Excessive mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, typically a new fact that contradicts an already-held belief.
Psychologists have documented that humans resolve the stress by resorting to a variety of coping mechanisms that prevent accurate perception and recall including:
a. Selective Distortion and Retention - Remembering only those elements of a news report that affirm the individual’s beliefs, or only “hearing” or “seeing” elements of a report that affirm existing beliefs.
b. Confirmation Bias - seeking out information to confirm what we already believe
c. Source Misattribution - Attributing dubious information to a more credible source
