Cognitive Dissonance and an Impossible Choice
One brisk September evening in 2001 I received a late call from my supervisor, a possible hate crime had just occurred and could I drive to the location and start documenting and start an investigation. A Middle Eastern business owner had his print shop vandalized ten days after the towers fell. I drove into town.
The shop was a mess. Expensive equipment smashed. And painted across the wall in crude letters: "Ragheads Go Home."
I stood there staring at those words. When was the last time anyone actually said that? The 1970s? It felt off – not morally wrong, but tactically wrong. Like dialogue from a bad movie. Who commits a hate crime in 2001 and uses that phrase?
But I investigated it as a legitimate hate crime. Anti-Muslim violence was spiking nationwide. I wasn't going to assume anything based on a gut feeling.
For three weeks, I interviewed 8 to 10 people a day. Neighbors, employees, business competitors, and pretty much anyone who'd had recent contact with the print shop.
We developed leads based on cars in the area seen on CCTV and by witnesses. Leads of people who hate the shop owner. I spent a full afternoon in a shack outside of town interviewing two brothers who readily admitted they’d parked by the store that night, to buy pot. Then they took me outside their house to show me their very impressive glass blowing studio and a whole lot of bongs that I wasn’t certain were legal, but not my thing. Every lead went nowhere. Every suspect got eliminated.
Meanwhile, the community rallied. They launched "Not in Our Town" – a fundraiser and public campaign. The message was clear: We reject hate. We protect our neighbors. The mayor promoted it publicly. My wife worked for that mayor. Donations poured in for the victim – a Syrian immigrant trying to run a small business.
And I kept coming back to an uncomfortable possibility. As I learned more about commercial printing and the predatory lease agreements equipment manufacturers made with print shops like this, I found that the equipment that was actually damaged were specifically the unprofitable machines, the ones bleeding money.
And there was that anachronistic slur. And the overall lack of cooperation by the victim and his wife and the uncomfortable behavior of his son and daughter.
By week three, I'd interviewed close to 100 people and systematically eliminated every alternative explanation. The only possibility left was the one nobody wanted: the business owner had staged his own hate crime.
I had to have two conversations I didn't want to have.
First, I met with the mayor. I was direct: "The investigation indicates this is most likely fraud. You need to stop promoting the fundraiser." I couldn't give him details. He had to trust me. It was awkward as hell – my wife worked for the man – but he listened.
Then I went to have a talk with the daughter.
Dissonance
Before I explain what happened in that interview, we should talk about the psychological mechanism at work: cognitive dissonance.
In 1957, psychologist Leon Festinger proposed that humans experience psychological discomfort when we hold contradictory beliefs or when our behavior conflicts with our values (Festinger, 1957). This discomfort – dissonance – is so unpleasant that we’re motivated to resolve it. We do this by changing our beliefs, changing our behavior, or rationalizing the inconsistency away.
The classic example: A smoker believes "smoking causes cancer" but continues to smoke. The inconsistency creates dissonance. To resolve it, they might quit smoking (change behavior), decide the research is overblown (change belief), or rationalize that "everyone dies of something" (minimize the inconsistency).
Most people think of dissonance as a problem – something that makes people irrational. However, dissonance is naturally occurring and present in about every difficult situation. The problem is, how we, as the interviewer, handle it. Understanding how dissonance works changes how you approach difficult conversations.
The daughter in this case was drowning in dissonance before I knocked on her door.
Her Situation
She suspected her father had staged the vandalism. His behavior on the first night had been strange – details that just felt off from the story he was telling. She couldn't quite bring herself to believe it, but she couldn't not believe it either.
Meanwhile, "Not in Our Town" had raised thousands of dollars. The mayor had publicly championed the cause. Media coverage framed her father as a symbol of resilience against hate. The community was making a moral statement: This is who we are. We stand together.
Every dollar donated tightened the dissonance. Her mental landscape looked something like this:
"I'm a good person who values honesty and community"
"I suspect my father manufactured this entire situation"
"If I stay silent, I'm complicit in defrauding people who are trying to do something good"
"But if I speak up, I destroy my father and humiliate everyone who supported him"
There was no resolution that didn't require her to betray someone. Staying silent betrayed the community. Speaking up betrayed her father.
