Cognitive Dissonance Theory an overview

Would you be more likely to do it if I gave you a dollar or twenty dollars? Please take a few moments to think about what you’d do but before we discuss it further, let’s cover some background. Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy. You want to be healthy, but you don’t exercise regularly or eat a nutritious diet. Temporal distance variable probably influenced endorsement of different strategies through the availability principle. That is, temporal distance might have affected the availability of BJW-defense strategies that required different modes of thinking.

The more difficult the decision, the greater the dissonance it creates. As in John’s case, the behavior might be deeply satisfying (who doesn’t love bacon?). In other cases, changing one’s behavior might actually be painful or incur a measure of loss . A person who stutters cannot stop stuttering at will, and a person who cheated on an exam cannot go back and undo his behavior. In https://ecosoberhouse.com/ two studies, we aimed to examine the CDS within the framework of the PAD model. We used two of the most popular paradigms to assess how the CDS impacts the Pleasure, Arousal and Dominance indexes of the PAD scale. The present results provide information with regard to our understanding of the CDS and are partially satisfying concerning the use of the PAD scale to assess the CDS.

Discussing discrepant behavior

After reading the reports about the various products, individuals rated the products again. For example, when people smoke and they know that smoking causes cancer , they are in a state of cognitive dissonance.

Depending on the paradigms used, anger and surprise are two other emotions that are likely to be confounded with cognitive dissonance (Geschwender, 1967; Noordewier & Breugelmans, 2013). While this particular debate is beyond the scope of this article, we invite consideration of the question. If the CDS is a specific state, then cognitive dissonance theory instruments should allow the CDS to be distinguished from other negative emotions. Cognitive dissonance is when a person has two contradicting beliefs leading them to become distressed and motivated to reach consonance again. In order to reach stability a person will either change their beliefs, behaviors or add new beliefs.

SAFETY MYTHS SERIES

Notably, this proselytizing solution reflects not only effort justification but also the motivation to create a shared reality with others that their beliefs are true. This is yet another way to establish what is real that we discuss next. One solution to this truth problem would be to try to make sense of what happened by establishing some new reality. This solution would involve creating new truths that are consistent with their previous beliefs and actions. New judgments about the present and predictions about the future were made that were consistent with the original belief, with the disconfirming event being treated like a bump in the road. After disconfirmation, for example, there was a sharp increase in the frequency with which group members decided that other people who telephoned them or visited their group were actually spacemen. They tried to get orders and messages from the “spacemen” for a future reality that would be consistent with their original beliefs.

This campaign definitely makes people feel dissonance, especially if they use tanning beds themselves. After these people walked out to a funeral that was supposed to be their own, it is clear they all regretted going and many of them pledged to never tan again. Although this is a very morbid campaign, the use of cognitive dissonance is evident and the organization got the change in behavior and attitude that they wanted to. Psychologist Leon Festinger introduced the theory of cognitive dissonance, which is the discomfort people feel when their thoughts and actions don’t align, in a famous study where he paid people to lie.