Cognitive Dissonance Theory: Examples and Definition 2024

Yes, cognitive dissonance describes the link between a person’s attitude and behavior when they don’t align with each other. Human behavior drives people to make decisions that lead to comfort in those decisions. When conflict arises between beliefs and actions, this is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort or tension we experience when we hold two or more conflicting beliefs or attitudes, or when our actions are inconsistent with our beliefs. Members are also taught emotion-stopping techniques — especially to block feelings of homesickness, frustration towards leadership, illness, distress, and doubts.

Reduce the importance of the cognitions (i.e., beliefs, attitudes).

In other words, they rationalize the action they took by changing their attitudes. In other words, an individual can reduce the mental discomfort by changing the inconsistent cognitions, reducing the importance of conflicting elements, acquiring new harmonious elements or increasing the importance of the existing consistent elements. Festinger used the case of a habitual smoker to demonstrate the theory (Festinger, 1962). A smoker who knows that smoking is bad for health will experience dissonance, which causes mental discomfort, because the habit of smoking and the knowledge of how harmful smoking is are conflicting.

Effort justification

In other words, he could tell himself that a short life filled with smoking and sensual pleasures is better than a long life devoid of such joys. In this way, he would be decreasing the importance of dissonant cognition (smoking is bad for one’s health). However, new information such as “research has not proved definitely that smoking causes lung cancer” may reduce the dissonance. If a voluntary experience that has cost a lot of effort turns out badly, the dissonance is reduced by redefining the experience as interesting. Participants in the high-dissonance condition spread apart the alternatives significantly more than the participants in the other cognitive dissonance and addiction two conditions. Participants in the high-dissonance condition chose between a highly desirable product and one rated just 1 point lower on the 8-point scale.

Social Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Clinical Brain Mapping

Is it a perception (as “cognitive” suggests), a feeling, or a feeling about a perception? Aronson’s Revision of the idea of dissonance as an inconsistency between a person’s self-concept and a cognition about their behavior makes it seem likely that dissonance is really nothing more than guilt. The theory of cognitive dissonance has been widely researched in a number of situations to develop the basic idea in more detail, and various factors have been identified which may be important in attitude change. Notice that dissonance theory does not state that these modes of dissonance reduction will actually work, only that individuals who are in a state of cognitive dissonance will take steps to reduce the extent of their dissonance.

• By Neha KashyapKashyap is a New York-based health journalist with a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from the University of Southern California.
• They were then paid either $1 or $20 to tell a waiting participant (a confederate) that the tasks were really interesting.
• How strong dissonance impacts an individual boils down to two key influences.
• There are plenty of sources, mostly scientific articles and books, that provide a wide overview of the literature on cognitive dissonance.
• Participants in the high-dissonance condition spread apart the alternatives significantly more than the participants in the other two conditions.

Understanding all inconsistency compensation as a palliative response to violated expectations

• This cognitive dissonance arises from the belief that they should have been better prepared.
• Festinger (Festinger, 1962) theorised that a pair of cognitive elements may relate to each other in three ways.
• As noted by Cooper and Axsom, their dissonance analysis bears considerable similarity to other theoretical conceptions including Bandura’s (1977) view that psychotherapy will be successful to the extent that it enhances people’s feelings of personal efficacy.
• The magnitude of dissonance depends on the number and importance of cognitions that the person experiences a consonance or dissonance with.

Dissonance-based interventions (DBIs) were developed based on Festinger’s well-known cognitive dissonance theory. Cognitive dissonance theory postulates that an underlying psychological tension is created when an individual’s behavior is inconsistent with his or her thoughts and beliefs. This underlying tension then motivates an individual to make an attitude change that would produce consistency between thoughts and behaviors. Research has shown that when an individual engages in behaviors that are inconsistent with their attitude or belief (e.g., arguing a counter-attitudinal position on a topic), a change in attitude is produced that is consistent in the direction of his or her behavior. This mechanism of thought or attitude change is the same mechanism used to produce changes in negative, irrational thoughts that are involved in the maintenance of depression and related disorders. The literature that is based on cognitive dissonance theory has broadly covered four phases of the process, namely, cognitive discrepancy, dissonance, motivation and discrepancy reduction (Hinojosa et al., 2017).

Reducing the Importance of the Conflicting Belief

• Do people from non-Western cultures experience cognitive dissonance as well?
• However, this shift requires convincing them to consider greenhouse gasses and emissions as significant issues worthy of attention.
• To resolve cognitive dissonance, a person can aim to ensure that their actions are consistent with their values or vice versa.
• In other words, he could tell himself that a short life filled with smoking and sensual pleasures is better than a long life devoid of such joys.
• Therefore, changes are more likely to happen in an element that is less resistant or less important (Cooper, 2007).
• Consequently, participants in this group ended up reducing the dissonance they felt another way—by reporting that the study had indeed been interesting.

Moreover, developments on attitudes theory showed that explicit but not implicit attitudes are affected by dissonance (Gawronski and Strack, 2004). There are still debates around the theory that can be traced in Brehm’s (2007) review and a more recent Kenworthy et al. (2011) trans-paradigm theoretical synthesis of cognitive dissonance theory. In this article the authors using modern statistical techniques aim to test five research paradigms.

What does cognitive dissonance feel like?

Feeling uncomfortable with cognitive dissonance, he eventually changes his behavior. So, while cognitive dissonance can be uncomfortable, it is a reminder that life is full of choices and decisions. It either brings about distress or has the potential to trigger individualized defense mechanisms as a coping strategy. Cognitive dissonance can arise for various reasons, including logical inconsistencies, cultural practices, if an individual opinion is not part of a larger one, or due to the inconsistency of past experience for the present situation (Festinger, 1957).