Although, when something they once believed turns out too good to be true, it conflicts with their pre-existing beliefs about their decision-making abilities. There is no doubt that cognitive dissonance can have a powerful influence on our behaviors and actions. However, there are fortunate individuals who see how their substance https://thebostondigest.com/top-5-advantages-of-staying-in-a-sober-living-house/ abuse is causing not only destruction in their lives but also with those who love them. They hold onto the belief that they will see better days and that recovery is needed to change their life. At Granite Mountain Behavioral Healthcare, our team aims to help our clients with addiction and mental illness recover.
How Do I Know if I Need Therapy?
If you’re interested in psychology and human behavior, you’ve probably heard the phrase cognitive dissonance. It’s the term coined by psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954 to describe “the feeling of psychological discomfort produced by the combined presence of two thoughts that do not follow from one another. Festinger proposed that the greater the discomfort, the greater the desire to reduce the dissonance of the two cognitive elements” (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999). Dissonance theory suggests that if individuals act in ways that contradict their beliefs, then they typically will change their beliefs to align with their actions (or vice-a-versa). Attending specialized therapy sessions such as psychotherapy or cognitive behavioral therapy can help individuals who struggle with cognitive dissonance work through emotional difficulties and disruptive or negative thoughts. Your psychologist or licensed professional counselor can help you understand your thought process, identify where the feelings are coming from, as well as find ways to change your bias, reduce conflicting beliefs or add new ones.
Decision Making
- The dissonance between two contradictory ideas, or between an idea and a behavior, creates discomfort.
- This is to reduce their potency in countering the positive cognitions induced by the health awareness efforts.
- The importance of a sudden shift in attitudes needs to be appreciated.
- We may perceive dissonance when we engage in a new behavior (e.g., when we decline an invitation to an event we usually attend in order to protect our leisure time).
- Cognitive dissonance can be caused by feeling forced to do something, learning new information, or when faced with a decision between two similar choices.
When you discover new information and you’re faced with the uncomfortable decision to … well, make decisions, embrace a positive outlook. In better understanding cognitive dissonance and the role it plays in most of our lives, we can be on the lookout for it and its sometimes-negative effects. People with a higher need for consistency and certainty in their lives usually feel the effects of cognitive dissonance more than those who have a lesser need for such consistency. The Sober House theory behind this approach is that in order to resolve the dissonance, a person’s implicit beliefs about their body and thinness will change, reducing their desire to limit their food intake. Avoiding, delegitimizing, and limiting the impact of cognitive dissonance may result in a person not acknowledging their behavior and thus not taking steps to resolve the dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds two related but contradictory cognitions, or thoughts.
Cognitive Dissonance: Festinger’s Theory
It’s normal to have cognitive distortions occasionally, but they can be harmful when frequent or extreme. He said that the way he could tell was if they excused their actions, if they had reasons and rationalizations for why they did it. If they did, that indicated they had a sense of guilt that they understood enough to need to cover it up. The inmates who were actually innocent due to their inability wouldn’t need reasons or excuses for what they did; they just did it.
What is the difference between cognitive dissonance theory and balance theory?
Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. People tend to seek consistency in their attitudes and perceptions, so this conflict causes unpleasant feelings of unease or discomfort. Cognitive dissonance theory, proposed by Festinger, focuses on the discomfort felt when holding conflicting beliefs or attitudes, leading individuals to seek consistency. Research from Acharya, Blackwell and Sen shows that individuals committing violence against members of another group develop hostile attitudes towards their victims as a way of minimizing cognitive dissonance. Importantly, the hostile attitudes may persist even after the violence itself declines (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen, 2015). The application provides a social psychological basis for the constructivist viewpoint that ethnic and racial divisions can be socially or individually constructed, possibly from acts of violence (Fearon and Laitin, 2000).
Relations among cognitions
- Alternatively, people may take steps to try to resolve the inconsistency.
- Cognitive dissonance is a little different than its evil twin, hypocrisy.
- In the “severe embarrassment” condition, they had to read aloud obscene words and a very explicit sexual passage.
Their framework speaks to this possibility by showing how violent actions by individuals can affect individual attitudes, either ethnic or racial animosity (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen, 2015). Though a person may not always resolve cognitive dissonance, the response to it may range from ignoring the source of it to changing one’s beliefs or behavior to eliminate the conflict. Cognitive dissonance suggests that addicts may modify their reasoning processes to support the satisfaction of impulses. For an addict, while craving, the world is experienced in a very different way compared to the way when the craving is satisfied. Craving distorts addicts’ ability to process information in a manner that promotes drug use.
Examples of Cognitive Dissonance
- A person who feels defensive or unhappy might consider the role cognitive dissonance might play in these feelings.
- Engagement entails an interaction and this allows the sponsor of the positive messaging to correct misinformation, and also to keep the facts of the message alive through directly acknowledging and countering cognitive dissonance.
- They were asked to rate how interesting they had found the discussion and how interesting they had found the people involved in it.
- Not only do these smokescreens serve to distract people from the outside looking in from really seeing what’s going on, they also deeply delude the people putting up the smokescreens themselves.
- Becoming aware of how conflicting beliefs impact the decision-making process is a great way to improve your ability to make faster and more accurate choices.
We may endlessly watch the news and spend time on social media in an effort to seek clarity that frequently only serves to add more noise to already conflicting pieces of information. We are striving to bring harmony to a situation that is far from harmonious. Well, the first thing to say is that we will have been experiencing cognitive dissonance in the pre-Covid world and will absolutely experience it after. It is a reality of everyday life which is why we wanted to specifically focus on it in this podcast series. Understanding it now will put you in very good stead for being able to work with it in healthier ways for the rest of your life. Whenever our values are positive and helpful, changing our behavior is usually the best way to close the gap.
