of dissonance. Even as infants, we instinctively seek harmony when confronted with discordant sounds. At every level, humans are drawn toward coherence.

Just as immune cells, when reacting to inflammation, release cytokines to rally defenses, the brain works to restore cognitive balance by adjusting beliefs, behaviors, or justifications. If resolved, the system calms; if not, chronic stress can fuel anxiety, depression, or unhealthy coping.

Our challenge as diplomats is to reflect that instinct toward coherence and to better consider our audiences in the stories we tell the world. As public diplomacy practitioners, we must think about how our messaging affects foreign audiences. Are we minimizing the dissonance our narratives create—or deepening it?

And at the very least, are we measuring it?

A Historical Perspective

In the 1960s, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara led a wave of technocratic governance, applying quantitative methods to major institutions—most infamously, the Vietnam War. By 1995 he admitted in his memoir, “We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”

Ironically, McNamara’s “whiz kids” never accounted for the cognitive dissonance their policies would produce. They promoted body counts as the primary measure of success, a metric that not only dehumanized the conflict but also arguably deepened public skepticism. By 1970 most Americans already believed Vietnam was a mistake, and within a year, nearly three-quarters supported a full withdrawal.

The official tally—58,000 U.S. dead versus as many as 3 million Vietnamese—only underscored the imbalance and further alienated audiences on every side of the debate. From that point forward, public trust in government entered the long decline that defined the post-Vietnam era.

Day-to-day public diplomacy may not rival the gravity of Vietnam-era decisions, but it is no less essential to measure, analyze, and address inconsistencies between our messaging and our stated values in this work.

Cognitive dissonance is inevitable—but ignoring it, as we often do, alienates audiences and undermines foreign policy goals. We damage our credibility when we fail to present nuanced arguments, dodge accusations of hypocrisy, or dismiss those who challenge us.

Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, in Changing Minds (2004), notes that “making sense is a deep human motivator” but cautions that coherence isn’t the same as truth. People will go to great lengths to reconcile conflicting information with their core beliefs.

Consider Preemptive Analysis

In public diplomacy, we often address uncomfortable truths at odds with our message only when our interlocutors bring them up—but by then, the damage is done. Audiences have already noticed the gap between our rhetoric and actions and formed their judgments. This erosion of trust undermines our core goals: to inform, engage, and influence.

When we do respond, it’s often with generic lines: “There are trade-offs in international relations” or “We work with countries where we can.” While technically valid, such statements rarely reverse the narrative, much less the gradual increase in dissonance. By that point, many have tuned out or hardened themselves to believe that the United States says one thing and does another.

Preemptive analysis could help. By anticipating where our messages might trigger dissonance, and proactively messaging on the disconnects between stated values and actions, we stand a better chance of keeping skeptical audiences open to our explanations.

Gardner also describes the “equity principle”—a deep-seated human expectation that fairness should be evenly distributed. When reality violates this instinct, as it often does in geopolitics, dissonance spikes.

This isn’t a partisan problem; it’s structural and recurring. The key is to confront it early. Rather than reactively patching over contradictions, we should assess and address them in advance to limit long-term reputational cost.

Case Study: Climate Change

With today’s analytical tools, we can—and should—anticipate cognitive dissonance before, during, and after messaging to foreign audiences. Take, for instance, the issue of climate change.

We could measure variables like public belief, drawing from opinion surveys; we could also quantify policy action by tracking major policy actions. Because conversations pervade the media space, it should be our role to measure the impact of competing narratives on foreign audiences.

For example, when we signed the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, how did the following articles (one a “fact check” by The Washington Post, and the other a rebuttal by AEI, the American Enterprise Institute) move the needle of public opinion? Each article claims to debunk the other, offering little space for nuance or the audience’s cognitive reconciliation.

What if audiences were convinced, for example, by AEI’s argument that gross polluters like China and India had ostensibly agreed to nothing in the Paris Climate Accords? What if they believed The Washington Post’s accusations that President Trump did not tell the truth?

The point isn’t whether climate change is real—it’s whether we’ve done enough to manage the dissonance that impedes policy traction. For PD officers in any administration, knowing how U.S. government messaging is landing and being processed should be one of our primary responsibilities.

Beyond climate messaging, issues like human rights, LGBTQ+ protections, and the perception of selective application also foment significant dissonance. These topics have limited elasticity in shaping belief—once trust erodes, it’s difficult to recover. If we fail to monitor and mitigate the dissonance we generate, we risk losing entire audience segments permanently.

By applying the skills of quantitative professionals, we could achieve more substantive and effective analysis. We might, for instance, examine the “levels of information entropy,” Claude Shannon’s famous measure of uncertainty in communications.

The key point is not that we should change our policies or avoid difficult or nuanced topics, but that we should consider dissonance in our strategic messaging and evaluation.

Time to Embrace Uncertainty, at Least in the Planning Process

It’s easy to see how audiences grow weary of the gap between our stated values and our behavior.

Like a spring stretched too often, cognitive elasticity wears down. If exposed to constant dissonance, cognitive resilience (or stiffness) decays over time; and, as resilience decreases, cognitive dissonance (or strain) accumulates more rapidly.

If we keep testing that limit—by sidestepping nuance, dodging charges of hypocrisy, or dismissing criticism as “whataboutism”—we risk lasting damage to American credibility.

Before we criticize China on human rights, perhaps we should start by acknowledging our own struggles. Similarly, before lecturing one country on LGBTQ+ protections, we might recognize that we don’t even address the issue in certain other countries. This approach wouldn’t change our policies but could soften our stance and reduce dissonance.

International relations are complex, and aligning perceived values with actions is challenging. We can, however, make a greater effort to analyze potential cognitive dissonance in foreign audiences and mitigate its long-term effects by acknowledging its existence and admitting that our actions sometimes exacerbate it.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “One of the biggest problems with the world is that fools are always so sure and certain about everything and intelligent people are so full of doubts and uncertainties.”

It might be time to embrace the uncertainties in our messaging—it could make us the smartest players in the room.

John Fer is the planning and coordination officer for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs in Washington, D.C. He joined the State Department Foreign Service in 2009 and has served in New Delhi, Managua, Moscow, Riga, and Tbilisi. He is an Air Force veteran and a returned Peace Corps volunteer (Nepal). He and his wife, Victoria, have two sons. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily those of the U.S. government.

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• “Tips from the Belly of the Python” by John Fer, The Foreign Service Journal, May 2015
• “The Golden Rule of Professionalism” by Matt Tompkins, The Foreign Service Journal, June 2017
• “Rethinking Public Diplomacy for a Post-Pandemic World” by Jian (Jay) Wang, The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020