As people learn by doing, they are socially influenced by self-consistency and commitment, according to another of Cialdini’s compliance principles. The Zajonc mere exposure theory describes people favoring people and objects encountered frequently. Similarly, people are attracted to people in propinquity (close proximity) (Festinger, Schachter, and Back), perhaps because of exposure.

Pricing and value perception

We may engage in behaviors or adopt attitudes to help relieve the discomfort caused by the conflict. Cognitive dissonance theory, proposed by Festinger, focuses on the discomfort felt when holding conflicting beliefs or attitudes, leading individuals to seek consistency. The expectation of shared beliefs, values, and attitudes from family members can additionally influence romantic relationships. If these don’t align, we might consider justifying our relationship or breaking up.

• It is possible to resolve cognitive dissonance by either changing one’s behavior or changing one’s beliefs so they are consistent with each other.
• But that consistency doesn’t always happen, and distress can arise as a result.
• Receiving only one dollar did not seem to justify lying to the confederate and compelled subjects in the one-dollar group to internalize the “interesting task” mental attitude.
• Human behavior drives people to make decisions that lead to comfort in those decisions.

Understanding all inconsistency compensation as a palliative response to violated expectations

• Singer’s mention a former member who believed himself to be a “drug addict” because he had taken a single toke on a marijuana cigarette.
• We may engage in behaviors or adopt attitudes to help relieve the discomfort caused by the conflict.
• More importantly, it also provided the first testable framework in which to conceptualize how cognition could be motivated and how the motivated cognition could yield some intriguing forms of social behavior.

The elaboration likelihood model has been extensively imported into extant work on psychotherapy and counseling (e.g., Heesaker, Conner, & Prichard, 1995). It is an important model for therapy considerations in part because of the value it accords central processing. This type of processing presumably leads to more persistent change and to behavior that is more consistent with the changed attitude. In addition, research that did not involve an elaboration likelihood explanation has been reinterpreted as revealing the role of this process.

Body image and health intervention

The formula conveys that the greater the amount or importance of dissonant cognitions and the smaller the number or importance of consonant elements the greater the magnitude of dissonance one experiences. The tension of a dissonance can fluctuate over time and does not follow a uniform pattern cognitive dissonance and addiction (Koller & Salzberger, 2012). However, the theory proposed that higher levels of dissonance can forcefully motivate a person to promptly address the psychological discomforts, while small levels of dissonance may not be as effective in encouraging the person to take an immediate action.

• People do not necessarily experience discomfort in response to every apparent contradiction in their thoughts and beliefs.
• A good example is the prospect of embarrassing ourselves in front of others, such as by forgetting our words during a speech.
• In addition to the feelings of hurt and abandonment, I began to reflect on the essence of my convictions.
• It also helps us understand better why people sometimes resist persuasion attempts (see discussion below), since some factor such as forewarning of persuasion has activated their thoughtful analysis of the positions being advocated.
• It is a theory with very broad applications, showing that we aim for consistency between attitudes and behaviors and may not use very rational methods to achieve it.

How does cognitive dissonance encourage behavioral change?

Many experiments have since been conducted to illustrate cognitive dissonance in more ordinary contexts. There are also individual differences in whether or not people act as this theory predicts. Many people seem able to cope with considerable dissonance and not experience the tensions the theory predicts. When one of the dissonant elements is a behavior, the individual can change or eliminate the behavior. Because these participants did not make a decision, they did not have any dissonance to reduce.

Dissonance due to Inconsistency between Commitment and Information

The elaboration likelihood model is one of the most influential approaches in the history of work on attitude change and persuasion. This model was proposed by Petty and Cacioppo (1981, 1986), https://ecosoberhouse.com/ and it has greatly reinvigorated work on attitude change since the early 1980s. As we will see, this model also has been applied to applications of clinical and counseling practice.

Is cognitive dissonance an incompatibility between attitudes and behaviors?

• Dissonance theory also fed theories about system justification (see also Kay et al., 2002; Jost et al., 2003).
• A person who feels defensive or unhappy might consider the role cognitive dissonance might play in these feelings.
• In addition, group-level schemas and categories at the societal level take the form of Moscovici’s social representations; shared social understandings make the unfamiliar into the familiar by reference to old socially shared concepts.
• We feel obligated to live up to prior commitments in order to preserve that feeling of consistency in our own behavior.

With undue influence, the cult-identity controls the real personality and control is exerted from the outside, so the locus of control is with the cult, through the cult-identity. Identical modes of physiological arousal [38,57] and ACC activation [62,63,66,68] follow from a wide array of divergent inconsistencies that follow from equally unrelated expectations, whether they are ‘low-level’ or ‘high-level,’ ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ [39,58,59]. In the coming years, we believe that it is inevitable that psychologists of differing disciplines will question the utility of offering wholly ‘distinct’ motivational accounts for each instantiation of this general inconsistency compensation phenomenon. From there, a unitary, discipline-straddling account of inconsistency compensation can uncover the true boundaries of this phenomenon, as well as compensation behaviors that have yet to find a disciplinary label.

Forced Compliance

People are comfortable when their beliefs, values, and actions align and support each other. Sometimes, the availability or presentation of new information can upset this comfort. This theory has profound implications for understanding decision-making processes and how we shape our values and behaviors. In this article, we delve deep into the theory of cognitive dissonance, revealing how it relates to decision-making, dealing with discomfort, and empowering businesses to craft compelling strategies. Alternatively, they may reduce cognitive dissonance by being mindful of their values and pursuing opportunities to live those values. Because it is something a person feels internally, it is not possible to physically observe dissonance.

The “mild initiation” group of subjects were to read aloud twelve sexual words not considered obscene. After reading the list of words, participants were given headphones to listen in on an animal-sexuality discussion that they were told was occurring in the next room. In reality, they were listening to a recorded discussion about animal sexual behavior, which the researchers designed to be dull and banal. Changing the conflicting cognition is one of the most effective ways of dealing with dissonance but it is also one of the most difficult—particularly in the case of deeply held values and beliefs, such as religious or political leanings.