What is Cognitive Dissonance and How Do You Reduce it?

This can also occur if you were taught that something is inherently wrong with you if you are gay. (This kind of dissonance was far more common in the past than it is now, though it still exists.) Some people experience feelings of guilt, shame, embarrassment, or anger as an effect of cognitive dissonance. If the dissonance is great, some people may even feel they have become immoral, or they can develop a lack of self-worth until the dissonance is resolved. Sometimes learning new information can lead to feelings of cognitive dissonance. For example, if you engage in a behavior that you later learn is harmful, it can lead to feelings of discomfort.

Understanding these various things that can create cognitive dissonance helps us navigate human and social psychology with empathy and self-awareness. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when an individual experiences discomfort because of inconsistencies between their beliefs and actions. This psychological discomfort can lead to irrational decisions, stress, and an overall lack of mental wellbeing.

A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance – Leon Festinger

You might worry that other people will see you as a hypocrite. If the disparity involves a belief that is important to the individual, they will experience stronger feelings of dissonance. To cope with this discomfort, you may look for things that justify your choice. Or you might focus on the negative features of the item that you didn’t choose to convince yourself that your decision was the right one. One of Festinger’s experiments revealed how forced compliance could lead to cognitive dissonance. In the study, participants were asked to complete a boring task that involved turning pegs on a peg board for an hour.

When one of the dissonant elements is a behavior, the individual can change or eliminate the behavior. Participants in the high-dissonance condition spread apart the alternatives significantly more than the participants in the other two conditions. Participants in the high-dissonance condition chose between a highly desirable product and one rated just 1 point lower on the 8-point scale. After reading the reports about the various products, individuals rated the products again. The rub is that making a decision cuts off the possibility that you can enjoy the advantages of the unchosen alternative, yet it assures you that you must accept the disadvantages of the chosen alternative.

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Instead of feeling defensive, dig into the information that your response gives you. Understanding what caused the dissonance can help you figure out the best way to address it. Social psychologists have uncovered dozens of cognitive biases, https://ecosoberhouse.com/ such as self-serving bias, unconscious bias or implicit bias, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, and the sunk-cost fallacy. Cognitive bias is the tendency to process information in the light of our own experiences.

When things are psychologically unbalanced, it creates discomfort and distress. Heider’s Balance Theory, on the other hand, emphasizes the desire for balanced relations among triads of entities (like people and attitudes), with imbalances prompting changes in attitudes cognitive dissonance and addiction to restore balance. Both theories address cognitive consistency, but in different contexts. It is a theory with very broad applications, showing that we aim for consistency between attitudes and behaviors and may not use very rational methods to achieve it.