Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Cognitive dissonance is defined as the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change. Cognitive dissonance occurs most often when a person’s beliefs, morals or feeling are one way but they do not act accordingly. This dissonance may be displayed in numerous ways that may be done outwardly but also there is an internal process that takes place. A use of internal processing involves many different functions, included but not limited to, thinking, perception and problem solving. The driving force of dissonance is that we as humans attempt to align opposing thoughts or ideas and carry on with life in a way that still meets our morals, set standards or way of thinking. In doing so, we are then challenged to find what we believe as appropriate reasoning for making

Cognitive dissonance is the internal state that arises when either an attitude and behavior or two attitudes conflict. The resulting psychological discomfort remains until subjects can reach consonance between the two. They reach consonance by changing an attitude, rationalizing a behavior, or undervaluing the importance of the discrepant attitude. Balcetis & Dunning (2007) investigated whether cognitive dissonance influenced subjects’ visual perception of natural environments. In two judgment tasks, the researchers manipulated the degree to which subjects felt that they had freely chosen to participate in an aversive task. Those in the first study donned a Carmen Miranda costume and walked the length of a school courtyard, while subjects in the second study used a skateboard to push themselves uphill. High-choice subjects experienced more dissonance than did their low-choice and control condition counterparts. In the

Sometimes the greatest test of a theory is its longevity. Over time, some theories will be disproved, some will be modified, and some will become the basis for a whole new group of theories. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance has stood up to challenge for over forty years, and is considered by many to be the single most important theory of social psychology. Though there have been modifications to the theory after many recreations and simulations of the original 1957 experiment, few have been able to really disqualify Festinger’s findings. It would be safe to say that many people don’t even have a full grasp of the incredible

The words Cognitive Dissonance were fascinatingly interesting; therefore more research went into the origin of these two words. Both words are Middle English, which was the English in use from 12th to 15th centuries and both used in the 15th century [ (Merriam-Webster, 2011) ]. Cognitive is an adjective meaning, there is physical activity involving the mind; be it: thinking, reasoning or remembering. Dissonance is a noun meaning, when there is a tug-of- war between one’s actions and one’s mind [ (Merriam-Webster, 2011) ].This paper will explore that tug-of-war of the mind (conscious) and actions (subconscious) and how one can and will justify behavior that a direct dissension from his or her values, beliefs, attitudes and

We get cognitively dissonant when our attitudes and behaviors are challenged. When something you expect is not correlated to what is occurring, it creates an uncomfortable state that we need to resolve what perception is being challenged. We contour in multiple solutions to find stability for a realistic interpretation. As selective creatures, we cognitively avoid dissonance; the

Attitudes do not always predict behavior, showcasing the aspect of cognitive dissonance where a feeling of disharmony arises when one is aware of two inconsistent elements such as behaving contrary to an individual’s attitudes (Chaiklin, 2011). Consistency theory maintains when the inconsistencies occur, individuals are encouraged to restore harmony through changing their behavior to reflect a position or finding justifications to explain the behavior. The cognitive dissonance theory indicates the cognitive and affective components of behavior are not always aligned with

how we feel if we do something we don’t like or want to do. Around college campus you see many students smoking and they are around an educational environment. They know that smoking causes cancer but they still smoke. When people smoke that’s their behavior and they know that smoking cause’s cancer is cognition. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony or dissonance (Mcleod, 2016). College campuses have become a place where students and teachers have to think twice before they speak. Our speech can be offensive to some students from different cultural backgrounds. Lukianoff and Haidt, authors of The Atlantic, argue we live in a world full of potential offenses.

cause that individual to change overall attitudes toward an object. An alternative to Rosenberg's theory is Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. While Rosenberg's theory deals with affect and cognition, Festinger's theory examines consistency among cognitive elements or beliefs about oneself, behavior, or environment. Dissonance occurs when elements are logically inconsistent or psychologically inconsistent because of cultural mores, specific opinions deviating from more encompassing opinions, or information or experiences that are contrary to previous information or experiences. Dissonance motivates the individual to reduce the dissonance and return to consonance. When faced with dissonance, the individual seeks to avoid situations or information that may increase dissonance.