She was experiencing what researchers call moral dissonance – when your actions (or inaction) violate your fundamental sense of who you are (Stone & Cooper, 2001). It’s one of the most psychologically painful forms of dissonance because it threatens your self-concept.
And I was about to walk into her life and ask her to resolve it.
What Doesn't Work
Here's what most investigators would do in this situation – and why it fails:
The Forced Commitment: "I'm going to be honest with you, so I expect you'll be honest with me. Does that seem fair?"
This sounds reasonable. It's in pretty much every interviewing manual and program. But it's psychologically worthless.
Why? Because it's coercive. What is she supposed to say – "No, I’m planning to lie to you about certain things"? She says "yes" because she has to, but it's not a real commitment. She's performing compliance, not making a voluntary choice.
When she later withholds information, there's zero dissonance because:
"He forced me to agree to that"
"That was obviously a manipulation tactic"
"I'm in an adversarial situation – of course I said what he wanted to hear"
The forced commitment creates no psychological ownership. It's an empty ritual.
The Guilt Trip: "Your community raised all this money. Don't you owe them the truth?"
This might create dissonance, but it also creates what psychologist Jack Brehm (1966) called reactance – the psychological resistance we feel when someone tries to force us to do something. (Knowles & Linn, 2004) She already knows the community deserves the truth. Rubbing her face in it doesn’t help; it just makes you the enemy.
The Threat: "If you knowingly withheld information about a fraud, you could be charged as an accessory." Or, as every FBI Agent ever has said at some point, “you can be charged with a Section 1001 violation for lying to a Federal Agent.”
This creates reactance and specifically reactance in the form of withdrawal. Interview over. And threatening her would make me the bad guy in a situation where she's already suffering enough.
None of these approaches work because they all try to force a resolution to her dissonance through external pressure. But research has consistently shown that dissonance only motivates behavior change when the person feels they’re making a voluntary choice (Linder, Cooper, & Jones, 1967; Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019)).
My job wasn't to pressure her. My job was to create conditions where telling me the truth became the path of least psychological resistance.
Interview
I can't reconstruct the entire conversation – it happened more than twenty years ago. But I can tell you the framework I used, because it's the framework I've used in hundreds of interviews since then.
I call it the BASE Model: Belonging, Agency, Security, and Empathy. These are the four psychological conditions that allow someone to voluntarily engage with you, even in an adversarial context.
Belonging: I wasn't there as her enemy. We were both trying to navigate an impossible situation. I acknowledged that explicitly – this was hard for everyone involved.
Agency: I made it clear she didn't have to talk to me. I wasn't demanding information. I was asking. She had control over this conversation.
Security: What would happen if she told me what she suspected? I couldn't promise her father wouldn't face consequences – that would be a lie. But I could be honest about the process, about what I knew and what I didn't know, about what would happen next.
Empathy: I let her talked, basically let her think out loud without pressuring or questioning, and then just reflected back what I was hearing – that she was trapped between loyalty and truth, and that was genuinely awful.
I didn't ask her to promise anything. I didn't guilt her. I didn't threaten her. I just created space for her to make a choice.
Dissonance Shift
Here's what happened psychologically during that conversation:
Before the interview, her dissonance looked like this:
Staying silent = community loyalty (lower dissonance)
Speaking up = betraying father (higher dissonance)
So silence was the easier path.
During the interview, I helped her to reframe which choice created more dissonance. After the BASE framework was established, her dissonance calculation shifted:
"This FBI agent is treating me fairly"
"He understands this is hard"
"He's going to find out eventually anyway"
"If I stay silent NOW – after he's been honest with me – I'm actively choosing deception"
Staying silent = complicity in fraud + disrespecting someone who respected me (higher dissonance)
Telling the truth = painful but honest (lower dissonance)
I didn't create her dissonance – the situation did. But I redirected it. I made truth-telling the path that resolved her psychological conflict rather than intensified it.
She started talking.
Next Steps
Once she made that initial choice to engage, a new form of dissonance kicked in: commitment.
Research on commitment and consistency shows that when people freely choose to take even a small step in a direction, they experience dissonance if they then reverse course (Freedman & Fraser, 1966; Cialdini, 2003). They need to justify their initial choice by remaining consistent with it.
This is why I never ask for big commitments up front. I let people make small voluntary choices:
Agreeing to talk
Answering one non-threatening question
Then another
Then another
Each choice is theirs. Each choice is small. But together, they create momentum.
