It’s important to protect the planet, yet sometimes you have to hop on a flight. It’s vital to maintain your work-life balance, yet now and then you have to fire off an email at 9pm. Why does the human brain seem to thrive on inconsistency? Contradictions aren’t glitches in our systems, they are fundamental mechanisms of the human mind, serving both as tools for social survival and as reminders of persistent inequalities.
To understand how they work, we met with Hugo Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the Jean Nicod Institute, which is affiliated with the CNRS and the ENS; and Johanna Luyssen, who has been a journalist at Libération for 10 years and is the author of Mère solo, le combat invisible (Published by Payot). Let’s dive in.
What are contradictions?
Seeking perfect unity is fruitless. Cognitive science researcher Hugo Mercier opens the conversation with a reassuring observation: “Humans have no biological reason to be perfectly coherent”. And for good reason: the brain doesn’t function as a monolithic whole. “The human mind is composed of countless cognitive mechanisms that operate in relative isolation,” the researcher explains. For example, if you dream of jetting off to the beach in winter, one part of you is excited about the promise of warmth and rest, while another wrestles with the moral implications of contributing to climate change. “The difficulty lies in the fact that these mental systems don’t necessarily communicate with each other, so that incoherence is easy to maintain.” All the more so when the consequences, as with climate change, are neither immediate nor directly felt.
Doubt: an animal instinct that improves decision-making
Self-doubt then plays out on different levels. “There’s a perceptual level that we share with other animals,” says Hugo Mercier. “Psychology researchers call it ‘metacognition’: cognition about cognition.” Rats and primates, for example, are capable of realizing when they are uncertain about something. Faced with a task that is too difficult for them, they will choose the ‘I don’t know’ option rather than risk giving a wrong answer. We do the same thing. If you see someone in the distance and aren’t sure you recognize them, you prefer not to approach them. And that’s completely natural. “On an individual level, all organisms benefit from calibrating their behavior based on their certainty of survival,” reveals the researcher. “A mouse needs to assess whether the risk of encountering a cat is worth a piece of cheese.”
What differentiates human beings from other animals is the level of consciousness. In other words, humans can express doubts and share them with others. “When we speak, we almost always convey a degree of confidence, subtly, through tone, intonation, or the words we use,” explains Hugo Mercier. If you assert something false with absolute certainty, you will be judged more harshly than if you express it cautiously,” the researcher explains. “These cognitive mechanisms have the ability to increase our ‘fitness’”, he says. “They allow us to make better decisions and integrate a social group more successfully.” For a social species, that ability is far from insignificant!
Discomfort can be useful
According to Mercier, “another uniquely human characteristic is the need to appear consistent.” When faced with conflicting information, animals simply select the most plausible option. But as humans, we show a desire to align our positions with our past behaviors, to show others that we are rational. “We are constantly judged by others,”
Hugo Mercier points out, “so we try to maintain a ‘facade’ of consistency, in which our decisions and actions are in line with our beliefs.” This mechanism of social reinforcement can have indirect effects on our own beliefs. And that’s when we run into social differences. We know that men tend to express themselves with more assurance and confidence than women in most cultures, even when they have equal skills.
But that’s not all. Contradiction is also a driving force behind evolution and knowledge. “Because the fear of being judged by other people creates discomfort, cognitive dissonance pushes us to correct our course or invent justifications to protect our reputation,” explains the researcher. In this sense, contradiction is useful, because it signals that we need to question ourselves in order to progress or adapt to the group. “From a scientific point of view, discoveries often arise from the apparent contradiction between data and theory,” underlines Mercier. It’s an uncomfortable phase, but it’s an opportunity to reassess, improve, and grow.
The gendered weight of contradictions
Even though that cognitive mechanism is universal, people experience it in different ways. And for Johanna Luyssen, journalist and author, women are the primary targets of these paradoxical injunctions.
The myth of having it all
While society promotes success on all fronts, Johanna Luyssen highlights a stark disconnect between rhetoric and reality. “We have a society that claims it’s possible to work and have children, but does nothing to implement that work-life balance,” she observes.
Getting your work done and organizing childcare inevitably involves a certain amount of juggling. In France, there is no early childhood policy, workplace support or corporate involvement. “People are being asked to ‘boost the birth rate’ without receiving the provisions to do so,” the author points out. Contradictions then become traps: women are asked to perform well at work in a culture of presenteeism with meetings at 7 p.m., while managing a household. It’s no longer a cognitive choice, it’s a survival mechanism.
The responsibility of public authorities
The guilt women feel when they find it impossible to reconcile everything under those circumstances is therefore not a lack of self-confidence, but the product of insufficient political will and a failure on the part of companies to engage. “As long as people continue to believe that family life can be managed invisibly and at no cost, relying on women as a form of unpaid labor, we will continue to place an enormous burden of suffering and contradiction on them,” warns Johanna Luyssen.
These inconsistencies cannot be resolved by individual will alone. It requires investment in family policies and wage equality. “Nothing we say will be of any use,” the specialist concludes. “We can tell ourselves that we should stop feeling guilty, but that simply isn’t true, we have no choice but to feel guilty.” One thing is certain: the paradox is no longer just in our heads, it is now at the very heart of the system.
