Cognitive dissonance

The English used in this article or section may not be easy for everybody to understand. You can help Wikipedia by reading Wikipedia:How to write Simple English pages, then simplifying the article. (July 2024)

Cognitive dissonance is a concept in social psychology. People who hold conflicting (very different) ideas, beliefs or values at the same time often feel cognitive dissonance. In this state, people may feel surprise, dread, guilt, anger, or embarrassment. Reacting to this bad feeling, people have a motivational drive (want) to reduce dissonance.

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance was developed to predict and explain how people react to this situation.^[1]

Cognitive dissonance theory says that people have a bias to search consonance between their expectations and reality. According to Festinger, people do something he called "dissonance reduction". This can happen in one of three ways:

1. lowering the importance of one of the discordant factors,
2. adding consonant elements, or
3. changing one of the dissonant factors.^[2] This bias sheds light on otherwise puzzling, irrational, and even destructive behavior.

People in dissonance may change their feelings, thoughts or memories so they are less in conflict. However, often they do not, and instead set out to manipulate the social scene around them so that their embarrassment is less. For example, they may try to explain away the dissonance with a wider theory or they may intensify their efforts at persuasion and publicity so that others join them in their beliefs.

1. ↑ Festinger, Leon (1985) [1957]. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-0131-8., paperback ISBN 0-8047-0911-4
2. ↑ Carlson, Neil R.; Heth, C. Donald (2010). Psychology: the science of behaviour (4 ed.). Toronto: Pearson Canada.