Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Cognitive Dissonance Theory, proposed by Leon Festinger, suggests that individuals experience discomfort when they hold conflicting beliefs or attitudes. This discomfort motivates them to reduce the dissonance by changing their beliefs or behaviors. The theory has been influential in understanding decision-making, attitude change, and the impact of inconsistency on psychological well-being.
7 Key excerpts on "Cognitive Dissonance Theory"
eBook - ePub- Miriam E. David, Marilyn J. Amey(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...KC Culver KC Culver Culver, KC Cognitive Dissonance Cognitive dissonance 258 260 Cognitive Dissonance Cognitive Dissonance Theory was originally articulated in 1957 by Leon Festinger, a social psychologist who posited that incongruence between two cognitions (which may be ideas, attitudes, beliefs, feelings, or behaviors) creates psychological discomfort that individuals are motivated to resolve. Cognitive dissonance has been repeatedly tested, debated, expanded, and refined. Researchers have variously categorized and connected it to cognitive development, motivation, identity salience, affective development, and social interaction. In higher education, the use of cognitive dissonance is widespread across literature and practice associated with student affairs, student development, multiculturalism, and teaching and learning. After providing a more detailed explanation of cognitive dissonance, this entry considers the use of cognitive dissonance in these different arenas. The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance Festinger provides many details about cognitive dissonance in the original theory. There are three possible relationships among cognitions: (1) irrelevance, (2) consonance, and (3) dissonance. Some thoughts are totally unrelated to others and therefore irrelevant. Ideas that support one another are consonant, while those that conflict are dissonant. Dissonance may stem from several sources, including logical inconsistency, previous experience, and cultural standards. The extent to which dissonance causes psychological discomfort is dependent on the value placed on each cognition and the weighted proportion of consonant and dissonant cognitive elements. To alleviate this discomfort, dissonance is likely reduced in one of three ways...
eBook - ePubApplied Social Psychology
Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems
- Jamie A. Gruman, Frank W. Schneider, Larry M. Coutts(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...132). As indicated in Figure 2.2, the core of Cognitive Dissonance Theory is the idea that humans are motivated to maintain consistency among their cognitions (e.g., opinions, attitudes, knowledge, values) because cognitive dissonance, the situation that exists when two cognitions are psychologically inconsistent with one another, is psychologically uncomfortable. Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory would suggest, in the case of Prasad’s (1950) rumor spreaders, that their cognition that “the earthquake didn’t hurt me in any way” was inconsistent with the cognition that “I’m still feeling very frightened.” For them, apparently the easiest way in which to reduce their dissonance-caused discomfort was to justify their fear by adding new cognitions (Figure 2.2), that is, by generating rumors of impending disasters. They might have taken a seemingly more logical approach (e.g., moving away from the earthquake zone), but an additional key element of Cognitive Dissonance Theory is the proposition that people will reduce dissonance in the easiest way possible. For example, the cognition that “exercising is good for my health” is dissonant with the cognition that “my only exercise is the trip between my couch and my refrigerator.” The most logical action for me to take would be to start exercising. However, because breaking old habits and acquiring new ones is very difficult, I probably will reduce my dissonance in one of several other ways...
- Amy E. Wenzel(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Eddie Harmon-Jones Eddie Harmon-Jones Harmon-Jones, Eddie Cindy Harmon-Jones Cindy Harmon-Jones Harmon-Jones, Cindy Cognitive Dissonance Cognitive Dissonance 756 757 Cognitive Dissonance According to Cognitive Dissonance Theory, when a person has in mind two or more pieces of knowledge that are related to each other but inconsistent with one another, he or she will experience psychological discomfort, which is referred to as dissonance. The theory and its research are concerned with how perception and cognition influence and are influenced by motivation and affect. This research has investigated the ways in which the experience of dissonance causes attitude and behavior changes. It is relevant to clinical treatments based on perspectives such as motivational interviewing. Theoretically, the amount of dissonance that occurs in relation to a particular cognition is determined by this formula: D i /(D i + C i). In this formula, D is the sum of cognitions dissonant (or inconsistent) with a particular cognition and C is the sum of cognitions consonant (or consistent) with that same cognition. The subscripts i indicate that each cognition should be weighted for importance. Dissonance is posited to motivate organisms to cognitively work to reduce the inconsistency. From the aforementioned formula, dissonance can be reduced by adding consonant cognitions, subtracting dissonant cognitions, increasing the importance of consonant cognitions, or decreasing the importance of dissonant cognitions. Dissonance reduction will typically cause persons to change cognitions that are least resistant (or most easy) to change. This entry discusses the experimental paradigms for testing Cognitive Dissonance Theory as well as other proposed explanation for dissonance effects. Experimental Paradigms Several experimental paradigms have tested the theory. One is the free-choice or difficult-decision paradigm...
