Teaching Tip Sheet: Cognitive Dissonance

Anyone can experience cognitive dissonance, and sometimes, it is unavoidable. People are not always able to behave in a way that matches their beliefs. If you’ve ever made a decision despite the fact it goes against your values and beliefs, and you then felt stress, regret or turmoil, you’ve experienced cognitive dissonance. Learn how to cope with those difficult moments and how to better manage your response. Psychologist Kia-Rai Prewitt, PhD, explains how to manage this feeling of discomfort, what’s known as cognitive dissonance, and how it can affect your mental health and other relationships when left unchecked. Once a choice has been made, however, people need to find a way to reduce these feelings of discomfort.

However, this mode of dissonance reduction frequently presents problems for people, as it is often difficult for people to change well-learned behavioral responses (e.g., giving up smoking). Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) investigated if making people perform a dull task would create cognitive dissonance through forced compliance behavior. Most of these techniques share a common grounding and background in traditional cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy techniques. Another example can be seen in many people’s continuing to smoke two or three packs of cigarettes a day, even though research shows they are shortening their own lives. Discussion could be generated concerning why the Aronson et al. study obtained results for self-reported past risk that were contradictory to the predictions of cognitive dissonance theory.

How to Cope With Cognitive Dissonance

Something like cognitive dissonance explains why we are reluctant to regret our tattoos. Even if your aesthetic preferences have moved on, confessing to yourself that you will now forever have a tattoo that you don’t actually like would lead to cognitive dissonance. So our way of getting rid of this negative feeling is to stick to the unshakeable belief that the tattoo is amazing. It completely changes a person’s moral compass, which is why the choice they make to engage in these addictive behaviors is stronger than just willpower. This theory of cognitive dissonance plays a major role especially for those who suffer from substance abuse. Addiction is a disease that already changes the chemistry of the brain and its ability to function normally.

They were then given either $1 or $20 to tell a person in the waiting room that the task was fun. The ones that received a dollar were more likely to rate the activity highly. Festinger proposed this hypothesis in his 1957 book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. His research on what causes cognitive dissonance and how we react to it has become critical to the fields of social psychology and psychiatry.

Social pressures

Dr. Vohs discusses the topic as it relates to supporters of Former President Donald Trump justifying one of his controversial tweets in 2019. Psychologist Joel Cooper recently published a comprehensive update of cognitive dissonance theory after more than 50 years of research. Dissonance can also be experienced vicariously through people of a social group that we identify with.

As originally formulated (Festinger, 1957), cognitive dissonance is induced when a person holds two contradictory beliefs, or when a belief is incongruent with an action that the person had chosen freely to perform. Because this situation produces feelings of discomfort, the individual strives to change one of the beliefs or behaviors in order to avoid being inconsistent. Hypocrisy is a special case of cognitive dissonance, produced when a person freely chooses to promote a behavior that they do not themselves practice.

Causes of cognitive dissonance

Lastly, in the selective-exposure paradigm, (based on the notion that people seek desirable outcomes, and avoid undesirable ones; Mills, 1999) people are asked to browse through newspapers about different topics. The prediction is that people will attend more to news that reinforces their pre-existing opinions, and they will try to avoid contradictory information, in order to avoid potential cognitive dissonance treatment belief dilemmas (i.e., cognitive dissonance, see Table 1). In essence, the present theoretical paper demonstrates that previous accounts of how people use dissonance-reduction strategies are bound to specific cases and methodological constraints. We therefore proposed a (working) dissonance-reduction model that transcends specific experimental paradigms and reduction strategies.

They further presupposed that participants would be driven to reduce the dissonance by justifying their behavior. Since participants in the $20 condition had a more substantial justification (higher pay) already, they were further assumed to perceive less dissonance than those in the $1 condition. In fact, it is a psychological mechanism that helps us perceive our world (and our place in it) consistently.

Little by little, you begin to consider the pros of living in a small town. We are committed to engaging with you and taking action based on your suggestions, complaints, and other feedback. This is often very difficult, as people frequently employ a variety of mental maneuvers.