Cognitive Dissonance In Psychology: Definition and Examples

The twenty-dollar group had external justification for their inconsistency–money motivated them to lie to the confederate about the task being interesting when it was actually boring. Receiving only one dollar did not seem to justify lying to the confederate and compelled subjects in the one-dollar group to internalize the “interesting task” mental attitude. The subjects convinced https://ecosoberhouse.com/ themselves that the tasks were somewhat interesting to rectify the dissonance due to inconsistency between believing the tasks were boring but telling someone they were interesting. The third limitation is that there are few studies using reliable measures of the CDS. As we wrote above, instruments that focus on general feelings or emotions may in fact capture other emotions.

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That’s why it’s important to recognize what it is and what it feels like — if you don’t, then it will be that much harder to live an authentic life aligned with your personal values. Anyone can experience this uneasiness when their feelings don’t align with their actions, says Rachelle Scott, M.D., a psychiatrist and ​​medical director of Mental Health at Eden Health in New York. Dissonance comes up when we realize there are two things opposing each other,” she explains. But you can feel caught off guard when those values and beliefs are shaken by social pressures, the presence of new information or having to make a rushed last-minute decision.

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Adding More Beliefs to Outweigh Dissonant Beliefs

At this point, you may have noticed a concerning trend in that people often don’t make the best decisions when in a state of cognitive dissonance. Employees often put their morals aside and follow questionable orders from their employer. Conspiracy theorists often disregard solid science that disproves their beliefs.

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• But our actions don’t always line up with what we think of ourselves.
• Since participants in the $20 condition had a more substantial justification (higher pay) already, they were further assumed to perceive less dissonance than those in the $1 condition.
• Conversely, we may justify or trivialize negative behavior or even end the relationship.
• By recognizing that the discomfort is just a cognitive process, and not a sign that your new beliefs are wrong.
• Explore how presenting a misleading image of social and emotional wellness affects mental health.
• However, all the variations we have seen could actually be interpreted as evidence for a general and unspecified negative affect.

A likely explanation is that the PAD scale was not sensitive enough to capture the arousal properties of the CDS in our studies. In both conditions, we used commitment variables to maximize the magnitude of cognitive dissonance in the Counter-attitudinal condition (i.e., aversive consequence, freedom, publicity; see Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999; Kiesler, 1971). The publicity and the consequences of the act were high, as participants were instructed to sign the consent form with their name and were told that their arguments would be presented to the committee. Free-choice was emphasized by telling participants that they were free to participate or not in the study and that they could quit the study at any time, without any loss of benefits or other negative consequences. Two main instruments have been developed to assess emotions using the PAD model.

This amounts to many data supporting the idea that writing a counterattitudinal essay evokes negative affect, but scarce evidence that the other paradigms induce the same negative affect. As presented above, studies assessing arousal are unclear regarding whether the different cognitive dissonance paradigms elicit the same sort of arousal. Therefore, it is still to be determined if there exists a common CDS across these paradigms. Festinger’s original theory did not seek to explain how dissonance works. It proposes that inconsistencies in a person’s cognition cause mental stress because psychological inconsistency interferes with the person’s functioning in the real world.

• Mismatches between your beliefs and actions can lead to feelings of discomfort (and, sometimes, coping choices that have negative impacts), but such feelings can also sometimes lead to change and growth.
• With over 15 years of content experience, Allaya Cooks Campbell has written for outlets such as ScaryMommy, HRzone, and HuffPost.
• Unfortunately, these limiting beliefs get in the way if we want to form a productive habit, set a lofty goal, or change the direction of our lives.
• Sometimes, new information leads to cognitive dissonance, but that also allows you to take new actions you may not have thought about taking before.

• Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.
• As a result of being more honest, you’ll think through your decisions in a responsible way and learn more about yourself, too.
• If you know texting and driving is dangerous, for example, changing the behavior will protect you and others in the long term.
• By Kendra Cherry, MSEdKendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the “Everything Psychology Book.”
• When the participants were asked to evaluate the experiment, the participants who were paid only $1 rated the tedious task as more fun and enjoyable than the participants who were paid $20 to lie.
• It was mentioned that their essay could be as long as they wished and that they could inspire themselves with the provided list of quotations if needed.
• In this way, he would be decreasing the importance of dissonant cognition (smoking is bad for one’s health).

To deal with the feelings of discomfort then, they might find some way of rationalizing the conflicting cognition. For instance, they may justify their sedentary behavior by saying that their other healthy behaviors—like eating sensibly and occasionally exercising—make up for their largely sedentary lifestyle. When there are conflicts between cognitions (thoughts, beliefs, and opinions), people will take steps to reduce the dissonance and feelings of discomfort.

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As most cognitive dissonance paradigms are likely to induce other emotions, it may be more pertinent to distinctively assess the nature of the psychological discomfort involved in the CDS. In this regard, the Dissonance Thermometer (Devine et al., 1999; Elliot & Devine, 1994) is the most common means to assess CDS. In its original form, it is a 18 item self-report affective scale that computes a specific CDS index on the basis of how much people report feeling uncomfortable, uneasy and bothered. However, despite its popularity, this scale seems to present several flaws. The scale indexes have presented an insufficient homogeneity several times (Harmon-Jones, 2000a; Priolo et al., 2016), and their inter-correlations fluctuate (Elliot & Devine, 1994; Galinsky et al., 2000; Matz & Wood 2005).

Cognitive Dissonance: Theory, Examples & How to Reduce It

In all conditions, they then heard a very boring discussion about sex in lower animals. They were asked to rate how interesting they had found the discussion and how interesting cognitive dissonance and addiction they had found the people involved in it. This is probably because dissonance would be caused if we spent a great effort to achieve something and then evaluated it negatively.