Cognitive Dissonance: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs

Cognitive dissonance is defined as the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change. Cognitive dissonance occurs most often when a person’s beliefs, morals or feeling are one way but they do not act accordingly. This dissonance may be displayed in numerous ways that may be done outwardly but also there is an internal process that takes place. A use of internal processing involves many different functions, included but not limited to, thinking, perception and problem solving. The driving force of dissonance is that we as humans attempt to align opposing thoughts or ideas and carry on with life in a way that still meets our morals, set standards or way of thinking. In doing so, we are then challenged to find what we believe as appropriate reasoning for making

After reading chapter five I noticed cognitive dissonance throughout a large portion of the book. Cognitive dissonance was described in class as being a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. A good example of this was found on page 182 where the author writes about how we all tell our self that African Americans “deserve” all of this even though we know, but do not want to acknowledge that white Americans are less likely to be convicted of the same crime done by blacks. Cognitive dissonance applies here because we know that this mass incarceration is not fair or morally right to do, however, our behavior does not try to stop it from happening. Instead of doing what our beliefs say is right we try to convince ourselves that it is the African Americans fault that they are

If one is trying to pull a thought or feeling in closer, or push it away, they may be attempting to manipulate their cognitive dissonance. If one knows that they are not happy with their actions, they can dilute that feeling of cognitive dissonance by decreasing the negative or enhancing the positive attitudes about it (Smith & Mackie, n.d.). One might be a smoker for instance, and know that smoking is bad for them, but continue smoking anyway. A perception of a clash of unsuitable elements is a way to describe the way one feels when their actions and beliefs are at odds (McLeod, 2014). So, if one is unhappy about the things they do because they do not match what they think they should do, they will be said to be experiencing cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is a physiological conflict resulting from out of place beliefs and attitudes held at the same time (Webster, n.d.). In layman’s terms this means having thoughts and attitudes that are not always the same as the general public’s thoughts. In this essay you will be given one example of cognitive dissonance from the media.

“We, the First Presidency…of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God…” This is the opening line in The Family: A Proclamation to the World, given by former President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Gordon B. Hinckley, in September of 1995. This is one of the main doctrines in the LDS faith. In light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling regarding the legalization of gay marriage in 2015, these two ideologies, what is socially acceptable versus the standards of the LDS faith, stand contrary to one another. This contradiction causes what is known as cognitive dissonance. Many people have noted that members of the LDS faith have felt this dissonance from society, but what about those people of the LDS faith who identify as LGBT or experience same sex attraction on some level? The more we identify the two things that oppose each other, the greater the cognitive dissonance.

Leon Festinger shared his brilliance with the world when he, opposing all previous psychological behaviorist work, created the Cognitive Dissonance Theory. In his own words, he quickly sums up this quite complex theory: "If you change a person’s behavior, his thoughts and feelings will change to minimize the dissonance" (Groenveld, 1999, p.1). In order to decode this dense statement, we must first be aware that Festinger held to be true that humans have a deep abiding need in their psyche to be consistent in our attitudes and behaviors; we want to feel in agreement and unified in thought and action. Inner harmony sounds good to everyone, and so it was Festinger’s view that when we feel a disharmony, or

There can be many explanations for why an employee would call in sick to work when he or she is not really sick. One reason could be explained through the attribution theory. The attribution theory explains the behavior like this can be explained by attributing it to either the employee’s internal disposition or to an external situation. The employee’s internal disposition could be that the employee always seems to have a bad attitude to his or her job duties and that his or her personality is pessimistic or lazy. The employee’s external situation could be that he or she has a manager who is constantly micro-managing them, which makes them unhappy at work, or the employee has a coworker who is their counterpart who is slacking at work. The employee may have to work harder at the job than the other employee to get their collective tasks completed. This may lead to the employee calling out sick because of his or her internal disposition – they are just lazy and do

According to Darity (2008), the theory of cognitive dissonance refers to an individual’s conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors, the resulting feeling of discomfort within the individual and the individual’s inevitable desire to reduce the discomfort by changing their attitude, belief or behavior in order to create cognitive consonance and harmony (Fox, 2006; Cognitive Dissonance, 2008; Hershey, Blanchard and Johnson, 2012). A cigarette smoker is a commonly used example of a cognitively dissonant individual. For example, Sarah, smoker may feel the need to quit do to the dangers of smoking but Sarah may also want to smoke because they like the feeling of smoking. Sarah’s attitudes are conflicting and to ease her discomfort she will adjust their attitude to fit the behavior by convincing her that there isn’t enough evidence of the dangers of smoking. Another example is when an individual decides that they don’t want to eat fatty foods in order to lose weight but the individual eats a donut after dinner and convinces themselves that the donut isn’t that fatty.

