What Is the Definition of Cognitive Dissonance

People make big and small decisions every day. When faced with two similar choices, feelings of dissonance often persist because both options are equally appealing. Cognitive dissonance can be problematic when you start justifying or rationalizing destructive behaviors. Or when you start stressing yourself out a lot trying to rationalize the dissonance. The theory of cognitive communication dissonance was originally developed by American psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1960s. Festinger theorized that cognitive dissonance usually occurs when a person has two or more incompatible beliefs at the same time. [59] This is a normal phenomenon because people encounter different situations that produce contradictory sequences of thoughts. This conflict leads to psychological complaints. According to Festinger, people who experience thought conflicts try to reduce psychological discomfort by trying to achieve emotional balance. This balance is achieved in three main ways. First, the person can minimize the meaning of the dissonant thought. Second, the person may try to prevail over dissonant thoughts with consonant thoughts.

Eventually, the person can incorporate the dissonant thought into their current belief system. [64] Managing cognitive dissonance easily influences a student`s apparent motivation to pursue education. [43] Turning Play into Work: Effects of Adult Surveillance and Extrinsic Rewards on Children`s Intrinsic Motivation (1975) showed that applying the justification of effort paradigm increased students` enthusiasm for education by offering an external reward for study; Preschoolers who solved puzzles based on a promise of adult rewards were later less interested in the puzzles than students who completed puzzle tasks without the promise of a reward. [44] Participants in the high dissonance condition chose between a highly desirable product and a product rated only 1 point lower on the 8-point scale. After reading the reports on the different products, the individuals re-evaluated the products. When there are conflicts between cognitions (thoughts, beliefs, opinions), people will take steps to reduce dissonance and feelings of discomfort. You can do this in several ways, such as: Hasan U. Cognitive dissonance and its impact on consumer buying behavior. IOSR Journal of Business and Management. 2012;1(4):7-12.

doi: 10.9790/487x-0140712 Thanks to the causes of cognitive dissonance, people can rationalize their decisions – even if they violate their beliefs – stay away from convoys on certain topics, hide their beliefs or actions from others, or even ignore a doctor`s advice. In the end, all of these tactics only help them repeat behaviors they don`t really agree with anyway. Hello, oxymoron alive, breathing. Cognitive dissonance presents a challenge: how can we resolve the unpleasant feeling that arises when our own thoughts or actions collide? Some responses may be more constructive than others. These self-leaders experience contradictory psychological stress (cognitive dissonance). People are motivated to close the self-gap (the gap between two self-leaders). [78] The predictive dissonance model suggests that cognitive dissonance is fundamentally related to the predictive coding (or predictive processing) model of cognition. [95] Predictive processing of the mind suggests that perception actively involves the use of a Bayesian hierarchy of prior acquired knowledge, primarily to predict proprioceptive, interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory input.

Therefore, the brain is an inference machine that tries to predict and actively explain its sensations. The minimization of prediction errors is crucial for this inference. The predictive dissonance count suggests that the motivation for cognitive dissonance reduction is related to an organism`s active willingness to reduce prediction errors. Moreover, it suggests that human brains (and perhaps other animals) evolved to selectively ignore conflicting information (as dissonance theory suggests) in order to avoid overfitting their predictive cognitive models to local, and therefore non-generalizing, conditions.