Cognitive dissonance dooms another grad student August 1, 2006
Posted by Niels in : Graduate school, Life, the universe, and everything , trackback
My first year at Berkeley was incredibly depressing. Part of it was being overwhelmed by the work, part of it was being blown away by brilliant classmates, and part of it was just feeling like none of the professors cared whether we were there or not. I wasn’t alone though. According to the mental health survey that year, 67% of Berkeley grad students felt hopeless at some point in the past twelve months. 10% of Berkeley grad students had seriously contemplated suicide. In case you missed that, let me say it again. 1 in 10 grad students at Berkeley said they seriously contemplated killing themselves last year. About 1 in 200 actually attempted it.
The survey honestly made me feel a bit better. I was more depressed than I’d ever been before, but at least I wasn’t suicidal. I was beating the odds, kinda! And it did bring my classmates closer together. I don’t know a single person in my department who wasn’t really depressed at some point their first year.
So it blew my mind on visit day when the prospectives arrived and all my friends started telling them how great Berkeley was. Who are you people? Weren’t you telling me yesterday about how your fever just dropped below a hundred after you went four days without sleep to make a conference deadline that probably didn’t even matter? Didn’t we talk last week about how incredible it was that I was the only person in our class who managed to maintain any outside hobbies besides research and classwork? And wasn’t I failing because of it?
I guess it was all in my imagination. Prospective students arrive and all of a sudden everyone loves their advisor, the research is fascinating, and you can’t beat the weather. It didn’t make any sense.
And then, yesterday, I read a study on cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance theory states that people are troubled by inconsistency between their beliefs and actions, which motivates behavior to restore consistency. In 1959, Festinger and Carlsmith had participants engage in a mind-numbingly boring “experiment” for an hour, turning pegs on a board around and around. They then told the participants that they needed them to brief the next subject, and to please tell the subject that the experiment was interesting. Half the participants were given $20 for this, the other half were given $1.
Afterwards, the original participants were interviewed and asked how much they enjoyed the experiment. The participants given $20 said the experiment was boring, as expected. But the participants given $1 said it was kinda fun! One measly dollar was not enough to justify the lie they told and the time they wasted. Instead, they reduced their dissonance by rationalizing that they really enjoyed the experiment.
Does this sound familiar to anybody else? A bunch of grad students are miserable for a year. They’re paid a pittance. But they stay anyway. It makes no sense for them to stay. Forced to explain themselves to a prospective student, cognitive dissonance sets in. “Oh, I guess I actually love it here!” they think. Oh, cognitive dissonance, you keep academia in business.
In my next post, I’ll explain how cognitive dissonance made me date Asian girls.
Comments»
“none of the professors cared whether we were there or not.”
Lucky you, my labmates nicknamed my supervisor, “Stalker.” Yes, I have to agree graduate school is depressing sometimes, a lot of the times.
I totally agree with you, Niels. As a former CS PhD student at a top-ranked university, my experiences were completely congruent with yours.
I’m in medical school now (dropped out of grad school to go to med school), and there’s lots of rationalizing going on here, too.
It’s depressing to hear that Berkeley grad students feel this way. Did you get a chance to be a GSI while you were at Berkeley? I know that some GSIs enjoy teaching undergrads.
Good luck with everything.
ur cute
I couldn’t find the post on how cognitive dissonance made you date Asian girl … I’d like to read that (hopefully … you’re not going to put my ethnicity and [half of yours] down)
For those already stuck in grad school, here’s a helpful link that was sent to me. It’s basically a grad survival guide.
http://thepeerreview.ca/index.php?iid=10
You should feel lucky. You can get yourself a date. Here at Stanford, where the gender ratio is comparable to that of an offshore oil rig, it is impossible to get a date, Asian or not Asian.
[...] first few years of grad school were quite depressing, in large part due to the absence of the social support structure I had grown accustomed to in [...]
Dear Disgruntled Stanford Grad Student,
undergrad life is miserable here too. We were ranked below MIT as a party school by playboy, and just a few notches above CALTECH!!
I think this comment may be a wee bit after the fact, but when I was an undergrad and had to learn research methods, I conducted my own research on cognitive dissonance and the affects of attitudes vs behaviors. My theory was that those with conservative attitudes and beliefs about sex (meaning they believe in abstaining from some or all sexual activity before marriage) yet engaged in sexual activity would have lower self-esteem, due to cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance isn’t just meant to change behavior. One can resolve the dissonance by simply changing a belief. Whether beliefs triggers behavior is debatable, but that brings us right back to cognitive dissonance.
Psychology is cool.