The Maintenance Costs of Value-Behaviour Gaps: Cognitive Debt and the Cost of Turning Away

This paper makes two claims about the cognitive cost of value-behaviour gaps. The first is that the gap between what a person values and how they act is not a discrete episode of discomfort but a continuous maintenance cost. Holding such a gap open draws on cognitive resources through four ongoing processes — active not-seeing, rationalisation upkeep, emotional suppression, and identity protection — each with independent empirical grounding. On this view, dissonance is better modelled as continuous cognitive debt than as a one-time aversive state. The nearest predecessor is self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987); what this paper adds is a decomposition of that cost into specifiable maintenance work. The second claim, offered more tentatively, concerns half-seeing, treated within a single value the agent already holds. Noticing a demand of that value and turning away appears to degrade sensitivity to the same value more than never noticing did, because the turning-away is itself an active suppression that must be maintained. The claim is value-neutral, and it is offered as an open conjecture rather than a presently runnable test: telling a flinch from never having noticed requires a discriminator that does not yet exist. The framework is offered as a hypothetical imperative: for a person who holds a value and wishes to act on it, sustaining the gap is costly. It is not a content-neutral description, and it does not pretend to be. Five hypotheses follow (the fourth in two sub-predictions), bounded by a stated requirement of intact moral-emotional architecture.