Cognitive Dissonance: What It Is And Some Examples
The term cognitive dissonance refers to the psychological discomfort that people perceive when something we feel, think or do contradicts our beliefs. It was first coined by the social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957, in his work “Theory of cognitive dissonance.”
That discomfort can arise, for example, when receiving information that questions our deepest values. It is what could happen to a person who sees how his boss repeatedly abuses an employee and does nothing to fix it.
Cognitive dissonance can also manifest itself when we act and think incongruously. An example would be knowing that drinking alcohol is harmful to health, but we still continue to drink it.
In such situations, people can feel annoyed by not being consistent. To reduce this cognitive dissonance that we enter, what we most frequently do is justify what happens — it is common for bosses to abuse their power — minimize — a drink is not going to kill me — rationalize or even deny the consequences.
What is the relationship between cognitive dissonance and lying?
According to Leon Festinger, people feel a great need to be consistent with ourselves. Therefore, when we do not think or act consistently, a resource that we use to avoid suffering is self-deception.
Lying to ourselves allows us to relegate to the unconscious what is most difficult for us to manage. In this way, the fiction that we create in our mind stops bothering and is much easier to cope with. It is the mechanism used by people who perform immoral acts, such as stealing, bribing or committing a crime.
Or imagine someone who, for example, abuses your child. In such a case, the inconsistency between what he does — I insult my son — and what he possibly feels — I deeply love my son — is so great that the most adaptive form is self-deception. Not doing so would be too painful and unbearable.
Leon Festinger himself carried out an investigation together with James Merill Carlsmith, another social psychologist, to study the phenomenon of self-deception. Both concluded that people who deceive themselves take for valid lies as if they were true.
Everyday Examples of Cognitive Dissonance
One of the most common situations in which people avoid suffering from cognitive dissonance is the fact of continuing to smoke, even though they know that it is harmful. How is that possible? Well, because they rationalize their inconsistencies.
Thus, it is easy for them to tell themselves that smoking is so enjoyable that it is worth it; that the real possibilities of damaging your health are not so great; that they have to die of something or that if they stop smoking they will gain weight and that is also detrimental to health.
If people feel that these thoughts are sufficiently consistent with their behavior, there will be no cognitive dissonance and they will continue to smoke for many years. If, on the other hand, the thoughts are not consistent, the dissonance will appear and the discomfort between what they do and what they think will be very present.
Other everyday examples in which cognitive dissonances appear would be when we declare ourselves lovers of the environment, but we have a high-consumption car or we buy fast fashion. Also when we feel like animal lovers, but still omnivores. Or when we consider ourselves to be people of integrity, but cheat on an exam.
Do not resort to self-deception
Most of us experience cognitive dissonances. It is something very common. Self-deception would be the least recommended way to handle them. Instead, the most adaptive way to resolve them is behavior or belief modification.
Thus, if honesty is a fundamental value for us and we have lied, one way to solve cognitive dissonance is by changing behavior: stop lying. In this way, we will once again feel a coherence between our way of thinking and acting.
Another way to solve the conflict is by modifying our value system. Beliefs are not immovable ideas that can never change again; they evolve throughout our life experience.
Therefore, when cognitive dissonance occurs, it can be a good time to reevaluate values and adjust them to current reality.
The important thing is to be aware that cognitive dissonances are frequent and that, either because we modify behavior or because we change beliefs, it is in our hands to reduce them, to a great extent.