With the daughter, once she started sharing what she'd noticed – her father's strange behavior, the timeline inconsistencies, her growing suspicions – stopping would have created a new dissonance:
"Why did I just tell him all that if I'm not going to tell him the rest? That would mean I made a mistake by starting. I'm not stupid, so there must be a reason I'm having this conversation."
She kept talking because stopping would have required admitting she'd been wrong to start.
I didn't drag her to the conclusion. She walked herself there through a series of voluntary commitments, each one building on the last.
Resolution
The daughter's cooperation didn’t give us everything we need but it gave me the confidence to know I was moving in the right direction and directed me to what other evidence I had to gather. Her father was charged with fraud. The community was devastated – not just by the crime, but by the betrayal of their goodwill. "Not in Our Town" had been their statement of values, and he'd exploited it.
But I think about that daughter sometimes. She made an extraordinarily difficult choice. She chose truth over loyalty in a situation where either choice would haunt her.
The only reason she made that choice was because I created conditions where doing so resolved her dissonance rather than amplified it. If I'd pressured her, threatened her, or tried to force a commitment, she would have shut down. Her loyalty to her father would have overridden everything else.
Instead, I gave her agency. I treated her with respect. I acknowledged the impossibility of her position. And I let her make a voluntary choice.
Why This Matters
Cognitive dissonance isn't just academic theory. It's the invisible architecture of every difficult conversation you'll ever have.
When someone is experiencing dissonance – when their beliefs conflict with their behavior, or their values conflict with their situation – you have two options:
Option 1: Try to force them to resolve it your way. Use pressure, threats, manipulation, forced commitments. This creates reactance. They dig in. They resist. They shut down. You get nothing.
Option 2: Create conditions where resolving their dissonance in the direction of truth becomes psychologically easier than maintaining the lie or the silence.
That requires:
Understanding what dissonance they're already experiencing
Not adding to it through coercion (which just creates new dissonance about being manipulated)
Establishing BASE conditions (Belonging, Agency, Security, Empathy)
Letting them make voluntary choices
Recognizing that small commitments cascade into larger ones
Most investigators want scripts. They want to know exactly what to say. "If I say X, they'll respond with Y."
But human psychology doesn't work that way. People aren't machines. They're complex, contradictory, and experiencing dissonance you can't see.
Your job isn't to follow a script. Your job is to:
Recognize the dissonance
Create conditions that allow them to resolve it voluntarily
Get out of the way
The daughter in that print shop case didn't provide me information because I was clever or because I used some trick. She cooperated because I created a situation where cooperating resolved her psychological conflict better than any alternative.
The interview solved itself. I just built the conditions that made it possible. And to be honest, I was a bit lucky, because it would take another 15 years for me to really understand all of the elements of my BASE Model.
Coda
About three years after the case was successfully tried, my wife, my parents and I were walking along a pier in a relatively small fishing village south of town, a popular tourist spot and home to great kayaking, and I saw a woman pushing a stroller toward me with an intent look on her face.
After a moment I realized that it was the daughter who I had not seen since the trial…the trial where her mother threw a trash can at me. I was rather terrified about what was going to come next.
She said “Agent Seale!” “Yes, hi” I responded warily. She was not angry, she was not going to attack me. She said she was so excited to see me and told me about finishing her degree, getting married, and having a family. She wanted me to know that and wanted me to know she still was not angry with me.
Several more years later, once the subject was out of jail, started a new shop, and proceeded almost immediately to commit more, and even more blatant fraud, for which he would have been convicted had he not been allowed by a judge to travel to Syria (from which he never returned), the mother approached me at a hearing and apologized for having thrown the trash can at me.
References
Brehm, J. W. (1966). A Theory of Psychological Reactance. Academic Press.
Cialdini, R. B. (2003). Influence. Influence At Work.
Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.
Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(2), 195–202.
Harmon-Jones, E., & Mills, J. (2019). An introduction to cognitive dissonance theory and an overview of current perspectives on the theory.
Knowles, E. S., & Linn, J. A. (2004). Resistance and persuasion. Psychology Press.
Linder, D. E., Cooper, J., & Jones, E. E. (1967). Decision freedom as a determinant of the role of incentive magnitude in attitude change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6(3), 245–254.
Stone, J., & Cooper, J. (2001). A self-standards model of cognitive dissonance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 37(3), 228–243.
