Cognitive Dissonance

To reduce this dissonance, we are motivated to try to think that the task turned out well. Because these participants did not make a decision, they did not have any dissonance to reduce. Individuals in the low-dissonance group chose between a desirable product and one rated 3 points lower on an 8-pointscale.

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 cognitive dissonance theory 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). 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).

A Biosocial Model of Affective Decision Making: Implications for Dissonance, Motivation, and Culture

They sought support from like-minded people and mentally disconnected from the negative situation to reduce the negative emotions. In simple terms, a dissonance is an inconsistency in cognitive elements, which can be knowledge, opinions, beliefs, or the behaviours of an individual. The existence of such inconsistency https://ecosoberhouse.com/ causes mental discomfort and motivates the individual to take some actions to reduce or eliminate it. We have millions of cognitions, many of which are in our awareness but most are not (Marx, 1976). Festinger (Festinger, 1962) theorised that a pair of cognitive elements may relate to each other in three ways.

• Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes.
• While cognitive dissonance theory has rarely been linked to psychological models of emotions, these models can be used to better describe the nature of the CDS.
• When faced with uncertainty about themselves or their environment, people defensively restore certainty, often in unrelated domains with the confidence-inducing help of social consensus and group identification (Hogg, 2007; Kruglanski, Pierro, Mannetti, & De Grada, 2006).
• Technological advances are allowing psychologists to study the biomechanics of cognitive dissonance.
• However, participants who were only paid $1 had more trouble justifying their actions to themselves—they didn’t want to admit to themselves that they told a lie over such a small amount of money.

Another way to make sense of what happened is to maintain the same belief about being taken away in a flying saucer but just change the date. This would justify the sacrifices that were made by increasing the value of their original belief. To strengthen the belief, new converts would be needed, which requires proselytizing. Indeed, this also occurred, with some group members proselytizing their beliefs after the disconfirmation.

Acquire new information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs.

Because the dissonance is aversive, the individuals try to reduce it by changing one or the other beliefs. For example, when making a difficult decision, individuals show attitude change that justifies the decision. In this case, individuals who face such a decision are conflicted because not all beliefs are consistent with the decision. The individuals are therefore motivated to reduce the conflict by justifying the decision they have made. The justification is typically achieved by changing their attitudes and beliefs so that the new attitudes and beliefs are consistent with and justify the decision that has been made. Notably, the resulting attitude change can be long lasting (Sharot, Fleming, Yu, Koster, & Dolan, 2012).

Some studies also investigated moderators, such as income and product involvement (Gbadamosi, 2009), on consumer decision making. Dissonance can also be extended to other purchase phases, but its purposes will be different (Koller & Salzberger, 2009; Koller & Salzberger, 2012). When cognitive dissonance theory was first presented, three experimental paradigms (namely decision justification, effort justification and induced compliance behaviour) were used to empirically test and provide evidence to support the theory.