You experience cognitive dissonance anytime your thoughts or actions don’t match up with your beliefs or values. Forced compliance is what happens when external circumstances pressure one into performing actions that do not reflect one’s personal beliefs. Decision-making can cause cognitive dissonance when one imagines another action may have yielded better results. People tend to be emotionally invested in things that take a lot of effort, so if the action does not have the intended effects, it may cause cognitive dissonance.

The predictive https://ecosoberhouse.com/ account proposes that the motivation for cognitive dissonance reduction is related to an organism’s active drive for reducing prediction error. Moreover, it proposes that human brains have evolved to selectively ignore contradictory information to prevent the overfitting of their predictive cognitive models to local and thus non-generalizing conditions. The predictive dissonance account is highly compatible with the action-motivation model since, in practice, prediction error can arise from unsuccessful behavior. In fact, recent research has suggested that while a discrepancy between cognitions drives individuals to crave attitude-consistent information, the experience of negative emotions drives individuals to avoid counter attitudinal information. In other words, it is the psychological discomfort that activates selective exposure as a dissonance-reduction strategy. Rather than trying to reduce dissonance after it occurs, we may attempt to avoid dissonance through selective exposure.

Cognitive Dissonance: Theory, Examples & How to Reduce It

Consider someone who buys an expensive car but discovers that it is not comfortable on long drives. cognitive dissonance theory exists between their beliefs that they have bought a good car and that a good car should be comfortable. Dissonance could be eliminated by deciding that it does not matter since the car is mainly used for short trips or focusing on the cars strengths such as safety, appearance, handling .

• You may even notice a lack of confidence when it comes to the situation surrounding the inner 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.
• Participants in the high-dissonance condition chose between a highly desirable product and one rated just 1 point lower on the 8-point scale.
• The theory also fails to address the issue of individual differences in the arousal of, and tolerance for, cognitive dissonance.
• Cognitive dissonance produces a state of negative affect, which motivates the person to reconsider the causative behavior in order to resolve the psychological inconsistency that caused the mental stress.

When the characteristics of the choice alternatives are changed to lessen dissonance, the selected option becomes more appealing, and the rejected alternative becomes less desired. This phenomenon is known as alternative spreading, and the experimental paradigm is known as the free-choice paradigm. When this inconsistency is recognized, dissonance results, which inspires a person to address the issue. This notion holds that one cannot ignore this kind of mental discomfort. The degree of dissonance varies depending on how important the belief, attitude, or value is to you and how inconsistently your actions match this conviction.

3.1 Situational determinants of how people defend BJW

The point of this condition was to see how significant the counterchoice may affect a person’s ability to cope. The high-choice condition asked students to write in favor of tuition increase as if it were their completely voluntary choice. The researchers use EEG to analyze students before they wrote the essay, as dissonance is at its highest during this time . High-choice condition participants showed a higher level of the left frontal cortex than the low-choice participants.

After the 2020 election, which Joe Biden won, supporters of former President Donald Trump questioned the results, citing voter fraud. This continued even after such claims were dismissed by numerous state and federal judges, election officials, governors, and government agencies as false. This was described as an example of Trump supporters suffering cognitive dissonance. Both groups were given headphones to unknowingly listen to a recorded discussion about animal sexual behaviour, which the researchers designed to be dull and banal.

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