What Is Cognitive Dissonance?

Decisions are the basis of human history, advancement, and modern society. Important decisions often cause a conflict within a person as he or she attempts to make a choice based on what he or she believes is right, as well as what he or she believes is wise. Throughout life and society, people find themselves at a crossroads of beliefs or thoughts with the justification of murder. This is due to the dissonance illustrated when they have mixed feelings with the idea that killing another human is wrong, although it seemingly appears unavoidable in certain situations. This inevitability is what justifies murder in the first place. These mixed feelings create a cognitive dissonance that impacts society in a detrimental

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

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.

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,

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- After our class end I was suppose to write my journal submit it before noon. That did not happen, what happened instead was that I convinced myself that I needed a break and need to catch up Game of Thrones. After the first episode ended, I immediately started watching the next episode and I justified it by saying that I am getting it out of the way and so that when I do end up doing my homework, I would be doing it without any distractions. One episode led to two episodes, few more hours later I ended up watch a whole season of Game of Thrones. What makes this an example of cognitive dissonance, is because cognitive dissonance is often

Cognitive dissonance is having a state of inconsistent thoughts and beliefs that towards decisions and attitudes that can constantly change. Many people tend to engage in cognitive dissonance but don’t realize there doing it. Correspondingly situation arose when someone hurts another feeling, or when temptation becomes a struggle with your beliefs. In the same way it can come in forms of making a decision or trying to achieve a goal that you find not worth the effort after accomplishing it. Given these points I would like to apply my real life examples of cognitive dissonance. My first personal example happened right before spring break. Me and my two best friends jess and Isaiah were sitting on the couch watching TV and making jokes. Isaiah then made a joke towards jess and we all found

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

An Example of cognitive dissonance is that at my house, my cats can sometimes be tough to see when you are walking, and thus people end up stepping on them or kicking them. The cognitive dissonance here would be that people often like to say “your cat walked into my path” or “your cat tried to trip me.” When this happens people are having two conflicting views at the same exact time, theory often suggests that the brain wants to eliminate dissonance whenever possible. The brain does this by changing the way you feel about or perceive certain things, or in other words, changing your attitudes and beliefs. So instead of just admitting they made a mistake in kicking the cat and feeling apologetic, people use cognitive dissonance to turn the situation into the cat’s fault for getting in their way, thus making them feel better about themselves.

One of the first dissonance theories that can be used to solve issues with your project is to reduce the importance of the conflicting belief.

What are cognitions? It is a way of knowing, believing, judging, and thoughts (West & Turner, 2014, p. 110). Leon Festinger used the theory of Cognitive Dissonance to explain imbalances of cognitions. So Cognitive Dissonance simply is the discomfort that is caused by holding conflicting cognitions. The theory argues that dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling that motivates people to take steps to reduce it (West & Turner, 2014, p. 110). The reason to for wanting to reduce it is because when people are in the state of dissonance and may feel dread, anger, guilt, or embarrassment. As a result, people will often ignore views that oppose their own, change their beliefs to match their actions (or vice versa), and/or seek reassurances after making

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.

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

Cognitive Dissonance Theory, or CDT for short, is an objective communication theory that was developed by Leon Festinger. Cognitive Dissonance is defined as “The distressing mental state caused by inconsistency between a person’s two beliefs or a belief and an action.” (Griffin, Ledbetter, et al). An example of cognitive dissonance would be a health conscious smoker, this person knows that smoking is bad for them, but they still smoke because they enjoy it. Their desire to be healthy conflicts with their smoking, this conflict places them in a distressing mental state, a state of cognitive dissonance. Festinger provides three hypotheses for CDT: 1.) Selective exposure prevents dissonance. 2.) Post decision dissonance creates need for reassurance. and 3.) Minimal justification for action induces attitude change.

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