Cognitive Dissonance
- evilponderingartic
- Oct 20, 2025
- 2 min read
The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger came up with the idea of cognitive dissonance theory in 1957. It says that people need to be very consistent in what they believe, how they act, and how they feel. Cognitive dissonance is the stress you feel when you think two or more things that are at odds with each other or when you act in ways that are against what you believe. This conflict makes people feel bad on a mental level, so they want to get rid of it. Usually, they do this by changing how they think or act or by figuring out why things aren't going as planned.
Festinger used a famous story about someone who smoked even though they knew it was bad for them. People feel dissonance when their actions don't match up with their health beliefs. To lessen this dissonance, they can quit smoking, play down the health risks ("the research isn't conclusive"), or adopt a new belief ("I exercise, so it balances out").
In a groundbreaking study by Festinger and Carlsmith (1959), people did a boring task and then had to persuade someone else that they enjoyed doing the same task. Some people were paid $1, which is not much, to lie, while others were paid $20, which is more. It's interesting that people who were paid $1 said they liked the task more than people who were paid $20. The dissonance theory says that $1 wasn't a good enough reason to lie, so the people in the $1 group felt awful about lying for such a small reward. To stop fighting with themselves, people changed their minds about the task by telling themselves it wasn't so bad. The $20 group, on the other hand, had a clear outside reason for the lie, so they didn't feel as much conflict and didn't have to change their minds as much.
In contrast to the behaviorist belief that bigger rewards always lead to bigger changes in attitude, this result showed that a smaller reward led to bigger changes within the person by getting rid of dissonance. Cognitive dissonance theory has become an important idea in social psychology, helping to explain things like
Justification for effort: We value goals more when they require a lot of pain or work to achieve them.
In order to keep things constant, we think about the good things about the choice we made and the bad things about the choice we didn't make.
To feel better about having to make a decision that goes against our values, we change how we think about the things we did in the past.
In this idea, it is emphasized that people don't always make reasonable choices. Instead, we often change our beliefs to match our actions and keep our psychological clarity. Later improvements made it clearer that dissonance is stronger when an action goes against how someone sees themselves, and neuroscientific studies have shown brain activity that is connected to reducing dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance theory focuses on a basic reason why people act the way they do: the deep psychological need for internal consistency.
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