Your therapist might help you explore the origins of this belief, challenge its validity, and work on accepting imperfection as a natural part of being human. You’re sorting through your mental clutter, deciding what to keep, what to discard, and how to organize the rest for a more harmonious mental space. By Kendra Cherry, MSEdKendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the “Everything Psychology Book.”

Cognitive Dissonance – The Battle Between What We Think, Feel, and Do

Cognitive dissonance is the uneasiness you feel when you have conflicting beliefs. For example, people may feel cognitive dissonance if they enjoy drinking alcohol, despite knowing too much may be bad for their health. At GenPsych, we’re committed to guiding children, adolescents, and adults through their mental health challenges, helping them find harmony between their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Celebrate Psychotherapy Day with us and take the first step toward a more balanced, fulfilling life. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance. Remember, cognitive dissonance is a normal part of the human experience.

Decision Making

As cognizant human beings, we assess the results of our actions, including the valence. We typically strive to engage in situations with consequences that are desirable and acceptable. Most of the time we are successful at this and thus most of the time we are not in a dissonant state. However, sometimes we notice that the consequences of our behavior are unwanted or negative. This happens in the real world and, with proper stagecraft, can be made to happen in the research laboratory.

Just as people can be slightly hungry or extremely hungry, Festinger’s theory provided for different magnitudes of dissonance. The greater the dissonance, the greater the urgency to make the cognitive changes necessary to reduce the unpleasant tension state. Cognitive dissonance isn’t just a vague psychological theory — in fact, contradictory beliefs appear in our lives more often than we might want to admit.

• This mental friction can impact our well-being, triggering stress, anxiety, and confusion.
• While we continue to look for nuance and novelty in the laboratory, we need to accelerate the translation of dissonance from a well-respected laboratory tradition into principles that are important in people’s lives.
• Cognitive dissonance plays a crucial role in psychotherapy and mental health.
• To resolve cognitive dissonance, a person can aim to ensure that their actions are consistent with their values or vice versa.
• Doing some soul searching to determine the areas of your life where contradiction exists can shed light on areas you may need to work on.

General Health

At the end of the day, some clients will be more capable and comfortable tolerating cognitive dissonance, and some clients may find it more uncomfortable. Where there is ‘forced compliance’ with an attempt to persuade or compel an individual to do something inconsistent with their attitudes, this can result in greater dissonance. https://yourhealthmagazine.net/article/addiction/sober-houses-rules-that-you-should-follow/ There is dissonance between the ‘don’t want to do it’ and ‘did it’.

Even if you try to ignore the internal discomfort of cognitive dissonance, it can still resurface as physical tension and stress. Cognitive dissonance, the mental tension from conflicting beliefs and actions, can impact your behavior and well-being. By understanding the psychology of cognitive dissonance, you can find ways to reduce it. Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. People tend to seek consistency in their attitudes and perceptions, so this conflict causes unpleasant feelings of unease or discomfort. We experience cognitive dissonance daily, relating to a whole spectrum of tiny to huge things.

How Attitude Change Takes Place

Some of that dissonance can be a good thing, but too much (or too much unresolved tension) means we’re constantly at conflict with ourselves. And that tension and conflict can make us feel stressed, irritated, and unhappy if we let them fester for too long. Here’s what you need to do to go about reducing and reconciling the cognitive dissonance in your life. Millions of readers rely on HelpGuide.org for free, evidence-based resources to understand and navigate mental health challenges. However, it’s possible to reduce cognitive dissonance by changing your thoughts, changing your behaviors, or finding other ways to cope. You’re in a steady relationship but notice your partner always cancels date plans.

However, many researchers stop short of the goal of turning the research into bona fide practices. My suggestion is for dissonance theorists to become more engaged in people’s lives by providing treatments that are available for people to use. Axsom & Cooper (1985) used laboratory procedures to demonstrate that people can lose weight if they are motivated by dissonance, but no such treatment ever became available for people to use. Most of us remained wedded to our laboratories while practitioners were either unaware of the studies or unconvinced of their usefulness. The field of social psychology has always had equal interest in theoretical advancement and practical applications of its theories. A premature application of theory into practice, however, can be risky for both uses, as such an application can lead to incorrect application of the theory because the theory was not sufficiently researched before it is applied.

We found that decision freedom made an enormous difference in results. 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. There are two ways in which this elegantly straightforward experiment upended traditional thinking. Within social psychology, the study Sober House Rules: What You Should Know Before Moving In made clear that dissonance theory was not the same as previous balance theories.

The theory behind this approach is that in order to resolve the dissonance, a person’s implicit beliefs about their body and thinness will change, reducing their desire to limit their food intake. The dissonance between two contradictory ideas, or between an idea and a behavior, creates discomfort. Festinger argued that cognitive dissonance is more intense when a person holds many dissonant views and those views are important to them. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort a person feels when their behavior does not align with their values or beliefs. The theory of cognitive dissonance has been widely researched in a number of situations to develop the basic idea in more detail, and various factors have been identified which may be important in attitude change. Notice that dissonance theory does not state that these modes of dissonance reduction will actually work, only that individuals who are in a state of cognitive dissonance will take steps to reduce the extent of their dissonance.

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It helps people get started on the “psychological work” needed to reduce inconsistencies. However, the research shows that cognitive dissonance can have positive effects. When we process the dissonance and understand why it’s happening, we can make changes that bring us into alignment. Resolving or reducing cognitive dissonance is not always an easy task — but it’s worth it. “It takes constant attention to work on ourselves, to continue to push to create better interactions with each other and more self-awareness,” Curry says.

When we say “yes” to a choice, whether it’s as small as what to order for lunch or as big as where to live, we have to say “no” to something else. This can be a difficult decision when the choices feel equally good or equally bad. If a person finds themselves in a situation where they have to do something that they don’t agree with, they’ll experience discomfort.