Cognitive Dissonance Theory

In this part of the assignment the author will explain the contribution of contrasting psychological theories to the understanding of two specific behaviours

In reading "Mistakes were Made but Not by me," multiple accounts are given of traits exhibited by humans that are displayed subconsciously. The authors, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, begin by defining these traits and give readers the actual terminology to these characteristics. With various examples being provided to the reading audience they are then able to make a clear correlation between the behaviors displayed and how they may impact not only themselves but others around them. "Mistakes were Made but Not by me" has a theme which is centralized around the two key facets which are cognitive dissonance and self- justification.

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

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

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

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).

Do attitudes predict behaviour? It is not easy to find the correct answer to this question. The relationship between attitudes and behaviour is one of the most controversial topics in social psychology. This essay explores whether attitudes can predict behaviours using two of theories of behaviour change: Cognitive Dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) and Self-Perception Theory (Bem, 1965, 1967).