An Examination of Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Notable Modifications
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
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In conclusion, Festinger found that the subjects who were paid one dollar actually came to believe that the experiment was enjoyable, as opposed to those who were paid twenty dollars. Incredible? Simple. The subjects who were paid twenty dollars have all the justification in the world for their actions, but the subjects who were only paid one dollar have reacted to the dissonance created by telling the lie for such a small price, and have actually led themselves to believe that the task was enjoyable to improve their self-esteem in regards to the lie.
Festinger concluded that over time dissonance would change attitudes. For example, cigarette smokers know that it is unhealthy to smoke, but they created an attitude to justify why they continue to smoke. If I quit smoking now, I will gain weight. I only smoke when I am drinking. I only smoke after a meal. But the dissonance theory is applicable to much bigger social opinions than smoking, for example: Aronson and Mills (1959) conducted an experiment in which some subjects were put through a harsh period of hazing during initiation into a group while other subjects had to endure only mild hazing. The end result was that the people who went through the sever initiation ended up liking that group a lot better than those who went through mild hazing. Going against the reinforcement theory (Aronson,
Cognitive dissonance theory has been around since the late fifties. It has inspired many psychologists to figure out the murky depths of people’s minds. The theory relates strongly to decision making, social phenomenons and mental angst. Many paradigms exist within cognitive dissonance. Two important paradigms are the Belief Disconfirmation paradigm and the Free Choice paradigm. There are several experiments that have been studied that relate to cognitive dissonance, including the boring tasks experiment. The person who coined the phrase cognitive dissonance is the famous Leon Festinger, and he studied it inside and out. Cognitive dissonance is one of the most important topics
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
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.
First, let me explain what cognitive dissonance means. This happens when a person has inconsistent thoughts, actions, and or attitudes. It usually happens when 2 or more ideas in your head contradict each other, causing an uncomfortable reaction within ones self. People then either ignore things that oppose this mental stress or engage it by changing their actions to confirm with their thoughts, or just the exact opposite. This is done in order to gain reassurance. Cognitive dissonance happens quite often within the minds of people.
No one enjoys being told what they are doing is wrong, and in this specific case that they are stealing. Peter explains to Joanna that his business has been rounding certain amounts to take “fractions of a penny” from compounded interests and then they placed the “dropped remainder” in an account they own. By using the Cognitive Dissonance Theory, I will analyze this artifact and incorporate how this theory is intertwined within the conversation between the characters Joanna and Peter. I will show how Peter uses selective exposure, post-decision dissonance, and two of the three parts of the state-of-the-art revisions to reduce his dissonance.
Milgram found that people will believe what they’re told and frequently do not pay attention to the underlying aspects of a situation. The people were told that they were in a learning experiment so that is what they believed, where as in reality Milgram was testing to see if they would shock the learners, and they did.
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
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.
In case smoking, the dissonance cognitive theory could be associated when a smoker have trust that smoking harmful to health and do they change their belief after receiving effect on their health or still continue smoking because they have different beliefs which reduces cognitive dissonance .A person who smoke will become addicted until smoking become habit and enable person getting cancer. Moffatt and Whip (2004) based on their study many dead people due to smoking. Although this smokers know smoking habit harmful to health but they still choose to continue to smoke (Pirie, Murray and Luepker 1991). It is important to know why they still choose to smoke to reduce smoking rates among young adults. Therefore, this study was to investigate
It is important to individuals to be able to control cognitive dissonance since it creates confusions between one or more cognition within their personality and ways of making attributions. When individuals’ cognitive ability are affected with conflicting behaviors and beliefs, they become confused and sometimes handicap to produce the right attributions to others. Most of the times, individuals are optimists to what they believe is right without thinking about the negative side of their beliefs. “Mostly, individuals consider themselves to be generally self-aware at any given time” (GCU, 2012). Hence, cognitive dissonance manipulates the self-attributive determination, and drives the person to inability to make the right decisions, attributions,
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
. First, the case can be reversed by changing one or more attitudes, opinions, or beliefs. However, this method frequently presents problems to individuals, since it is quite difficult for people to change their views, for instance, drinking. The second way in which a dissonance can be reduced is through acquiring new information which outweighs the dissonant belief. For example, thinking that drinking causes liver cirrhosis will cause it if a person drinks. Nevertheless, new information such as "research has not proved definitely that drinking causes liver cirrhosis" may reduce the dissonance. In attribution theory, the leaders have an understanding of the reaction of their staff in given situations by identifying social features that lead to achievement. It provides a feeling of self-efficacy in making a difference in the social systems that individuals exist (Carver & Scheier, 2012). Also, it gives an opportunity to set strategic learning goals contributing to the social work practice through the achievement of these standards and affecting the lives of others.