Cognitive Dissonance Social Psychology

Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person is in a state of tension when they hold two cognitions being (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and opinions.) Dissonance produces a sort of discomfort that ranges from deep anguish to not sleeping at night, until a solution is found (Aboriginal). The policies that are put in to place for safety, are often turned in to a discriminatory act. Examples of discriminatory practices that often occur in our society and communities are (gender discrimination, race & ethnicity, and mental & or physical disability). Many of the discussion is based on intent and result. Discrimination exists when there is clear intent to treat groups differently. For example, in “stop and frisk: if an officer chooses to purposely stop and ‘violently’ frisk a “Hispanic or African American” without context that is considered discrimination. There are many racial disparities in the US criminal justice system. Racial minorities are more likely to be discriminated upon. There’s a chance that the officers have an unconscious bias regarding race.

Cognitive distortions are overgeneralisation, dichotomous thinking and personalisation (McLeod 2008). These distortions reduce the persons ability to process information (Mcleod 2008). Research suggests that cognitive distortions are part of the way everybody handles difficult situations, therefore should they be regarded as causes of emotional problems? (Mcleod, Pg.145).

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

If one is trying to pull a thought or feeling in closer, or push it away, they may be attempting to manipulate their cognitive dissonance. If one knows that they are not happy with their actions, they can dilute that feeling of cognitive dissonance by decreasing the negative or enhancing the positive attitudes about it (Smith & Mackie, n.d.). One might be a smoker for instance, and know that smoking is bad for them, but continue smoking anyway. A perception of a clash of unsuitable elements is a way to describe the way one feels when their actions and beliefs are at odds (McLeod, 2014). So, if one is unhappy about the things they do because they do not match what they think they should do, they will be said to be experiencing cognitive dissonance.

The informed consent were not obtained for the participants to engage in the experiment at their own free will, instead they were deceived and made to belief that they were benefitting, such experiment which has become widely known

Cognitive distortions are basically negative and inaccurate thoughts that our minds convince us of being true. Everyone gets these kinds of thoughts whether we realize it or not and for some people they occur more often than others. A simple example of this is someone who fails at one thing and then thinks or believes that they are failure at everything. Some of these thoughts may be much more subtle but still have a huge effect on us and our thought process. It’s an important topic to discuss because as we learn more about the different kinds of cognitive distortions we can learn how to prevent them or change the thoughts. By learning to refute these thoughts we can replace them

Baumrind fairly claims the “laboratory is not the place” to conduct studies of obedience as the laboratory tends to increase the number of variables above what is desired (Baumrind 90). Science Magazine defends Baumrind’s claim by conducting an experiment directed toward answering the question of the reproducibility of previously conducted psychological experiments. The data collected shows a significant decrease in the strength of the data collected and the number of experiments deemed reproducible was much smaller than those which were reproducible (“Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science”). If the experiment’s results are correct, then Baumrind has fairly contested the integrity of the results of the experiment conducted by Milgram since his results have a stronger chance of not being reproduced in a laboratory than of being reproduced in a laboratory. Milgram adds credibility to his article by mentioning the population from which the subjects were drawn. Initially, Milgram enlists Yale undergraduates to volunteer for his study which led to results consistent with his study, but severely taints the credibility of his experiment. He then modifies his experiment and enlarges to volunteer population to include that of anyone living in the city (Milgram 80-81). His

This quote summarizes the central idea of this chapter, the importance of cognitive dissonance. It gives the true definition of cognitive dissonance to realize how cognitive dissonance is the engine that drives self-justification. To give a simpler explanation, Tavris and Aronson use an example of smoking to show how dissonance leads you to have different minds of a particular decision.

Cognitive dissonance is when people revise their attitudes to justify their action. This is presented in chapter five and it says that the strongest dissonance is when the action is not consistent with a preexisting attitude or desire, although it does not always have to be in this sense. An example under the broad umbrella of cognitive dissonance is if a fox wanted grapes but could not reach them, then the fox decides that the grapes are sour and not worth

In this experiment, subjects are explained that this is “a ‘learning experiment’ to ... study the effects of punishment on memory” (4). Yet, the real intention here is to measure the participants’ compliance towards the experimenter. This controversy is unethical as subjects are volunteering for a cause that does not exist. They are misled since they are not exposed to the real purpose of this study.

Cognitive dissonance means feeling tension when our thoughts and beliefs are inconsistent. An example of this is when people smoke even though they are aware of the consequences that can occur such as cancer which leads to cognitive dissonance. This occurs almost everyday in our lives, whether we are aware of it or not. An one example that was shown on one of the episodes of Friends made us aware of this happening.

Cognitive dissonance impacts attitudes and behavior negatively in the workplace in a variety of ways depending on the position you are employed. Being in management as an administrator you are faced with many challenges and situations that cause cognitive dissonance. For example, if my director asks me to perform a task and the way in which he wants me to perform the task, goes against my beliefs, I am forced to decide whether to follow his directives or risk termination for insubordination. The stress factor is making the correct decision. I can remember an instructor sending a student to me for conduct issues and wanted the student terminated from her program. The documentation that she provided to me was not sufficient to suspend the student,

Cognitive dissonance is believing in one thing, but the opposite is true or proven. This will cause psychological stress. We will change our way of thinking to support a more consistent consonance. In the example given in class aliens were coming to take them away before the flood. When there were no aliens they had cognitive dissonance. To bring harmony back; they were given a new purpose and told to invite more members for social support. Another example would be: You are trying to eat healthy. Potato chips are your favorite snack. But you know that potato chips are not a healthy snack. This is cognitive dissonance. To reduce the cognitive dissonance, you could distort your way of thinking by making excuses. You could tell yourself

Leon Festinger created the cognitive dissonance theory as an attempt to explain why people desire to have consistency between their behaviors and actions. Cognitive dissonance is the distressing mental state people feel when they find themselves doing things that don’t fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold (Festinger, 1957; as cited in Griffin, 2009). Thus, people are motivated to change either their behavior or their belief when feelings of dissonance arise.

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