Holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accepting both, which institutions demand more often than individuals notice.
Orwell's 1949 coinage. The institutional version is more common than the individual one: an organisation can hold a public commitment and an operating practice that contradict it without anyone experiencing the conflict.
In practice
- An organisation publishes a commitment to candour and operates a process where raising concerns is career-limiting, and no one experiences the contradiction.
- A firm's leadership genuinely believes both that the redundancies were unavoidable and that the company values its people.
- Standing
- The fictional cousin of cognitive dissonance, published the same decade.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop