Analysis Of The Cognitive Dissonance Theory

The student's who were paid $1 said the experiments, which were time consuming and boring, were fun, while those that were paid $20 straight up told the truth and said the tasks were boring. The students that were paid $20 experienced little dissonance, so they were honest in their responses. However, those that were paid $1 had to justify spending a considerable amount of time doing pointless tasks, so they said the tasks were enjoyable. Another experiment that Festinger completed was where students were paid either $1 or $20 to perform certain tasks. When the students who were paid one dollar were asked about the task, many replied saying that the task was fun. However, the students who were paid $20 told the truth that the task was boring. The students who received $20 seemed to appear little dissonance, while the other students had to justify why they were doing a mundane task for such a low price, so they said that the task was fun. From all of these experiments, Festinger believed that “we spend our lives paying attention only to the information that is consonant with our beliefs, we surround ourselves with people who will support our beliefs, and we ignore contradictory information that might cause us to question what we have built”

After reading chapter five I noticed cognitive dissonance throughout a large portion of the book. Cognitive dissonance was described in class as being a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. A good example of this was found on page 182 where the author writes about how we all tell our self that African Americans “deserve” all of this even though we know, but do not want to acknowledge that white Americans are less likely to be convicted of the same crime done by blacks. Cognitive dissonance applies here because we know that this mass incarceration is not fair or morally right to do, however, our behavior does not try to stop it from happening. Instead of doing what our beliefs say is right we try to convince ourselves that it is the African Americans fault that they are

“The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones—is an unpleasant feeling the Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when ever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish.” (p.13)

In the podcast titled Cognitive Dissonance (2011), Dr. Carol Tavris, the author of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, discusses the relationship between psychology and neuroscience, in addition to discussing cognitive dissonance. As Dr. Tavris explains, cognitive dissonance theory is the mental discomfort we feel whenever two ideas are conflicted with one another, causing discomfort that we attempt to reduce cognitively (Campbell & Tavris, 2011). Moreover, dissonance can increase dependent upon, how important the decision is, how strongly the dissonant thoughts conflict, and our ability to rationalize and justify the conflict (Cognitive dissonance, 2016). As a future psychologist,

Topic Background/Introduction: To get a positive response from an individual, one must offer a reward. To stop a particular response from an individual, one must present a punishment. The greater the reward and more severe the punishment, the more likely the individual is to respond to or stop the behavior. To achieve continued compliance, one has to continue to give a reward or punishment. Cognitive dissonance occurs when someone has two or more contradicting attitudes and behaviors. The only way to fix this is to change an attitude to match the behavior or change the behavior

There can be many explanations for why an employee would call in sick to work when he or she is not really sick. One reason could be explained through the attribution theory. The attribution theory explains the behavior like this can be explained by attributing it to either the employee’s internal disposition or to an external situation. The employee’s internal disposition could be that the employee always seems to have a bad attitude to his or her job duties and that his or her personality is pessimistic or lazy. The employee’s external situation could be that he or she has a manager who is constantly micro-managing them, which makes them unhappy at work, or the employee has a coworker who is their counterpart who is slacking at work. The employee may have to work harder at the job than the other employee to get their collective tasks completed. This may lead to the employee calling out sick because of his or her internal disposition – they are just lazy and do

According to Darity (2008), the theory of cognitive dissonance refers to an individual’s conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors, the resulting feeling of discomfort within the individual and the individual’s inevitable desire to reduce the discomfort by changing their attitude, belief or behavior in order to create cognitive consonance and harmony (Fox, 2006; Cognitive Dissonance, 2008; Hershey, Blanchard and Johnson, 2012). A cigarette smoker is a commonly used example of a cognitively dissonant individual. For example, Sarah, smoker may feel the need to quit do to the dangers of smoking but Sarah may also want to smoke because they like the feeling of smoking. Sarah’s attitudes are conflicting and to ease her discomfort she will adjust their attitude to fit the behavior by convincing her that there isn’t enough evidence of the dangers of smoking. Another example is when an individual decides that they don’t want to eat fatty foods in order to lose weight but the individual eats a donut after dinner and convinces themselves that the donut isn’t that fatty.

When determining a course of action regarding the topic of my choosing for this paper, the ideals behind cognitive dissonance allowed for me to put to paper for the very first time, a topic that I believe fulfills the requirements of the assignment, and one that bears great presence in my life. As some may have gathered throughout our tenure in this course, I am mother to my nine beautiful children. Though I despise the formalities attached to assignment of titles, attention must be paid toward the fact that I have two stepsons, Dominick & Zachary – ages seven and six. I have always harbored an oppositional stance toward the idea of referring to them, or parenting them in a fashion as though they are

The show, ChoreoProject, was presented by sjDanceco and presented various types of dance performances from classical to contemporary works. The piece that I enjoyed from this show was Cognitive Dissonance. In this dance piece, Erwin Columbus both choreographed and was the dancer. Erwin Columbus used music from Kerry Muzzey for his piece. In Cognitive Dissonance, he told a story of himself having negative, inconsistent thoughts and his journey of fighting off those thoughts from his mind. With fast and dramatic movements along with intense music, Columbus was able to grasp my attention and teach me how it feels to have negative, inconsistent thoughts that can negatively control one's body.

Rokeach (1960) asserts that Belief Congruence Theory can be applied when whether there is a group of people is having similar beliefs that will result in social harmony or a group of people that is having different beliefs which conversely will bring to disharmony. In fact, this theory is one of the theories of Prejudice. “Belief is more important than ethnic or racial membership as a determinant of social discrimination” (Rokeach, 1960, p.135). In another word, this statement illustrates that belief is a crucial element in resulting in cognitive dissonance or cognitive consonance. The scene above shows Mike eventually accepts the beliefs that uphold by his colleagues and they then uphold the similar beliefs which are the belief in the value of cooperation.

According to cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957), individuals feel uncomfortable when they gain information which does not match the existing pattern or inconsistent. West & Turner (2010) explained that the dissonance as inconsistent between

People have the tendency to only see what they want to see sometimes, but why? Seeing or hearing something that does not match up with one’s views or morals can lead to cognitive dissonance. According to Thibodeau and Aronson (1992) this is particularly true if a person hears something that can lead to them themselves being personally responsible for a negative event. The thought of causing something they know to be negative doesn’t coincide with their need to be good and right. People typically like to believe that their views and they themselves are right, and any objection to either of these things can be interpreted by the person as they themselves being bad.

Consistency, the absence of contradictions, has sometimes been called the hallmark of ethics. Ethics is supposed to provide an individual with a guide for moral living, and to do so it must be rational, and to be rational it must be free of contradictions. When consistency and ethics are compromised, this is known as cognitive dissonance. Leon Festinger shared his brilliance with the world when he created the Cognitive Dissonance theory. Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors (McLeod, 2008). Cognitive dissonance produces an uncomfortable tension of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs,

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 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