Editing Cognitive dissonance theory (section)

==='''Effort'''===
The Effort represents the situation when a person spends years of effort achieving something but does not receive something back equally, in order to prevent dissonance from occurring, the person would try to convince themselves that they didn't really spend years of effort, or that it was really quite enjoyable, or that it wasn't really that much of an effort<ref name="Aronson&Mills">Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177.
</ref>. We could, of course, spend years of effort into achieving something which turns out to be a load of rubbish and then, in order to avoid the dissonance that produces, try to convince ourselves that we didn't really spend years of effort, or that the effort was really quite enjoyable, or that it wasn't really a lot of effort. An experiment on dissonance was carried out by Aronson and Mills in 1959<ref name="Aronson&Mills">Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177.
</ref>. In the experiment, a group of female students volunteered to take part in a discussion on the psychology of sex and read aloud to a male experimenter a list of sex-related words in different levels of embarrassment conditions. After the experiment, the result showed that participants in the “severe embarrassment” condition gave the most positive rating. The result showed that dissonance happened when a bad outcome with a lot of effort, so redefining the experience is interesting and helps reduce the dissonance.