Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the state of discomfort and unease that follows upon simultaneously holding two ideas or beliefs that are opposed to, or incongruent with each, other; it also involves the tendency of that condition to resolve itself by changing the ideas or beliefs, and/or by rationalizing them. The beliefs and ideas need not be entirely verbal. It is not uncommon for the term “cognitions” to be used, since the contradictory positions in question may be feelings, attitudes or even perceived facts.

The area of cognitive dissonance is one of the most extensively analyzed areas in social psychology, and has been the occasion of some of its most well-known and significant studies. Cognitive dissonance studies have established that individuals have an intrinsic drive to resolve dissonant cognitions. Often they do so by adopting positions that ignore or distort pertinent facts, as well as by modifying their own self-perceptions, and in some cases even memories. Given its apparently universal operation, cognitive dissonance has major implications for nearly every aspect of human self-understanding and activity, providing human beings with a strong description of an apparently intrinsic tendency to distort evidence and make poor if not destructive choices.

Cognitive dissonance involves inconsistency, although not necessarily logical inconsistency. In the case of mercy killings, for instance, one may both love someone and yet seek to terminate that person’s life. The experience may well be agonizing, but the agony is not one of internal uncertainty. Cognitive dissonance theorists assume that when ideas, beliefs, and feelings are perceived as being internally and intrinsically consistent, the resulting psychological state is a comparatively positive one known as consonance. If cognitions are viewed as being unrelated or simply not in opposition to one another, again, the psychological state remains a stable and not disharmonious one.

When perceived logical or emotional inconsistency occurs, however, dissonance occurs, and the drive to resolve the balance by mischaracterizing or distorting aspects of the situation until a harmonious picture emerges. That picture may be false, but it will be sincere: the individual will not resolve the contradictions simply by remaining aware of them and by framing an explanatory hypothesis or plan of action that is consciously held to be provisional. He or she will dismiss, deny, or devalue cognitions that contradict the emerging dominant cognition, and often continue to do so.

By way of example, the sincere Christian drafted into service during war may undergo dissonance by unhappily balancing the scriptural injunction not to kill with the governmental injunction to kill on command. A spouse may experience cognitive dissonance in the course of loving their partner while at the same time being strongly attracted to a third party. A political ideologue may experience cognitive dissonance as he or she observes social phenomena that blatantly contradict their interpretative schema. In all these cases, predictable responses and consequences apply.

When Prophecy Fails

One classic example is one of the most famous cases in cognitive dissonance studies, as described in the book When Prophecy Fails by psychologist Dr. Leon Festinger and colleagues. The book discusses the patterns and persistence of belief shown by a ‘UFO’ doomsday cult. The central prophecy of the cult, allegedly delivered to the cult leader by aliens, was a prediction of the obliteration of the earth on a given date. The date came and the earth remained untouched. The disconfirmation of the prophecy created a dissonance the belief in the leader’s teachings and facts of the case. However, though some members abandoned the group, most members lessened the dissonance by instead generating a new belief that the Earth was spared because of the active propagation of the views of the group by its members. Far from disintegrating, the failure of the prophecy proved to precede a growth in membership, as members re-doubled their efforts to recruit new converts.

This pattern has been recorded and repeated in instances ranging from fundamentalist Christian prophecies such as the “Great Disappointment” of 1844 on the one hand, to economic and social forecasters on the other, and even in scientific circles, as in the case of cold fusion, where the failure to replicate results led, in some cases, not to the rejection of the concept but to claims of incorrect replication practices and in other instances of government and corporate conspiracy.

Cognitive Dissonance, Self-Concept, Emotional Health

Another common consequence is a destabilization, and often the rigid re-stabilization, the individual’s self-concept: if a person’s self-characterization as “good” is put into question by cognitions that contradict the person’s self-image, that self-image can, at one extreme, collapse, leading to radical personality change, or at the other extreme, the development of rigid and insensitive disconfirming cognitions.

