Splitscreen: Cognitive Dissonance in Risk 🎭🧠📉

Splitscreen: Cognitive Dissonance in Risk 🎭🧠📉#

“What happens when truth and feeling disagree?”

“One screen shows the data.
The other shows your face.”

We are taught to trust numbers.
We are taught to respect emotion.
But what do we do when they collide?

This chapter explores the irreconcilable tension between probabilistic knowledge and emotional truth—especially in high-stakes, deeply personal decisions.

🧬 Risk Isn’t Felt as a Number#

Let’s say the model shows:

“Your risk of death is 3.2 per 10,000.”

That is precise.
That is informative.
That is emotionally meaningless.

What the person hears is:

  • Will I be the one?

  • Will I leave my children behind?

  • Why does this sound low but still feel terrifying?

The brain sees a decimal.
The gut sees a cliff.

🪞 Dual Channels of Knowing#

We operate on two channels:

Channel A

Channel B

Statistical logic

Narrative memory

Population truth

Personal imagination

Model output

Family history anecdote

Donor registry

“I heard someone died…”

Ukubona lives in the space between them.

Our platform doesn’t resolve this split—it holds it in view.

🧠 Dissonance Is Designable#

Most risk tools pretend this tension doesn’t exist.
Ukubona leans into it:

  • By showing confidence intervals, not just point estimates

  • By offering multiple visualization formats

  • By allowing patients to explore both optimism and caution

  • By embedding narrative anchors (e.g., case studies, symbolic metaphors)

Design can’t erase the dissonance.
But it can prepare the user to dwell there safely.

🧪 A Use Case: The Older Donor#

The app estimates a very low 90-day mortality for a healthy 67-year-old white male donor—perhaps 2.4 per 10,000.

But his daughter asks:

“Should I prepare for a funeral?”

The calculator says no.
The heart says maybe.
Ukubona shows both: the number, and the abyss it floats above.

🎭 The Truth in Conflict#

“What if both are true?”

What if the risk is small
and
the fear is valid?

What if knowledge doesn’t cancel dread
—but clarifies it?

What if clarity is not certainty,
but coexistence with contradiction?

That’s what we design for.

Next: Apollo & Dionysus – Control and Ecstasy in Design
Where we explore the architectures of order and the seductions of chaos.

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