Socially, belief disconfirmation is arguably the most problematic because it turns rational discourse into something very, very ugly. Instead of persuading people, evidence and debate can further entrench a given belief instead. When certain issues became almost identity and lifestyle statements (climate change denial, the anti-vax movement, GMO hysteria, etc.), contrary evidence is perceived as a personal attack instead of a weighing of scientific evidence to determine fact. Unfortunately, overcoming this isn't easy. And it's made that much harder when people are able to retreat into their preferred echo chambers rather than be forced to directly confront the dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is believing that two contradictory theories are most likely true based on the evidence you have. Since the evidence of the truth of one is also evidence for the untruth of the other, it means that when evaluating the evidence for one, you discount a different set of evidence than you do when evaluating the evidence for the other.

This is never rational, and never something that you have to do. It's usually done to avoid conclusions that would force you (according to your own ethics) to give up something that you have, or not take something that you want.

Not sure I agree with that.

The real world is full of mutually exclusive moral problems, like when "do unto others" runs directly into "first do no harm" when deciding to give help to someone whose bad behavior you might be enabling.

"I decided X but these pieces of evidence induce doubt" is not cognitive dissonance. It's capacity for uncertainty.

During an interview one of my answers was: "for me - it sounds shit to live ambitions !"

And the answer was like the old adam and eve thingy: "But shit is a super fertilizer, it gives a filmsy plantlet growth and thriving.

"Because i have seen where you're going with this", i answered, "let me tell you that some people think, you can make every stand - when you only ground it"

wink

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

I've also noticed something about the term "cognitive dissonance" in popular discussion. It's used as a pejorative explanation when the speaker can't figure out how someone else harmonizes two apparently inconsistent or contradictory positions. But when it's a speaker responding to someone else's accusation of cognitive dissonance, something like Fitzgerald's line usually comes up.

It's probably a useful concept in the context of doing actual psychology (either science or therapy), but I've come to believe that in an argument it's often a form of ad hominem attack, like most stories participants in arguments tend to spin about each other.

Only if you reject the evidence that does not fit with your beliefs. If you use the new evidence to examine and update your beliefs then you can be both open to new evidence and avoid cognitive dissonance.

Good enough?

To (try to) answer your question, to the best of my ability based on limited information what your question even is: no, it is not about detecting when that update should be performed. Remember that we are talking about brain states, i.e. the-world-as-you-think-it-is, as it is represented in your mind, and perhaps if you want to push it, as you are consciously aware of it. If you hold conflicting beliefs but you are truly ignorant of the fact, then you can't really be said to have cognitive dissonance. In Bayes terms, I guess this is analogous to having priors, but not being aware of how to evaluate them based on evidence, and maybe even that you should do so in the first place. Cognitive dissonance, on the other hand, would be having priors, knowing how (and when) to update them, doing the update, and then ignoring the results. Alternatively, it would be performing faulty updates and being at least partially aware of the error in doing so.

Cognitive dissonance is saying that X is 90% certain and that !X is also 90% certain.