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Psychology: Cognitive Dissonance Theory

According to wikipedia.org, cognitive dissonance is:
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values.
 Let me give you an example of cognitive dissonance to explain it better to you. When people smoke they know its bad for them, yet they have a habit of smoking a cigarette. This is an example of cognitive dissonance. Their behaviour (smoking a cigarette) is inconsi
stent with their beliefs (smoking is bad for health) which leads to contradictions. We are all powerfully motivated to maintain cognitive consistency, and it is this force that can sometimes result in us behaving irrationally, and sometimes even maladaptively.


We can reduce this unpleasant feeling of discomfort/contradiction by using one of the following:
  1. Change our attitude/belief/behaviour (in our case, give up smoking) 
  2. Acquire new information (research has not yet proven that smoking is bad for health)
  3. Reduce the importance of cognitions (It is better to live a short life that a long without smoking)
These are just some of the methods by which we reduce our cognitions. Cognition dissonance is a very effective tool we can use this to turn enemies into friends. If we ask personal favour from our enemy they will be in a state of dissonance and possibly turn into your friend (or neutral, who knows).

Cognitive dissonance has its use in almost every aspect of living like relationships, studies, works. These are some examples of cognitive dissonance in every day life:
  • You know that cheating is wrong but you cheat on a exam. So, you convince yourself that the exam was really tough that is why you cheated, and you’ll never do it again.
  • You put a great effort to do something great (like go to college) and then you find that it pretty average out there (studies). You will be in cognitive dissonance and you will try to justify all this by convincing yourself that you love it. 
  • You are procrastinating (watching TV, Netflix) but you have to do study for a exam (or complete some work) but you convince yourself that just 1 more episode will refresh your mind and allow you to focus on the task more.
So in the end, I would like to say cognitive dissonance is every where and it can be used to explain a lot about someones behaviour or attitudes.
 
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