PREPARE FOR THE GRE TEST WITH A NEW WORD EACH DAY

Welcome to my blog

Words and phrases shown on this blog are taken from actual speeches and written text in the public arena during the current week

I hope that GRE General Test Takers and others who aim to build their word power will find this blog useful

"Language is the medium of all understanding and all tradition

And language is not to be understood as an instrument or tool that we use, rather it is the medium in which we live" (Gadamer)



This is a work in progress.
- Your comments and suggestions are welcome
- Hope you will visit often, and share this blog with your friends

Saturday, November 5, 2011

57. Cognitive Dissonance


From, “The Divider vs. the Thinker” by Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal on 10/29/11:

To add to the unease, in New York at least, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance. If you are a New Yorker, chances are pretty high you hate what the great investment firms did the past 15 years or so to upend the economy. Yet you feel on some level like you have to be protective of them, because Wall Street pays the bills of the City of New York. Wall Street tax receipts and Wall Street business—restaurants, stores—keep the city afloat. So you want them up and operating and vital, you don't want them to leave—that would only make things worse for people in trouble, people just getting by, and young people starting out. You know you have to preserve them just when you'd most like to deck them.

Based on your reading of this paragraph, can you identify the cause of the ‘cognitive dissonance’?

cognitive dissonance: anxiety that results from simultaneously holding contradictory or otherwise incompatible attitudes, beliefs, or the like, as when one likes a person but disapproves strongly of one of his or her habits.

No comments:

Post a Comment