Teaching Strategy #8: Cognitive Dissonance

by Kristina Chew, PhD on April 14th, 2007

Tell me this has never happened to you, personally, or you, as the parent of an autistic child:

It has been a happy afternoon, it’s a Friday afternoon at the end of a fine week at school and at home. You say to yourself, “We can do something special—a treat,” and all the more so because there is a big change to Charlie’s usual routine today and tomorrow: My husband Jim had to go out of town for a special tribute to a friend who is retiring and he will not be back until very late Saturday night. We have explained this to Charlie simply and straightforwardly; I hear one errant, strained noise from Charlie just as he and his ABA therapist are about to go out for a walk. Charlie’s home coordinator is observing today and she and I talk about how the photo calendar has been helping Charlie deal with the unexpected. After his session is over, I tell Charlie that we’re going to get his favorite brown noodles at one of his favorite restaurants. We get in the black car, turn on some music, and, one word at a time, go over how he’ll get “Bangkok peanut noodles with shrimp.” Very alert to the fact that it is Friday and we are Jim-less, I amaze myself by remembering the special shortcut that Jim takes to the restaurant.

We park. We hurry out, laughing. “CLOSED DUE TO WATER MAIN BREAK” says the sign on the door.

Cognitive dissonance ensues. “Cognitive dissonance” being “the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one’s beliefs. More precisely, it is the perception of incompatibility between two cognitions.”

That is: I knew, as much as one can know what another person is thinking, that Charlie was literally standing before what was (as far as I can tell) an impossible situation: We were at the restaurant where he gets Bangkok noodles on Friday. It was Friday, and here was the restaurant; there were even people clearly moving around inside the restaurant. So the next thing that ought to happen was that he could open the door, walk through, and claim a seat in the booth by the far wall: So why was this man coming out and shaking his head, and shutting the door, with us on the outside of it?

We have been in this situation wherein there has been “the perception of incompatibility between two cognitions” many times before. In fact, I have traced this sort of situation as happening directly prior to Charlie (in the past) head-banging. Once I saw him busily taking out some colored blocks from a bucket and arranging them in various patterns and suddenly he stopped—his hum-chatter stopped—and suddenly there was a little cry and then a bump. Other times he would have just put in the Barney video he most liked and I would see him pushing at the VCR buttons one moment and then a thump. Charlie certainly has a strong sense of where things should be—-lately he has been piling his blanket, bear, and Jim’s coats outside the bathroom door while he brushes his teeth and prepares for bed; over time, I have been learning that he also has a decided sense of how things should be done and in what order. Perhaps something did not go as, to Charlie’s sense of things, it should have when he was taking out those blocks and, lacknig the language, Charlie communicates his frustration at this “incompatibility between two cognitions” with what can indeed be called a “difficult behavior.” I have to wonder if he indeed feels some terrible, physical discomfort at the disruption of the usual order: Does his head buzz? hurt?

That was how jarred Charlie seemed to feel (he made a loud sound, once) as he and I stood before the locked restaurant door. As my mind raced to think about what to do, I felt that “uncomfortable tension” that Charlie’s face was registering regarding something that is just not right. It is how I feel, for instance, when I see incorrect grammar, whether in English, as on the paper about freedmen in ancient Rome that I reviewed with a student this afternoon; or in Latin, as in the title “Autism Vox Falsus“—seeing that -us on the end of falsus (which means what the English looks like) is quite jarring: Vox is a noun in the feminine gender (as I can still hear the voice of my Latin teacher, Mrs. DeVries, intoning) and the ending should be -a, as in falsa. (I guess this is all a sign of the need for more Latin teachers, but I digress.) As for the gender of “autism,” it is a masculine noun in German (der Autismus) and in Italian (autismo) but there is no word for “autism” in Latin (in the classical Latin that I know, at least—it is not that there was no autism in the ancient world, but that there was no word for it).

I often tell my students that translating a Latin sentence is like taking apart some complicated thing—-a laptop computer, for example, or simply a cell phone. To take apart a laptop, you have to know how to take the case off to reveal the motherboard and the drives, and better yet if you also know how to put those pieces back together—or you might end up with the keyboard on backwards, or some such. And maybe that is how it felt in Charlie’s head when the blocks were not arrayed just so, the smell of the noodles was there and the door was locked.

It was something of a “eureka” moment for me when we figured out that these moments of cognitive dissonance were preceding Charlie becoming upset. We sensed that he was trying to make some kind of order for himself, and we have tried to show him other ways to keep track of things: Using the picture calendar. Organizing his clothes into plastic bins and setting them out in one spot in his room and having him retrieve his own socks and more. Teaching him to follow an activity schedule in which, for a set period of time, he learns on his own to do a series of activities, from playing games to going on a walk to getting out some flashcards to practice his reading. Somehow, by creating all this order for Charlie, he has seemed to enjoy the times when he is, frankly, doing “nothing” more than roaming around in the front yard and driveway and looking at the patterns the pine needles make. That is, I think he is able to handle a certain amount of “disorder”—of the unexpected, of cognitive dissonance—because his days alternate being highly structured and, for lack of a better word, loose. More structure seems to help Charlie deal better with less.

Charlie and I stood in a cold wind in front of the locked restaurant for ten minutes and then walked back to the car. He seatbelted himself in forlornly and we headed west; I talked about maybe going to the grocery store. I spied a Baja Fresh: “How about guacamole?” I asked. “Yes,” said Charlie. We parked, we went in, I ordered, Charlie chose a table and we sat down amid the other families and got some salsa and ate. We had some chips left over; Charlie picked up the container and handed it to me with the instruction “give.”

What could be better than going out for dinner with Charlie and talking in exchanges of hums and the different colors a tape can be?

There is no discord here for me, but the makings of some good harmony.

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Teaching Strategy #8: Cognitive Dissonance

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