Cognitive Dissonance Definition + Examples

Narcissistic people are masters of generating cognitive dissonance in other people’s minds. Imagine a young, accomplished woman, Yael, who starts dating a charming man named Tom. At first, Tom showers Yael with little presents, buys her flowers, takes her to trendy restaurants, and makes Yael feel like a princess in a fairy tale. On the nights they don’t see each other, he calls Yael, and they talk for hours. These behaviors set an expectation on Yael’s mind regarding the relationship and how invested Tom is.

They might decide that they value smoking more than they value health, deeming the behavior “worth it” in terms of risks versus rewards. The more dissonant thoughts you have, the greater the strength of the dissonance. Cognitions that are more personal, such as beliefs about the self, and highly valued tend to result in greater dissonance. There are a number of different situations that can create conflicts that lead to cognitive dissonance.

Articles Related to Cognitive Dissonance

Another example of dissonance occurs when people who are humiliated during an initiation to join a group like a fraternity or the armed forces, end up liking these groups more than if there was no hazing. As going through humiliation to join a group is dissonant with any negative aspects of the group, the attitude toward the group is changed to be more positive. This is referred to as ‘effort justification’ because the attitude change results from having to justify to the self the willingness to go through so much to join the group.

The bias where one is “better, kinder, smarter, more moral and nicer than average” is confirmation bias. Cognitive dissonance can shake the core of some of our beliefs and lead to confusion. Another way advertisers use cognitive dissonance is when they use celebrities and influencers for marketing their products. Maybe you dislike a particular brand of dish soap, but after you see your favorite celebrity use it, you might modify your original opinion and start liking the product. You may even buy the celebrity-endorsed brand next time you are low on dish soap.

Sticking to Your Beliefs

This situation created cognitive dissonance in most individuals—they believed that the task was boring, yet inexplicably found themselves arguing quite the opposite. Half of the participants were given a ready excuse for telling this lie—they were paid $20 to do so—while the other half, paid only $1, had no such excuse. Those with a clear justification for their odd behavior experienced no dissonance and, as one would expect, later reported that the task was rather boring. Rather than endure the aversive experience of believing one thing but saying another, these individuals changed their opinion and convinced themselves that the task was actually interesting.

• Dissonance as a result of inconsistencies of attitudes and behavior occurs when there are discrepancies between what we believe and what we do.
• The researchers use EEG to analyze students before they wrote the essay, as dissonance is at its highest during this time .
• There are a number of different situations that can create conflicts that lead to cognitive dissonance.
• Assume I gave you an incredibly boring task, and after you finished it, I asked you to tell others about how fun the activity was.

The study argued based on survey evidence that an individual trader’s future decision-making may be influenced by his previous investment decisions. As such, his future decisions, which may be contrary to his investing beliefs, are taken to reaffirm the amount of time and money he has invested in his previous ones. First, subjective measures of emotional similarities can be collected; second, these cognitive dissonance theory measures are analyzed mathematically to determine the number of independent emotions, e.g., eigenvalues. Experimental psychologists again should expect difficulties related to an expected large number of emotions. Another specific difficulty is to make sure that subjects concentrate on emotions of cognitive dissonance and are not distracted by semantics of phrases used to create the dissonances.

Cognitive Dissonance in Psychology: Theory, Examples & Definition

After contacting participants one week later, they reported behaviors, including social distancing and mask-wearing. Another method to reduce cognitive https://ecosoberhouse.com/ dissonance is through selective exposure theory. This theory has been discussed since the early days of Festinger’s discovery of cognitive dissonance.