ECT wiki:Cognitive Dissonance

Overview

“Cognitive dissonance theory proposes that people want consistency between what they believe and what they do, and if these two are not consistent with each, people feel an unsettled feeling of tension (Festinger, 1957).” A simple metaphor to understand the concept is harmony in music. Whenever the notes being played do not resolve, in other words, when they do not follow the rules of harmony, the annoying sound that comes out of the instrument is dissonance. And often the emotions associated with dissonance are unpleasant. When taking that situation of dissonance into cognitive science, the “inharmonious clash” between one’s beliefs and behavior can cause troubling feelings in our brains (Martinez, 2010).

As the majority of people are not born seeking and indulging in their own negative feelings, most people want to resolve that cognitive dissonance whenever that happens. We either change our behaviors, which is more morally imperative, as we are supposed to do what we are supposed to do, or, more interestingly, we change our beliefs to match, or to put it more straightforward, to justify our behaviors (Martinez, 2010). After all, we are not rational beings but rationalizing beings (Martinez, 2010). We make a lot of effort to make things seem right, to give our brain a reason to be at peace.

Evidence

In Festinger’s study, he used an example to illustrate the theory. A habitual smoker who knows smoking is bad for health experiences cognitive dissonance, as his smoking behavior contradicts with the knowledge that smoking is bad for health (assume that he wants to live longer). The smoker either stops or reduces the frequency of smoking, or he tries to look for evidence that argues the positive effects of smoking, such as the feeling of relaxation and pleasure. The fact that smoking is bad for health doesn’t change, while the smoker’s choice of processing that fact changes—he may just focus more on the enjoyment that smoking brings him and intentionally overlook its harm to health (Festinger, 1957).

Design Implications

When it comes to learning design, the focus is on how to keep students motivated with the implications of cognitive dissonance theory. As students might naturally wish to justify their disengagement in the classroom as a way of not putting the effort to learn things that are not useful for the future, it’s important for educators to change the environment that prevents that kind of dissonance (Spiro et al., 1998). For example, emphasizing the transferability of knowledge to be taught and contextualizing the information with various examples help students to see the practical implications of what they learn. When efforts are made by educators to shape learners’ beliefs about the significance of to-be-learned knowledge, for the sake of consistency between beliefs and behaviors, learners will hopefully adjust what they do to match their beliefs that learning is useful and meaningful.

Challenges

However, there are many alternative theoretical attempts to advance the cognitive dissonance theory over the years (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019). For example, Bem (1972) argues that the motive to change behaviors or beliefs is attributed to reducing the negative feelings brought by the dissonance rather than an active way of seeking change. He proposed self-perception theory in response to his inquiry. However, while he argues whether people are the true controlling entities of our behaviors, many other researchers have proved that dissonance is associated with psychological discomfort, and the cognitive or behavioral changes that occur are motivated by that discomfort, which self-perception cannot count for all changes produced by the dissonance effects (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019).

References

• Bem, D. J. (1967). Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena. Psychological Review, 74(3), 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0024835

• Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.

• Harmon-Jones, E., & Mills, J. (2019). An introduction to cognitive dissonance theory and an overview of current perspectives on the theory. In E. Harmon-Jones (Ed.), Cognitive dissonance: Reexamining a pivotal theory in psychology (pp. 3–24). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000135-001

• Martinez M. E. (2010). Learning and cognition : the design of the mind. (pp. 153–188) Merrill. http://books.google.com/books?id=wqFWAAAAYAAJ

• Spiro, R.J., Coulson, R.L., Feltovich, P.J., & Anderson, D. (1988). Cognitive flexibility theory: Advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-structured domains. In V. Patel (ed.), Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

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