Daryl Bem, a critic of cognitive dissonance theory, proposed a related alternative theory called self-perception theory as an alternative explanation of this phenomenon. Bem felt that people do not consider, let alone brood upon, whether the content of their thinking was in conflict. His view was that people inferred their attitudes from observations of their actual behaviors. In other words, people tend to use their own behaviors as barometers of their feelings. Thus, when asked “Do you love your spouse?”, a married person might often say yes, since that is a reasonable interpretation of the behavior of continuing to stay married; but since a divorced spouse might not be able to infer love from the act of separation, the answer would more likely be no. At issue, in Bem’s view, were not ideas in conflict but rather untenable characterizations of behavior.

Interestingly, Bem suggested that people who were paid a large amount of money to perform a given task would be less likely to characterize it as interesting than people who were paid a low or no amount of money to accomplish the task. The individuals being well paid would infer the money to be the dominant reason to engage in the task, whereas those who performed for little monetary compensation would infer that there must be an intrinsic value in the task itself – why else would they be engaging in same? Bem’s theory also suggested that people paying significant amounts of value for an item or service would be more likely to place a higher value upon it, as compared to those who paid little for the same object or service.

And studies have apparently confirmed both views, although later psychologists have asserted that striving for cognitive consistency is a more often a way to maintain a public self-image than a private self-concept.

But while in many cases Bem’s theory and Festinger’s provide identical predictions, dissonance theory remains the theory of choice because the cognitive dissonance predicts the discomforting tension or emotion, and experiments have confirmed the presence of perceived unpleasantness in dissonance situations. Indeed, awareness of contradiction can easily turn into mild or strongly negative emotional states such as anger, guilt, anxiety, unease, and stress. Dissonance simply feels bad, and reducing dissonance feels good, which is why some behavioral scientists have categorized the reduction of dissonance as a reinforcer, driving cognitive modifications by use of a reward model, and others in the behavioral camp such as Cooper and Fazio have claimed that dissonance is driven by aversive consequences: in this interpretation, the subjective pain of doing wrong by lying, and not any inconsistency between cognitions, is what drives the effort to either regard the lie as truth or to stop the practice.

A new interpretation by researcher Elliot Aronson in 1969 attempted to integrate and reformulated the core theory by connecting it to the self-concept. In Aronson’s view, cognitive dissonance arises not because of a dissonance between conflicting cognitions or because their interpretation of their behavior cannot be reasonably sustained. Rather, it takes place when people see their behaviors as being in conflict with their positive view of themselves. Referring to the original Festinger and Carlsmith study, Aronson gave the view that the dissonance was between the cognition, “I am an honest person” and the cognition, “I lied to someone about finding the task interesting.” Thus, an actor might regard himself as an honest person and yet on stage say any number of objectively false things, but experience no dissonance. If contradictions do not touch the self, and endanger a positive view of that self, they are not perceived as contradictions.

Confirmation Bias and Rationalization

Cognitive dissonance can also easily lead to confirmation bias – a tendency to search for data, interpret or reinterpret information, or remember things in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions or initial hypotheses, selectively assessing new or existing evidence. The racism of “Aryan Science” under National Socialism is the most egregious public example, but personal life is rife with examples as well. It is widely acknowledged that cigarettes cause lung cancer, yet though the tension produced by the contradictory ideas of wanting to be healthy and indulging in an unhealthy practices can be reduced by no longer smoking, smokers commonly rationalize their behavior by focusing on the notions that not all smokers become ill, or that only extremely heavy smokers are susceptible , or that the environment is so full of carcinogenic substances that are in danger whether they smoke or not, or even that if it is their destiny or karma or God’s will that they contract cancer then they will, regardless of whether they smoke or not.

Such reasoning is not limited to existing behavior: choice-supportive bias makes past choices appear wiser than they were, and rationalization is yet another maladaptation: the chance that a decision or action might have been a poor one can foster a drive to support one’s choice by to developing other supportive reasons and justifications, however poor or flimsy. A voter may elect a political figure who leads a country into disastrous circumstances, but rather than rethinking their original decision, the voter may grope for reasons to excuse the leader in question, purely to support his decision, ascribing political failure to the actions of the opposition party or unalterable circumstance, or even to scapegoats or conspirators.

