Leon Festinger's Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in order to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and to personal conscience. The experiment consisted of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, and who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. The roles of this experiment included a learner, teacher, and researcher. The participant was deemed the teacher and was in the same room as the researcher. The learner, who was also a paid actor, was put into the next room and strapped into an electric chair. The teacher administered a test to the learner, and for each question that was incorrect, the learner was to receive an electric shock by the teacher, increasing the level of shock each time. The shock generator ranged from

A classic experiment on the natural obedience of individuals was designed and tested by a Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram. The test forced participants to either go against their morals or violate authority. For the experiment, two people would come into the lab after being told they were testing memory loss, though only one of them was actually being tested. The unaware individual, called the “teacher” would sit in a separate room, administering memory related questions. If the individual in the other room, the “learner,” gave a wrong answer, the teacher would administer a shock in a series of increasingly painful shocks correlating with the more answers given incorrectly. Milgram set up a recorder

In 1963 a psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted one of the greatest controversial experiments of all time. Milgram tested students from Yale to discover the obedience of people to an authoritative figure. The subjects, whom did not know the shocks would not hurt, had to shock a “learner” when the “learner” answered questions incorrectly. Milgram came under fire for this experiment, which many proclaimed was unethical. This experiment of Milgram’s stimulated the creation of several responsive articles. Two articles that respond to this experiment are authored by Diane Baumrind and Ian Parker. These two authors attempt to review the methods, results, and ethical issues of Milgram’s experiment.

Cognitive dissonance is a physiological conflict resulting from out of place beliefs and attitudes held at the same time (Webster, n.d.). In layman’s terms this means having thoughts and attitudes that are not always the same as the general public’s thoughts. In this essay you will be given one example of cognitive dissonance from the media.

People can display themselves outwardly in a certain manner although on the inside be completely different. A person’s attitude and behavior can influence each other; a person’s surrounds will also have an impact on how the person is. An example of this can be seen in a person committing a crime such as shoplifting, the person knows this is illegal and not moral but in the right situation the person may forget his or her moral upbringing and commit the crime any way. Influences on the individual can be overpowering, causing the person to behave or act in an attitude different from the person’s normal action and behavior. People tend to suffer from

The researchers hypothesize that a "higher percentage of participants will obey the experimenter than in Milgram's baseline condition" (Bocchairo, Zimbardo, and Van Lange, 2012) because of their substitution for a softer form of psychological aggression. The researchers also predict that there will be "a relatively lower level of whistle-blowing than disobedience because whistle-blowing involves the possibility of direct confrontation with the authority figure" (Bocchairo, Zimbardo, and Van Lange, 2012). In a second study conducted by Bocchiaro, Zimbardo, and Van Lange they wanted to explore "to what extent respondents estimated reactions differ from actual experienced reactions" (Bocchairo, Zimbardo, Van Lange, 2012). The respondents "were asked to predict the behavior of themselves and that of others when faced with the setting they had designed for the laboratory investigation" (Bocchairo, Zimbardo, Van Lange, 2012). In this study the researchers predict that in both cases there will be a large overestimation of the likelihood to disobey by blowing the whistle. They hypothesize that one of two things will happen, either "obedient participants will be considerably different from defiants or that certain behavioral contexts like their designed study will at best anticipate week

Many of the participants shook and shivered as they administered the shocks but they still continued to shock when the experimenter told them it was vital to the experiment. The participants that stopped shocking were more likely to take personal responsibility for shocking the “student” while the participants who had continued shocking mostly claimed that it was the experimenters fault for pressuring them to continue. These statistics lead Milgrim to believe that obedience to authority had a great effect on our behavior.

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,

Festinger’s blanket statement of his theory still needs further explanation. When he says, "If you change a person’s behavior, his thoughts and feelings will change to minimize the dissonance" (Groenveld, 1999), he is referring to not only selective exposure and post-decision dissonance but also to minimal justification. Minimal justification predicts that if a person’s actions can be changed, with very little compensation, then the person, needing to eliminate the dissonance of behaving against her beliefs for something infinitesimal, will change her attitude about the situation. So, Festinger, through influential psychological experiments, has successfully proven that if a small incentive is offered for a behavior change, a significant attitudinal change is made whereas

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.

People behave in certain ways to feel good about themselves. That is a small part of what cognitive dissonance does. Briefly, cognitive dissonance is a psychological concept. It's when someone has two conflicting thoughts, that could be for instance; decisions, the way you view yourself, and more. This also influences the reason why people don't recognize that they're not meeting the standards they set for themselves.

Cognitive dissonance theory is based on several fundamental assumptions. One is that humans are sensitive to the inconsistencies between actions and beliefs. Accordingly, we all recognize when we are acting in a manner that is consistent with our attitudes. Secondly, the recognition will definitely lead to dissonance that will drive the persons involved to resolve the situation (Gladwell, 2005). This dissonance can be solved through change beliefs, change actions and change perception of action. The individual in this case has to be

The phenomenon of cognitive dissonance is recognised as a feeling of discomfort, initially aroused by two inconsistent cognitions created by performing an action that contradict ones typically self-concept (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2010). The drive to view ourselves as

In the early 1960’s Stanley Milgram (1963) performed an experiment titled Behavioral Study of Obedience to measure compliance levels of test subjects prompted to administer punishment to learners. The experiment had surprising results.

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