15 APRIL 2024 WorldWide Drilling Resource® The Un-Comfort Zone II by Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. Cognitive Dissonance Almost Kept Me from Smoking Have you ever wanted to do something you knew was bad for you? I wanted to smoke cigarettes. My biggest influence was my father who smoked until I was nearly five years old. Add nearly two decades of television cigarette commercials, but most of all it was seeing my favorite movie stars smoking. They looked so cool! The only thing stopping me was the warnings that smoking causes cancer. In 1975 when I started college, smoking was not discouraged at my university. You might say it was encouraged. Students were allowed to smoke in class. Disposable aluminum ashtrays were on the student desks in all the classrooms. Professors had large ashtrays attached to each end of the blackboard. A university is considered to be a bastion of intelligence and erudition, and I thought: surely the people running it know whether or not smoking is dangerous to human health. My desire to smoke was powerful, but at the same time I was afraid of trying it. I was suffering from cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort caused by coming in contact with contradictory information. On one hand, smoking was acceptable at an institution of higher learning. On the other hand, the science I was exposed to in the media claimed smoking killed. Then I got a job working in a busy hospital emergency room where I noticed nearly all the nurses smoked. These were the smartest nurses in the hospital. They were Wilson Cont’d on page 16.
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