What Does Cognitive Dissonance Affect Your Attitude?

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

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 Overview the topic and define relevant terms in your own words.   When someone makes a decision or takes an action that goes against their personal beliefs, they experience a sense of discomfort; this discomfort felt is due to cognitive dissonance. People may values and beliefs that they live by. A person who believes that smoking cigarettes are bad is unlikely to smoke a cigarette; if they do smoke a cigarette than they will experience some discomfort. The action of smoking is conflicting with their idea that smoking is bad; this creates cognitive dissonance.

In the podcast titled Cognitive Dissonance (2011), Dr. Carol Tavris, the author of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, discusses the relationship between psychology and neuroscience, in addition to discussing cognitive dissonance. As Dr. Tavris explains, cognitive dissonance theory is the mental discomfort we feel whenever two ideas are conflicted with one another, causing discomfort that we attempt to reduce cognitively (Campbell & Tavris, 2011). Moreover, dissonance can increase dependent upon, how important the decision is, how strongly the dissonant thoughts conflict, and our ability to rationalize and justify the conflict (Cognitive dissonance, 2016). As a future psychologist,

The show, ChoreoProject, was presented by sjDanceco and presented various types of dance performances from classical to contemporary works. The piece that I enjoyed from this show was Cognitive Dissonance. In this dance piece, Erwin Columbus both choreographed and was the dancer. Erwin Columbus used music from Kerry Muzzey for his piece. In Cognitive Dissonance, he told a story of himself having negative, inconsistent thoughts and his journey of fighting off those thoughts from his mind. With fast and dramatic movements along with intense music, Columbus was able to grasp my attention and teach me how it feels to have negative, inconsistent thoughts that can negatively control one's body.

First, let me explain what cognitive dissonance means. This happens when a person has inconsistent thoughts, actions, and or attitudes. It usually happens when 2 or more ideas in your head contradict each other, causing an uncomfortable reaction within ones self. People then either ignore things that oppose this mental stress or engage it by changing their actions to confirm with their thoughts, or just the exact opposite. This is done in order to gain reassurance. Cognitive dissonance happens quite often within the minds of people.

The theory of cognitive dissonance illustrates the mental state or kind of tension that experienced by an individual who holds at least two beliefs and ideas which is contradiction to each other at the same time. Also, this can be caused when an individual confronted by the new encountered information that conflicts with his prior beliefs and ideas. When these two cognitions are inconsistent, then it would bring uncomfortable

The next concept is dialectical tensions. This is just basically when people have a want or desire for two things that aren’t the same at one time. For example, someone in a relationship could want both predictability and novelty. Predictability could be something like your spouse ordering a

Cognitive dissonance impacts attitudes and behavior negatively in the workplace in a variety of ways depending on the position you are employed. Being in management as an administrator you are faced with many challenges and situations that cause cognitive dissonance. For example, if my director asks me to perform a task and the way in which he wants me to perform the task, goes against my beliefs, I am forced to decide whether to follow his directives or risk termination for insubordination. The stress factor is making the correct decision. I can remember an instructor sending a student to me for conduct issues and wanted the student terminated from her program. The documentation that she provided to me was not sufficient to suspend the student,

While they say college is supposed to be the time where you find yourself, and become who you really are, I find that I have still not reached that point. That’s not to say that I haven’t done all of the other important things that you’re supposed to do while you’re in college; I’ve picked a major, a minor, figured out all the best routes to class are, found a flexible job to help pay my rent, and found friends that I can for the most part rely on. The department I have lacked in the most would be finding love. But like all things, there is trial and error. For me it has been mostly error, but in hindsight I can see why.

side from being testable through experiments such as the mentioned above, cognitive dissonance theory can predict future events, which is a criteria of a good theory according to Griffin (p. 25), by helping to explain human behavior. “Social psychologists have been trying for many years to predict the conditions under which attitudes and opinions are changed...first major breakthrough in this area came [from] Leon Festinger” (Chapanis, 1964). Objective theorist aim for reality, and when they measure and report their experiments, they prefer to use numerical terms rather than linguistic terms (Griffin, 215, p.28). The most eye grabbing criteria of any theory is simplicity. “No matter how complex the social situation, Festinger assumes that it is possible to represent the meaning which the situation has for an individual by a series of elementary cognitions—statements that an individual might make describing his knowledge, opinions or beliefs“ (Chapanis, 1964).

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

Cognitive consistency theories suggest that individuals try to see their natural surroundings in ways that are basic and uncomplicated. Early consistency philosophers formulated theories of conflict, retention, and bigotry for indecisiveness by those with a controlling disposition. At the core of subjective consistency theories, is the suspicion that individuals are propelled to seek coherent attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, values, behaviors, and feelings. On the off chance that these are conflicting, they will create a" tension state" in the individual, and rouse the person to decrease this strain. People lessen this pressure, as indicated by consistency theories, by making their relevant cognizance consistent.

Cognitive Dissonance has provided me with theoretical orientation which has assisted me in understanding the “psychological discomfort” experienced when some beliefs were incongruent with my behavior. But first we need to revisit time spent with my family as a I grew up, to understand how the cognitive dissonance experience came to be. I consider myself to be fortunate for having such a close relationship with both my sisters and my parents. We laugh together, we discuss politics, philosophy and religion. However, the subject of the conversation sometimes shifted gears and the center of the stage was taken over by both my parents speaking about “mujeres liberales” women who were too liberal. One theme that often seemed to accompany the subject of the dialogue were women who spent time at the night clubs. I unconsciously internalized their stories and when I went off to college I had many opportunities to do just that and spend time dancing at the clubs.

“Don’t be a person who does not represent the real you” this quote, I do not desire to be a police woman because I desire to be a musician or an entertainer, but I kept joining with a home trainer to train me to be a policewoman, control my weight and discover tricks to pass the test, than went to a musical school.