School is another catalyst for tension as people are acclimating to a new environment, meeting others and learning new information. The expectation of shared beliefs, values, and attitudes from family members can additionally influence romantic relationships. If these don’t align, we might consider justifying our relationship or breaking up. An extreme example of the negative consequences of cognitive dissonance is when we justify our partner’s harmful behavior toward us and get stuck in a toxic relationship. The theory is based on the idea that two cognitions can be relevant or irrelevant to each other (Festinger, 1957).
- Our studies did not find evidence of a role for Arousal or Dominance change, which suggest that these characteristic are less defining features of the dissonance state.
- When the effort doesn’t seem to be “worth it,” we often make up reasons why it was better than the alternative.
- As you can imagine, participant’s attitudes toward this task were highly negative.
- Narcissistic abuse is an insidious, covert form of emotional abuse that can happen to unsuspecting individuals who are entangled in a relationship with a person with narcissistic qualities.
- When someone is forced to do (publicly) something they (privately) really don’t want to do, dissonance is created between their cognition (I didn’t want to do this) and their behavior (I did it).
Who May Experience Cognitive Dissonance?
Psychologist Kia-Rai Prewitt, PhD, explains how to manage this feeling of discomfort, what’s known as cognitive dissonance, and how it can affect your mental health and other relationships when left unchecked. For example, a small 2019 study notes that dissonance-based interventions may be helpful cognitive dissonance addiction for people with eating disorders. This approach works by encouraging people to say things or role-play behaviors that contradict their beliefs about food and body image. For example, behaving in ways that are not aligned with your personal values may result in intense feelings of discomfort.
How to Resolve Cognitive Dissonance
- For example, the cognitive dissonance you might experience after choosing between two equally appealing options isn’t necessarily destructive unless you choose an option that will cause harm to yourself or someone else over an option that won’t.
- Past accounts of dissonance reduction have identified several different factors influencing dissonance reduction (e.g., the type of cognitions in conflict, situational circumstances, influence of other people, individual differences, personal goals, etc.).
- Is it a perception (as “cognitive” suggests), a feeling, or a feeling about a perception?
- You might decide that your choice is OK in comparison to your beliefs or you might minimize the negative aspects of your decision to feel better.
- For instance, when the cognitive conflict is made highly salient, or self-affirmation is readily available, trivialization will be more likely.
- In our opinion, these studies are valuable as the psychological discomfort is supposed to be the core of the theory and the mediator of all cognitive dissonance.
Another way to cope with cognitive dissonance is to slow down when making decisions. Taking the time to explore the pros and cons before making a decision can help you feel more comfortable with your choices and minimize some of the cognitive dissonance you may experience. Likewise, you also can challenge the behaviors that don’t align with your beliefs and think of alternative ways of doing things that would be more in line with with you believe.
Self-discrepancy theory
The concept of cognitive dissonance is nicely explained in this YouTube video by social psychologist Andy Luttrell. People who are healing from toxic love relationships do well to educate themselves on the nature of the emotional abuse sustained so that they can move through their pain to a place of healing. Interaction between the number of reported behaviours and the experimental condition on reports of Pleasure, Arousal and Dominance. Cognitive bias is the tendency to process information in the light of our own experiences.
- Cognitive dissonance can feel a lot like anxiety and stress — and they often come paired together.
- His research on what causes cognitive dissonance and how we react to it has become critical to the fields of social psychology and psychiatry.
- Here, the individual is more likely to retreat from, rather than approach, the situation (Lewis, 2016).
- Another challenging issue is the categorization of reduction strategies, which has also been a notoriously difficult task in the coping literature (Skinner et al., 2003).
- Actually, it seems likely that different inconsistencies would elicit different affective states, for instance depending on whether they involve self-relevant cognitions (Elliot & Devine, 1994) or positive outcomes for the individual (Gawronsky & Branon, 2019; Kruglanski & Shteynberg, 2012).
Elaborate interpretations are concocted and believed by zealots, and their preconceived beliefs and biases give them a new sense of meaning in their lives. Official lies that are stated assertively and repeatedly gain the credibility of many angry people with the status quo. They are often believed by those dissatisfied with their lives and who feel powerless and socially disconnected. They seek meaning in their lives and want clear answers to nuanced complexities, but they base their realities on misinformation, delusions, and lies.
- We argue that detection of dissonance will follow the same principles as when people interpret any other stimuli as emotionally significant.
- The most common experimental paradigm in dissonance research is the induced-compliance paradigm, in which individuals are asked (under the perception of free choice) to write a counter-attitudinal essay.
- Once a reduction strategy is implemented, the individual’s response will feed back into the initial interpretation of the situation and a new evaluation will take place.
- 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.
- Cognitive dissonance is a psychological state of discomfort that occurs when your behaviors and beliefs do not align.
- Instead of feeling defensive, dig into the information that your response gives you.