Research

Most research on cognitive dissonance involves doing those who perform actions without sufficient justification or rational incentive. In the notable 1959 experiment by Festinger and Carlsmith, students were asked to spend an hour giving pegs a quarter turn, over and over again. The tasks were designed to be so boring as to generate vividly negative feelings. They succeeded. Afterwards the students were asked to persuade another subject, in fact an experimenter concealing his identity, that the tasks were fascinating and enjoyable. Some participants were paid twenty dollars make this claim, another group was paid one dollar, and a control group was not asked to make any claims.

Asked later for their opinion of the tasks in question, the one dollar group described the tasks more positively than did those in the twenty dollar group or the control group. Researchers theorized that those receiving twenty dollars for presenting the tasks in a positive light had an obvious reason for doing so, experienced no cognitive dissonance as a result, and therefore had no reason to change their evaluation. The one dollar group had no strong reason for claiming to find the tasks interesting, and therefore internally gave the tasks a higher evaluation purely because there was no other reasonable way to justify making the claim publicly to another person.

In subsequent research, essay writing in which subjects are paid variable amounts of money for writing opinions contrary to their own has become popular. People paid large amounts find the practice justified by the sizable payment and experience little dissonance in stating contradictory opinions. People paid a small amount have less justification for stating views opposite to their own, and tend to both experience more dissonance and a greater inclination to alter their views as a result.

Effort justification is the tendency to attribute a greater (than objective) value to an outcome which demands a great effort in order to resolve a dissonance.

Post-Decision Dissonance

An experiment by researcher Jack Brehm has had much currency in marketing circles: Brehm had two hundred and twenty-five female students rate a number of household appliances and choose one of two appliances to take home as a gift. In the second round of ratings, the participants increased their ratings of the item they chose, and lowered their ratings of the rejected item. Much replicated, the study demonstrated that people will give higher evaluations to any decision once made, and place a lower value on the option discarded. When decisions are not easy to make, it is often because there are aspects of the alternative choice that appeal and attract, and dwelling on such aspects is inconsistent with an alternative choice. Accordingly, those aspects are downplayed and denigrated.

Why Cognitive Dissonance Matters

Why is cognitive dissonance significant? Because it impacts on us all – even studies done with four-year-old children and capuchin monkeys have shown reaction patterns of behavior consonant with cognitive dissonance theory – and because it significantly affects our ability to honestly and objectively assess situations, actions and behaviors. Whenever there is a decision to be made or a position to be taken, there are alternative paths and different evidence that supports the contrary path. We each have a profoundly strong tendency to select one or the other rather than to seek other newer alternatives or to simply live with the apparent contradiction. Once we lean toward one choice, we tend to quickly discount the evidence in favor of the alternative, even if that evidence remains strong and later is demonstrated to be incontrovertibly correct. Furthermore, once committed, we tend to justify and invest ourselves emotionally with our choice even if later developments prove the discarded situation a preferable one. In the worst cases, dissonance is resolved at the cost of becoming a true believer who remains blindly wed to an idea or position in the teeth of whatever evidence or personal cost may result.

Thus while cognitive dissonance may beneficially drive us to resolve contradictions, it often does so at the cost of psychic tension and stress, and it often facilitates poor decision-making which we justify too easily and discard too reluctantly. Is there a solution? Only in a vigilant awareness of the inclination and the decision to explore apparent contradictions more thoroughly, to opt for definitive explanations more slowly, and to be prepared to re-check and abandon beliefs more consistently. Better decisions, better choices, and ever closer approximations to the truth, are within everyone’s grasp. But achieving them entails maintaining an awareness of the mind’s inclination to take short cuts, and a determination to compensate for them.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Festinger, L. (1956). When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of A Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World, by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. Harper-Torchbooks, Jan. 1956. ISBN 0061311324

Festinger, L. and Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). “Cognitive consequences of forced compliance”. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203-211. Full text

Brehm, J. (1956). Post-decision changes in desirability of alternatives. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52, 384-389.

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Tavris, Carol; Eliot Aronson (2007). Mistakes were made (but not by me): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.

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Cooper, J. (2007). Cognitive dissonance: 50 years of a classic theory. London: Sage publications.