It clarified the conditions that motivate individuals to change their opinions, attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. Festinger (Festinger, 1962) defined the ‘cognition’ as any piece of knowledge that an individual has about themself or their environment. The theory was based on the belief that people strive toward consistency within themselves and are driven to make changes to reduce or eliminate an inconsistency (Cooper, 2007). Cognitive dissonance theory began by postulating that pairs of cognitions can be either relevant or irrelevant to one another. However, if two cognitions are relevant, but conflicting, the existence of dissonance would cause psychological discomfort and motivate the individual to act upon this. The greater the magnitude of dissonance, the greater the pressure for the individual to reduce the dissonance (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019).
Acquire new information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs.
The cognitive discrepancy phase considered a conflict between two or more cognitive elements. The motivation phase focused on the motivational nature of dissonance to reduce the psychological discomfort. Lastly, the discrepancy reduction phase related to dissonance reduction mechanisms. The concept of dissonance is predominantly related to the post-decision or post-purchase situation (Oliver, 2009).
Understanding all inconsistency compensation as a palliative response to violated expectations
Since then cognitive dissonance continues to interest social psychologists and to feed research on different fields such as health attitudes (smoking, eating habits), political attitudes (voting behavior, opinion polls, and election campaigns), and marketing. 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. In this article the authors using modern statistical techniques aim to test five research paradigms. It seems that cognitive dissonance is a theoretical field that will continue to trigger basic and applied research.
Eating meat
- Therapy analog studies by Heesaker, Petty, and Cacioppo (1983) have provided support for this general line of reasoning.
- Research from Acharya, Blackwell and Sen shows that individuals committing violence against members of another group develop hostile attitudes towards their victims as a way of minimizing cognitive dissonance.
- On the other hand, the condition with no monetary incentive was meant to cause a discrepancy between belief and behavior, thus inducing cognitive dissonance in the subjects.
- Firstly, the self-consistency model (Abelson, Aronson & McGuire, 1968; Aronson, 1999) addressed the paradox of the simplicity of the original theory by adding self-concept as a further explanation of dissonance.
- This theory suggests that this tension motivates individuals to change their attitudes in order to achieve consistency between their thoughts and behaviors.
When faced with two similar choices, we are often left with feelings of dissonance because both options are equally appealing. Sometimes you might find yourself engaging in behaviors that are opposed to your own beliefs due to external expectations at work, school, or in a social situation. This might involve going along with something due to peer pressure or doing something at work to avoid getting fired. Because it is something a person feels internally, it is not possible to physically observe cognitive dissonance and addiction dissonance.
Emotion and control
In his study and his book 3,4, Festinger infiltrated students into a UFO cult. He predicted that those who traveled to the hilltop to be picked up by a UFO would be more likely to continue to believe than those who did not make the journey. His prediction proved to be true — those who experienced disconfirming evidence on the hilltop were strengthened in their belief. Festinger realized that we are made uneasy if we our sense of consistency or congruency is challenged. The BITE model uses these three components — cognitive, affective and behavioral — and adds information a fourth and overlapping component.
We live in cognitive dissonances, in a sea of negative emotions created by them, “in much wisdom is much grief.” And if not music we would continuously suffer negative emotions related to knowledge. Cognitive dissonances extend from minor everyday choices, such as a choice of drink between coca-cola and water, to life disappointments familiar to everyone, unrequited love, betrayal by friends, and loved ones. We do not notice negative emotions related to minor everyday choices, because we have a lot of emotions to overcome them.
1 Cognitive dissonance theory
Members are also taught emotion-stopping techniques — especially to block feelings of homesickness, frustration towards leadership, illness, distress, and doubts. Whenever a person is feeling depressed, or anxious or fearful, they are exhorted to believe and surrender more to the leader or group. Whenever there is a problem, the group and the leader are always right, and it is always the member’s fault.
- The Zajonc mere exposure theory describes people favoring people and objects encountered frequently.
- This tension is typically reduced by changing one of the dissonant elements, or adding new ones, until mental consonance is achieved.
- The application provides a social psychological basis for the constructivist viewpoint that ethnic and racial divisions can be socially or individually constructed, possibly from acts of violence (Fearon and Laitin, 2000).
- Aronson 1992 and Brehm 2007, written by two of Festinger’s historical students, offer historical anecdotic information as well as keystones to understand the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance.
- A person has a cognitive state of attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and most of the time they will act accordingly.
- Gawronski and Strack 2012 offers an overview of the cognitive consistency field.
- When one learns new information that challenges a deeply held belief, for example, or acts in a way that seems to undercut a favorable self-image, that person may feel motivated to somehow resolve the negative feeling that results—to restore cognitive consonance.
More generally, persuasive arguments theory (Burnstein) describes how groups polarize shared opinions, compared to individuals, when they receive novel supporting information. Moreover, minority influence (Moscovici) within groups operates partly through minorities’ conviction provoking majorities to systematically process their arguments. The elaboration likelihood model has been extensively imported into extant work on psychotherapy and counseling (e.g., Heesaker, Conner, & Prichard, 1995).