According to Cooper (2011), confirmation biases have set in with the US tending to ignore engagement with the conflicting information. Instead, the US has chosen to instead look upon other factors to update in terms of the information that conforms its pre-existing attitudes. Accordingly, the nation has resulted in motivated reasoning where it views new evidence as consistent with their pre-existing views. This is all the more indicative of the nation avoiding cognitive dissonance. The Obama administration has tried to avoid the regional battle in the Middle East where Iran is poised to become a central player. So the US surreptitiously supports Iran in fighting the common enemy in Isis while also working to contain Iran’s efforts to expand their influence in the area that seems contradictory. What the situation

No one enjoys being told what they are doing is wrong, and in this specific case that they are stealing. Peter explains to Joanna that his business has been rounding certain amounts to take “fractions of a penny” from compounded interests and then they placed the “dropped remainder” in an account they own. By using the Cognitive Dissonance Theory, I will analyze this artifact and incorporate how this theory is intertwined within the conversation between the characters Joanna and Peter. I will show how Peter uses selective exposure, post-decision dissonance, and two of the three parts of the state-of-the-art revisions to reduce his dissonance.

Furthermore, Mike continues show his overbearing and disrespectfulness towards Becky. Mike underestimates the ability of Becky based on her education background and working experience. Besides, Mike expresses disrespectfulness by ridiculing Becky’s appearance. Mike laughs at her bangs ironically. Mike’s irresponsible attitude and behavior make the ratings of the DayBreak show drop drastically.

In “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance,” (1957) social psychologist Leon Festinger proposes that all humans share an inherent drive to keep behaviors and principles in harmony and avoid disharmony between opposing attitudes. When a person feels a clash of their views they attempt to counteract or explain away their discomfort. In more severe cases of misalignments of an individual’s beliefs they may behave irrationally or maladaptively due to the instinctive urge to rebalance themselves. Cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant state caused by people’s awareness of inconsistency among important beliefs, attitudes, or actions.

In our daily life we often face with various cognitive biases. Today, there are about 166 types of cognitive biases. Even though we are rarely able to recognize them, cognitive biases have a great effect on our way of living. Personally, by analyzing my daily behaviour, as well as people around me, I can identify four cognitive biases, that occur more often than other. One of them is Law of the instrument,or in other words an over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. This cognitive bias I experience very often, since one of the weak sides of my character is stubbornness and risk aversion, so in my daily behaviour while making any decision, I tend to rely on a “familiar tool” rather than

The principal assumption of the theory regarding to Hogg and Vaughan (2011, p.214) “is that cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant state of psychological tension generated when a person has two or more cognitions (bits of information) that are inconsistent or do not fit together. So if people at the same time hold those two cognitions (thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, states of awareness of behaviour), which are psychologically inconsistent, then we experience dissonance. The theory also accounts for discrepancies between behaviour and attitudes. For instance, when people act in a manner that is inconsistent with their attitudes, then they experience tension. And how people can reduce this tension? Festinger (1957) suggested people have to do it by changing their attitudes so that they are in line with their behavior. The main way of reducing dissonance is attitude change. The theory propose that when we are dealing with two conflicting beliefs then we experience tension or an aversive state and a good example is military training. The military teaches and telling soldiers that when they kill the enemy its nothing wrong and killing them is a good thing but those same soldiers have a deeply natural and inborn belief that “thou shalt not kill”(Sturman, 2012) . Another example is about person who smokes cigarettes. Regarding to Stone and Cooper (2001) most people

. First, the case can be reversed by changing one or more attitudes, opinions, or beliefs. However, this method frequently presents problems to individuals, since it is quite difficult for people to change their views, for instance, drinking. The second way in which a dissonance can be reduced is through acquiring new information which outweighs the dissonant belief. For example, thinking that drinking causes liver cirrhosis will cause it if a person drinks. Nevertheless, new information such as "research has not proved definitely that drinking causes liver cirrhosis" may reduce the dissonance. In attribution theory, the leaders have an understanding of the reaction of their staff in given situations by identifying social features that lead to achievement. It provides a feeling of self-efficacy in making a difference in the social systems that individuals exist (Carver & Scheier, 2012). Also, it gives an opportunity to set strategic learning goals contributing to the social work practice through the achievement of these standards and affecting the lives of others.