Your behavior contradicts not just the beliefs you have about the world, but also the beliefs that you have about yourself. But you can feel caught off guard when those values and beliefs are shaken by social pressures, the presence of new information or having to make a rushed last-minute decision. Sometimes, we can even get caught up in behaving or reacting a certain way that doesn’t necessarily align with how we really feel — and then we end up feeling lost. Another possibility, and one that I endorse, is that dissonance is a learned drive. I consider dissonance to be a secondary drive that is learned early in childhood and then becomes generalized to myriad issues that we deal with as we develop.

How to stop being self-conscious: Strategies to feel more confident

In a balanced replication, we showed that decision freedom was a crucial moderator of the dissonance effect. With decision freedom set high, people changed their attitudes as predicted by dissonance theory, but dissonance did not operate when people were forced to behave. Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and behavior in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance). You may also experience cognitive dissonance when you have situations where friends, family members or coworkers act a certain way that don’t align with your beliefs.

Decision Making

The fellow student indicated that he was against a fee increase but nonetheless accepted the invitation to write it. Choosing to write a counterattitudinal statement knowing that it might be used to increase fees at the university should cause the speech writer to experience dissonance and cognitive dissonance and addiction change his attitude toward the fees. Our interest was not the writer (who was actually a confederate of the experimenter) but rather the observer.

Conditions

You may be pressured into allowing those actions to continue or participate in those actions yourself — and that can leave you with some significant discomfort, so you end up questioning exactly how you should feel about the situation. Matz and his colleagues (2008) showed that our personality can help mediate the effects of cognitive dissonance. They found that people who were extraverted were less likely to feel the negative impact of cognitive dissonance and were also less likely to change their mind. Introverts, on the other hand, experienced increased dissonance discomfort and were more likely to change their attitude to match the majority of others in the experiment. One answer to that question is provided by the Action-Orientation Model (Harmon-Jones, 1999).

What is the difference between cognitive dissonance theory and balance theory?

If a person with legitimate authority tells me to advocate in favor of a position with which I disagree, I will conclude that it is not my fault that I did it. Not everyone practices what they preach—and that could trigger poor mental health. Cognitive dissonance is the psychological conflict a person experiences when they hold simultaneous conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. If left unchecked, it could lead to anxiety and mental tension, and you might even try to rationalize harmful actions.

• The second corollary is that people will avoid responsibility for a consequence if they can convince themselves that it was unforeseeable at the time of their decision to act.
• Festinger & Carlsmith made the prediction that the $20 incentive would lead to less dissonance than the small incentive because it helped people understand why they had acted in contradiction to their true beliefs.
• 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.
• This is as it should be, as arguably no theory has been more frequently studied, criticized, supported and modified than cognitive dissonance.
• As predicted by vicarious hypocrisy theory, this occurred when the hypocritical student was in the same group as the participant and when the participant strongly identified with her group.
• We also found that vicarious dissonance was mediated by vicarious arousal.