cognitive dissonance addiction is a well-researched psychological phenomenon. It occurs in all of us frequently, not just when planning to diet and justifying a doughnut with a delayed diet start. This offers opportunities to discuss the discrepancies, deepen the relationship, and re-align values.
Changing Behavior
The original book by Leon Festinger is a staple on every (social) psychologist’s bookshelf. If patients are provided with the opportunity to co-design aspects of their therapy, they may be more likely to act in line with their choices by reaching their therapeutic goals. Sometimes the dissonant information appears to be important at first sight but can be diminished upon deeper reflection. Cognitive dissonance is powerful because we are highly driven to eliminate it.
What is cognitive dissonance?
- Cognitive dissonance can have many different causes, including addiction, a desire to meet the expectations of others, fear of change, and trauma.
- Some of the ways people reduce discomfort from cognitive dissonance include seeking information that aligns with and supports current beliefs, reducing the conflicting belief’s importance, and changing beliefs to reduce the feelings of conflict.
- This reduces your guilt and helps you bridge the gap between your love of animals and your diet.
- It’s just a small local election.” Maybe you even told yourself that your vote probably wouldn’t affect the outcome that much anyway.
- Sometimes cognitive dissonance can cause such stress or anxiety that you have to change your behavior.
The major theoretical revisions differ primarily in terms of the motivation they posit for causing dissonance reduction. The revisions are self-consistency, self-affirmation, new look, and action-based model. Among people who felt the shock but sustained no damage from the earthquake, rumors were widely circulated and accepted about even worse disasters to come. What is the neural explanation for this common type of psychological stress? Thanks to advances in imaging methods, especially functional MRI, researchers have recently identified key brain regions linked to cognitive dissonance.
Challenge current beliefs
This desire to be at peace with our decisions might be just the thing to inspire us to go for that run after all. Cognitive dissonance is a theory in social psychology first proposed by Leon Festinger. According to this theory, cognitive dissonance describes the discomfort experienced when two cognitions are incompatible with each other. Cognitive dissonance can have many different causes, including addiction, a desire to meet the expectations of others, fear of change, and trauma.
Adding More Beliefs to Outweigh Dissonant Beliefs
People from this group are kind and likable, just like anyone else. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term that describes the discomfort you feel when your beliefs don’t line up with your actions. Or it could refer to the tension of holding two conflicting beliefs at once. Your thoughts – on the one hand, that you consider yourself a staunch supporter of a certain political party and, on the other hand, that you cannot support that party’s policy about your neighborhood – are not in harmony with each other. The discomfort this causes can push you to make a change, either in your behavior or your beliefs, that will make you feel more comfortable. This definition of meat-animal dissociation shares similarities with, and is facilitated by, other constructs and processes.
It can, hence, be argued that they had a clear association between meat and animals. Consequently, an increasing number of people became largely separated from animals used in food production and, thus, had less contact with the animals they consumed. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.
The Impacts of Cognitive Dissonance
You love your partner and believe them to be a good person who cares about you. When they are physically or verbally abusive, you may justify their behavior to stay in the relationship. Or you may eventually change your beliefs about your partner and get out of the relationship. When someone else’s behavior – for example, that of a partner, co-worker, neighbor, or member of your place of worship – causes cognitive dissonance for you, it can put stress on both you and the relationship. That’s how recognizing and resolving the cognitive dissonance you experience can help you understand yourself better and the values and beliefs that really matter to you. This “guilt factor” is a common side effect of cognitive dissonance.
Among them are how highly a particular belief is valued and the degree to which the beliefs are inconsistent. Cognitive dissonance can be caused by feeling forced to do something, learning new information, or when faced with a decision between two similar choices. Festinger and his collaborators, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, examined conditions under which disconfirmation of beliefs leads to increased conviction in such beliefs in the 1956 book When Prophecy Fails. The three psychologists and several more assistants joined the group. The team observed the group firsthand for months before and after the predicted apocalypse. Many of the group members quit their jobs and disposed of their possessions in preparation for the apocalypse.
The area implicated most consistently is the posterior part of the medial frontal cortex (pMFC), known to play an important role in avoiding aversive outcomes, a powerful built-in survival instinct. In fMRI studies, when subjects lie to a peer despite knowing that lying is wrong—a task that puts their actions and beliefs in conflict—the pMFC lights up. Not everyone feels the discomfort described in some of the examples of cognitive dissonance included here. Some people might be OK with a temporary conflict between their beliefs and their actions.
- Bastian and Loughnan (2017) convincingly argued that people rarely consciously reflect on the moral implications of eating meat because societal mechanisms keep people’s cognitive dissonance in place.
- She holds a master’s degree in psychology with a concentration in behavioral neuroscience and a bachelor’s degree in integrative neuroscience from Binghamton University.
- Or maybe you learn a new piece of information that disagrees with a long-standing belief or opinion.
- Moreover, it has been argued that one qualifying condition for dissonance to emerge is that individuals feel responsible for their actions (Cooper & Fazio, 1984).
- When faced with conflict, you may experience cognitive dissonance if you make a decision to lessen potential conflict between you and other people, but it’s not necessarily a decision you fully believe in.
- In other words, they were more likely than participants in the other two conditions to increase the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and to decrease the attractiveness of the unchosen alternative.
This tension is typically reduced by changing one of the dissonant elements, or adding new ones, until mental consonance is achieved. There have been three major revisions relevant to modern interpretation of dissonance phenomena. Aronson’s self-consistency model (1968) proposed that dissonance resulted from behaviors that were discrepant with one’s conception of oneself as a decent and sensible person. Steele’s self-affirmation theory (1988) proposed that dissonance emerged from threats to the overarching self-system, and that dissonance reduction relied on re-establishing the integrity of the global self-concept.