In the 1950s, Leon Festinger had come up with this theory of Cognitive Dissonance when a cult leader had persuaded his followers to believe that life on earth was going to end, and that those who were believers would be rescued by aliens. When this did not occur, they rationalized their beliefs by instead coming to the conclusion that aliens, rather, had saved the entire world. Cognitive Dissonance occurs when we hold a strong belief about something and then do something else that contradicts that belief. Look at a person who smokes cigarettes, but knows that the nicotine and all that goes inside one cigarette are bad. The tension they feel is “dissonance,” and to ease that tension they can do one of three things: change their behavior, justify their behavior by changing their conflicting thoughts, or justify their behavior by adding on new thoughts. This paper will use research articles that were previously written, to explain the relationship between dissonance and moral/non-moral

The proposed hypothesis is based on bounded rationality. The cognitive decision making process allows for individuals to search for and review alternative options and select the alternative that is most beneficial for the situation. Conversely, cognitive dissonance, the condition of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs or attitudes towards an attitude object (in this case, the attitude object would be the gasoline that you are filling your tank with), limits the alternatives in the decision making process and occurs due to bounded rationality.

The cognitive dissonance theory specifies that inconsistencies in an individual’s thoughts and actions lead to mental tension, dissonance, and cause us to take actions to reduce this dissonance. Actions include either changing the way you think about something or the way you action. The amount of dissonance can vary depending on justification; an unjustifiable causes more dissonance in comparison to acting with a good enough reason, depends how the individual’s morals. In Festinger and Carlsmith’s study, individuals were either given $1 or $20 to state opinions that weren’t consistent with there own. Individuals who were paid $1 had less justification for the inconsistency which lead to higher levels of dissonance. As a result, they were more

she is a jerk, but we cannot be sure whether there is an emergency as taking his pregnant wife to the hospital or is in hurry to catch a flight. Cognitive dissonance is the procedure we use to justify our experiences so that they are meaningful to us. A classical example of cognitive dissonance is one of the most famous Aesopian myths the story of the fox and the sour grapes. The fox, however diligent, was unable to reach the grapes.

The Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) is a model of attitude-behavior relations which suggests that human behavior can be reduced to rational assessments on the probable costs and benefits of a given action based on how one's peers view the action (Perloff, 2014, p. 90). The essential idea is that the agent deliberately weighs the social boon or penalty that comes from the action against the agent's instinctive desire, or lack thereof, to execute said action. The operative component of this theory is that this deliberation is conscious and not subconscious—we humans actively place a great conscious emphasis on how our actions are perceived by others.

side from being testable through experiments such as the mentioned above, cognitive dissonance theory can predict future events, which is a criteria of a good theory according to Griffin (p. 25), by helping to explain human behavior. “Social psychologists have been trying for many years to predict the conditions under which attitudes and opinions are changed...first major breakthrough in this area came [from] Leon Festinger” (Chapanis, 1964). Objective theorist aim for reality, and when they measure and report their experiments, they prefer to use numerical terms rather than linguistic terms (Griffin, 215, p.28). The most eye grabbing criteria of any theory is simplicity. “No matter how complex the social situation, Festinger assumes that it is possible to represent the meaning which the situation has for an individual by a series of elementary cognitions—statements that an individual might make describing his knowledge, opinions or beliefs“ (Chapanis, 1964).

The principal assumption of the theory regarding to Hogg and Vaughan (2011, p.214) “is that cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant state of psychological tension generated when a person has two or more cognitions (bits of information) that are inconsistent or do not fit together. So if people at the same time hold those two cognitions (thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, states of awareness of behaviour), which are psychologically inconsistent, then we experience dissonance. The theory also accounts for discrepancies between behaviour and attitudes. For instance, when people act in a manner that is inconsistent with their attitudes, then they experience tension. And how people can reduce this tension? Festinger (1957) suggested people have to do it by changing their attitudes so that they are in line with their behavior. The main way of reducing dissonance is attitude change. The theory propose that when we are dealing with two conflicting beliefs then we experience tension or an aversive state and a good example is military training. The military teaches and telling soldiers that when they kill the enemy its nothing wrong and killing them is a good thing but those same soldiers have a deeply natural and inborn belief that “thou shalt not kill”(Sturman, 2012) . Another example is about person who smokes cigarettes. Regarding to Stone and Cooper (2001) most people