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Cognitive Dissonance Examples: 5 Ways It Pops Up In Everyday Life

what is cognitive dissonance theory

Because people want to avoid discomfort, cognitive dissonance can have a wide range of effects. We may engage in behaviors or adopt attitudes to help relieve the discomfort caused by the https://ecosoberhouse.com/ conflict. Cognitive dissonance theory, proposed by Festinger, focuses on the discomfort felt when holding conflicting beliefs or attitudes, leading individuals to seek consistency.

what is cognitive dissonance theory

Reducing the Importance of the Conflicting Belief

When you understand how cognitive dissonance impacts your target audience, you can begin to explore ways to resolve those feelings of discomfort. Businesses should promote a positive organizational culture that aligns with their stated values. This will help to reduce the amount of cognitive dissonance employees experience between their personal values and those promoted by the company, boosting morale and productivity. Consumers often experience cognitive dissonance when making purchasing decisions based on price. If they perceive a product as too expensive, but they still buy it, they may feel dissonance between the price paid and the product’s perceived value.

Understanding all inconsistency compensation as a palliative response to violated expectations

Members are told that they should always be grateful and happy, as they are part of the “chosen” people who know the “Truth”, and have the key to salvation, whether in this world or the next. Members often sing songs about the leader, the doctrine or the group to maintain a “happy” atmosphere. Engaging with music and especially joining in group singing helps to generate euphoria, which diminishes perception and critical thinking. Dillman, Smyth and Christian (2009) viewed survey response as a voluntary action within a context of reciprocal social obligations, and showed how survey procedures can build a positive social exchange with prospective survey participants. The elaboration likelihood model is one of the most influential approaches in the history of work on attitude change and persuasion.

Leveraging the psychology of cognitive dissonance

Maybe you decide you’re okay with your husband being less romantic, even though those small, loving gestures were once important to you. But if deep down you still resent that behavior, that tension can lead to more problems over time. Encountering these types of advertisements frequently can lead to stress if you do take the messages at face value. The second condition necessary for cognitive dissonance to work is that people must have a freedom of choice.

Acquire new information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs.

what is cognitive dissonance theory

The greater the magnitude of dissonance, the greater the pressure for the individual to reduce the dissonance (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019). The existence of dissonance and the mechanisms that humans used to cope with it captured Festinger’s interest in developing cognitive dissonance theory. The concept of cognition was relatively new at the time of the introduction of cognitive dissonance theory.

What Influences Cognitive Dissonance?

what is cognitive dissonance theory

In the coming years, we believe that it is inevitable that psychologists of differing disciplines will question the utility of offering wholly ‘distinct’ motivational accounts for each instantiation of this general inconsistency compensation phenomenon. From there, a unitary, discipline-straddling account of inconsistency compensation can uncover the true boundaries of this phenomenon, as well as compensation behaviors that have yet to find a disciplinary label. This article appeared in the first edition of the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioural Sciences (2001). Dissonance theory also fed theories about system justification (see also Kay et al., 2002; Jost et al., 2003). 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.

Consider the importance of dissonant thoughts

It offers one explanation for why people sometimes make an effort to adjust their thinking when their own thoughts, words, or behaviors seem to clash with each other. To deal with the feelings of discomfort then, they might find some way of rationalizing the conflicting cognition. For instance, they may justify their sedentary behavior by saying that their other healthy behaviors—like eating sensibly and occasionally exercising—make up for their largely sedentary lifestyle.

what is cognitive dissonance theory

As a result of changing her behavior to fit what she believes makes her happy, she might actually become happier, Leikam says. But that consistency doesn’t always happen, and distress can arise as a result. Although familiar information tends to reproduce itself, new information has an impact, according to many theories.

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  • Businesses must maintain consistent brand messaging and ensure their products or services align with the values and expectations they’ve cultivated among their customer base.
  • The discomfort, tension, shame, and anxiety that can come with cognitive dissonance are all negative feelings you’d probably like to avoid.
  • But that consistency doesn’t always happen, and distress can arise as a result.

Providing the space and time to understand their new behavior and justifying it can help to reduce the dissonance. This can be a difficult and uncomfortable process and involves getting additional information. Dissonance can also be experienced vicariously through people of a social group that we identify with. When they act inconsistently with their attitude, we feel the same discomfort as if we had acted inconsistently with our attitude ourselves (Cooper, 2016). Alternatively, they may reduce cognitive dissonance by being mindful of their values and pursuing opportunities to live those values.

How Attitude Change Takes Place

Or you may get caught up in trying to rationalize the dissonance to the point of stressing yourself out. You start going to bed earlier and get up with enough time to work out. It’s hard at first, but instead of feeling cognitive dissonance theory guilty when you see the gym keychain, you feel proud of yourself. Every time you see the membership tag on your keychain, it reminds you of that pesky truth — that exercise is part of a healthy lifestyle.

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