eBook - ePubMistakes Were Made (but Not By Me) Third Edition
Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
- Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Mariner Books(Publisher)
...At the heart of it, Festinger’s theory is about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful. The theory inspired more than three thousand experiments that, taken together, have transformed psychologists’ understanding of how the human mind works. Cognitive dissonance even escaped academia and entered popular culture. The term is everywhere. The two of us have encountered it in political columns, health news stories, magazine articles, a Non Sequitur cartoon by Wiley Miller (“Showdown at the Cognitive Dissonance Bridge”), bumper stickers, a TV soap opera, Jeopardy!, and a humor column in the New Yorker (“Cognitive Dissonances I’m Comfortable With”). Although the expression has been thrown around a lot, few peo ple fully understand its meaning or appreciate its enormous motivational power. In 1956, one of us (Elliot) arrived at Stanford University as a graduate student in psychology. Festinger had started there that same year as a young professor, and they immediately began working together, designing experiments to test and expand dissonance theory. 4 Their thinking challenged many notions that had been gospel in psychology and among the general public, such as the behaviorist’s view that people do things primarily for the rewards they bring, the economist’s view that, as a rule, human beings make rational decisions, and the psychoanalyst’s view that acting aggressively gets rid of aggressive impulses. Consider how dissonance theory challenged behaviorism. At the time, most scientific psychologists were convinced that people’s actions were governed by reward and punishment. It is certainly true that if you feed a rat at the end of a maze, he will learn the maze faster than if you don’t feed him, and if you give your dog a biscuit when she gives you her paw, she will learn that trick faster than if you sit around hoping she will do it on her own...
eBook - ePubMedia Choice
A Theoretical and Empirical Overview
- Tilo Hartmann(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...(2) Contrary to Festinger, Mills assumes—following the Choice Certainty Theory—that dissonances can appear through the anticipation of an action’s consequences even before a decision is made to act a certain way. (3) Furthermore, Mills demands to factor in other cognitions that are in relationship with the two core cognitions. Festinger’s personal hope to establish the theory of cognitive dissonance as a general psychological-biological law that applies to all living creatures (as his dissonance-theoretical experiments with rats show, see Lawrence & Festinger, 1962) 2 has clearly failed. What remains is the question whether human beings generally strive for reduction or avoidance of inconsistency in their cognitions. Such Aronson already assumed in the “TOCCAS-volume” (1968, p. 26): “man cannot live by consonance alone” and Frey already listed three other theories in 1984 that are “all more or less aiming at substituting the dissonance theory completely or in part”: “impression management theory” by Tedeschi (1981) among others (it traced back the findings of dissonance research to the human desire to present the social environment in a continuous, consistent character) (Tedeschi, Schlenker, & Bonoma, 1971); “self-perception theory” by Bem (1965 and others (it does not trace back cognitive changes to the existence of a state of dissonance, but explains it with the human ability to infer internal conditions from external factors); and the “curiosity and complexity theories” (see Berlyne, 1968 among others). In contrast to consistency theories they explain human behavior with the need for variety, surprise, and complexity (Berlyne, 1960; Maddi, 1961)...
eBook - ePubThe Science of Social Influence
Advances and Future Progress
- Anthony R. Pratkanis, Anthony R. Pratkanis(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...4 The Evolution of Cognitive Dissonance Theory: A Personal Appraisal ELLIOT ARONSON I am a chronic and habitual storyteller. So what I want to do (primarily) is tell you a story. Part of the story will be fairly traditional for this kind of volume; that is, it will describe a program of research that has come out of my laboratory. But, in addition, the story will include an homage to my dear friend and mentor, Leon Festinger, who revolutionized social psychology. It will also include a history of an idea– Cognitive Dissonance Theory– as well as a central aspect of my philosophy of science (such as it is!). But mostly this story is a celebration of social psychology– a field that I have been madly in love with for the past 50 years. THE BEGINNING OF MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH DISSONANCE THEORY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY I was not always in love with social psychology. As a matter of fact, when I entered graduate school in the mid-1950s, it was not my intention to become a social psychologist. I had read a little social psychology as an undergrad, and it struck me as pretty boring stuff. The hot item at the time was the Yale research on communication and persuasion which, among other things, demonstrated that, if you present people with a message indicating that nuclear submarines are feasible, it is more effective if you attribute it to a respected physicist like J. Robert Oppenheimer than if you attribute it to an unreliable source like Pravda. I can see now that this was important and necessary research, but at the time, it seemed so obvious that, to an undergraduate, it hardly seemed necessary to perform an elaborate experiment to demonstrate that it was true. In those days, almost everything done in the field was inspired by a rather simplistic derivation from reinforcement theory...
eBook - ePubSocial Psychology
Revisiting the Classic Studies
- Joanne R. Smith, S Alexander Haslam(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...3 Cognitive Dissonance Revisiting Festinger’s End of the World study Joel Cooper Background On an autumn day in 1954, a well-known social psychologist read an article in his local newspaper. The psychologist had been a student of Kurt Lewin, often described as the seminal figure in the birth of modern social psychology. Like his mentor, this social psychologist believed that progress in the new science lay not only in testing theory in the laboratory but also in applying theory to phenomena in the real world. At this time, Leon Festinger had already been responsible for two major theoretical contributions. In 1950 he had written a paper on the pressures for uniformity in groups (Festinger, 1950) and four years later turned his theoretical insight about group pressure into a focus on the individual, with his theory of social comparison processes (Festinger, 1954). Social comparison theory identified the strong need people have to evaluate their own opinions and abilities by comparing them with the opinions and abilities of others. However, he was now working on a new theory that would be transformative in the history of social psychology – what we would later know as the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). The new theory would move beyond social comparison to view the social world unabashedly from the perspective of the individual. According to Festinger, individuals represent the social world as a set of mental cognitions. Any behaviour, attitude or emotion was considered a cognition – that is, a mental representation within a person’s mind. So, too, were the perceptions of the world around us. Our perceptions of other people, social groups and the physical world were all considered to be cognitive representations. Those representations existed in relationship to each other – sometimes fitting together consistently and sometimes inconsistently in people’s minds...
