Festinger's Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance

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

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.

Have you ever wondered what causes individuals to act in certain and sometimes irrational ways? There are invisible, yet powerful forces involved in everyday decision-making. These nearly undetectable forces possess the power to cause a highly trained professional to make an extremely costly rookie mistake. In the book Sway, the authors Ori Brafman and his brother Rom Brafman eloquently explore the unpredictable nature of human behavior through hidden psychological forces. The book describes several forces that lead individuals to ignore logic and behave irrationally which include: loss aversion, commitment, value attribution, and diagnosis bias.

Cognitive Dissonance is a tense discomfort that we get when we realize that we have made a mistake or have committed hypocrisy. There are several different ways that we get rid of cognitive dissonance, some of them include a change in behavior, denial, and excuse making. In this essay I will discuss cognitive dissonance, its consequences, and how to solve the problem of excuse making in our society.

Leon Festinger and James M. Carlsmith (1959) were interested in the cognitive dissonance experienced when a person is forced to say or do something that is conflicting to one’s private opinion of the matter. Cognitive dissonance is most persuasive when it comes to feelings and thoughts about oneself and can motivate or influence us to choose one action or thought over another. The researchers were also interested in forced compliance theory, which is the idea that authority or some other perceived higher-ranking person can force a lower-ranked individual to make statements or perform acts that violate their better judgment. The focus is the goal of altering an individual's attitude through persuasion and authority. Thus, the study conducted

While they say college is supposed to be the time where you find yourself, and become who you really are, I find that I have still not reached that point. That’s not to say that I haven’t done all of the other important things that you’re supposed to do while you’re in college; I’ve picked a major, a minor, figured out all the best routes to class are, found a flexible job to help pay my rent, and found friends that I can for the most part rely on. The department I have lacked in the most would be finding love. But like all things, there is trial and error. For me it has been mostly error, but in hindsight I can see why.

The focus of this paper is to determine how cognitive dissonance affects our decisions, and how one can reduce the impacts of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a phenomenon which occurs when two cognitions are conflicting. In choosing one option over the other, people tend to question if they made the right decision. There are several strategies to resolve cognitive dissonance. Altering the conflicting cognition, altering the importance of the conflicting cognition and adding additional positive cognitions to outweigh the conflicting ones are ways to resolve cognitive dissonance. The results of these dissonance reduction strategies all typically result in a stronger attribution with the option that was chosen, and the unchosen alternative is more negatively attributed.

Is it right to say or do the opposite of what you really want to do? In this article, Leon Festinger and James M. Carlsmith put this question to test. However, this article deals with cognitive dissonance theory. However, a report from Janis and King shows this situation a little bit different. A number of series for an experiment was given to improvise a speech to see if it convinces someone. It shows that if something needs to be change because of someone opinion, it is more than likely to change.

Uttich and Lombrozo also studied the side-effect effect, but explained it differently than Knobe did. They said that the side-effect effect, the differences in ascribed mental states and traits pertaining to intentionality of an action, is due to the side effect’s norm status as opposed to moral status. They named this view the Rational Scientist view. While Knobe suggested the moral status of a side-effect influenced judgments on intentionality, Uttich and Lombrozo suggested that norm status is sufficient alone in producing the side-effect effect. Specifically, they said that norm-violating behavior that outweighs the reason to observe the norm is more informative in explaining intentionality of side effects compared to norm-conforming behavior. By default, people usually follow the norms, unless some sufficiently strong reason compels them to violate them. The Rational Scientist view is consistent with the Theory of Mind, in that internal states support explanation and prediction of behavior, but adds the vital role of norms in those predictions and explanations; moral norms affect Theory of Mind ascriptions by influencing mental state ascriptions.