Most of us try to believe that we are reasonable, decent folks who make wise decisions, do not behave immorally, and have integrity. It is in between these kinds of behaviour in which a person would be eager to engage spontaneously. Those which he would refuse, or feel unable to perform except in the presence of powerful and consistent reinforcements, there lie a large number of behaviours which a person might be prepared to undertake, but still have doubts about whether he was doing the right thing. It is this last category that has been the prime focus of Leon Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance.
In his theory, Festinger replaces the concept of consistency or balance with that of consonance, and inconsistency or imbalance with that of dissonance. As viewed by Festinger, there is “pressure to produce consonant relations among cognitions and to avoid dissonance”. A cognition is any bit of knowledge (“It is above 35 temperature today”), belief (“Above 35 temperature causes the sunburn”), or opinion (“I hate above 35 temperature”) that people have about themselves.
Dissonance is defined as an aversive motivational state that results when some behaviour we engage in is inconsistent with our attitudes. Dissonance appears to be most consistently aroused when the attitudes and behaviour that are dissonant are important to the self.
As originally conceived by Leon Festinger, dissonance was defined as an inconsistency between any two cognitions. But not all cognitive inconsistencies are equally upsetting. Research has shown that dissonance is most powerful within ourselves. This creates an inconsistency between who we think we are and how we behave. Generally speaking, then, cognitive dissonance occurs whenever we do something that tends to make us feel absurd, stupid, or immoral.
This in turn motivates a person to try to reduce the discomfort, in much the same way as hunger produce discomfort that motivates a person to eat. Still, the ways of reducing dissonance are not simple; rather they often lead to fascinating changes in the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Many of these behaviours are powerful and non-obvious.
People are motivated to reduce dissonance by either changing their behaviour or justifying their past behaviour. The resulting change in attitude stems from a process of self-persuasion. Whenever we make an important decision, we will experience dissonance. The more important the decision, the greater the dissonance. An important decision can be defined as a decision that is difficult to change or causes harm to another person. Deciding which person to marry is clearly a more important decision than deciding which car to own. Decisions also vary in terms of how difficult they are to revoke. The more permanent and less revocable the decision, the greater the need to reduce dissonance.
Life is made up of more than just decisions about cars, appliances, and summer trips. Often our decisions involve moral and ethical issues. Following a difficult moral decision, dissonance reduction can cause people to behave either more or less ethically in the future.
Take the issue of cheating in an exam. Suppose you are a college student taking the final exam. Even since you can remember, you have wanted to be a surgeon, and you know that your admission to medical college will depend heavily on how well you do in this final exam. The key question on the exam involves some material you know fairly well; but because so much is riding on this exam, you experience acute anxiety and draw a blank. The minutes tickaway, you become increasingly anxious. You simply can not think. but then, you realize that you happen to be sitting behind the smartest person in the class.
You glance at his paper and notice he is just completing his answer to the crucial question. You know you could easily read his answer if you chose to. Time is running out. What do you do? Your conscience tells you it’s wrong to cheat — and yet if you don’t cheat, you are certain to get a poor result. And if you get a poor result there goes medical college. You wrestle with your conscience.
Regardless of whether or not you decide to cheat, you are doomed to experience the kind of threat to your self-esteem that arouses dissonance. If you cheat, your cognition. “I am a decent, moral person” is dissonant with your cognition “I have just committed an immoral act.” If you decide to resist temptation, your cognition “I want to become a surgeon” is dissonant with your cognition “I could have acted in such a way that would have ensured a good result and admission to medical college, but I chose not to. Wow, was that stupid!”
In this situation, some students — perhaps most — will decide to cheat; others will decide not to cheat. While that is interesting, an even more interesting question is, what happens to the student’s attitudes about cheating after their decision? Suppose that after a difficult struggle, you decide to cheat. How do you reduce the dissonance?
What you could do is try to justify the action by finding a way to minimize the negative aspects of the action you chose. In this instance, you will adopt a more lenient attitude toward cheating, convincing yourself that it is a victimless crime that doesn’t hurt anybody, that everybody does it and so it’s not really that bad, and so on.
Suppose, on the other hand, that after a difficult struggle you decide not to cheat. This time you go in the opposite direction. For giving up a good result, you must convince yourself that cheating is a heinous sin and that cheaters should be rooted out and severely punished.
When we were little, we were taught never to tell a lie. Alas, the world is a complicated place and most of us have yet to meet a person who has yet told a lie. At times, most of a us feel that, for good reason, we need to be less than perfectly truthful. One such reason involves something else that we were taught — namely, to be kind to one another. Occasionally, in order to be kind to someone, we find it necessary to tell a lie.
For example, suppose you walk into your friend’s house and notice an atrocious paining on the wall. But then your friend asks, “Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”
Chances are you go through something like the following thought process: “Raheel seems so happy and excited. Why should I rain on his parade?” So you tell Raheel that you like the painting very much. Do you experience much dissonance? I doubt it. There are a great many thoughts that are consonant with having told this lie. In effect, your cognition that it is important not to cause pain to people you like, provides ample external justification for having told a harmless lie.
But what if there is no ample external justification for doing so? What if your friend is fabulously wealthy and buying paintings is a habit and wanted a sincere opinion? Now the external justifications for lying to your friend are minimal. If you still refrain from giving your true opinion, you will experience dissonance.
When you can’t find external justification for your behaviour, you will attempt to find internal justification, by bringing the two cognitions close together. How can you do this?
You begin looking for positive aspects of the painting — creativity or sophistication. Chances are that if you look hard enough you will find something good. This phenomenon is generally referred to as counter attitudinal advocacy, a process by which individuals are induced to estate publicly an opinion or attitude that runs counter to their own private attitudes. When this is accomplished with a minimum of external justification, it results in a change in the individual’s private attitude in the direction of the public statement.
Similarly, if people avoid doing something desirable for insufficient punishment, they will come to believe that the activity wasn’t really all that desirable. The flip side of this kind of dissonance reduction has sinister effects.
The strength of cognitive dissonance theory has also been its weakness; that is, the postulation of cognitive mechanisms has had a substantial heuristic impact, but the resulting intricate experimental procedures have been subjected to alternative interpretations. Attempts to explicate the role of arousal state and the implication of the self-concept promise both to clarify the theory and to enhance its contribution.
The problem with reducing dissonance in ways that make us feel better about ourselves is that it can result in a rationalization trap. As suggested by self-affirmation theory, we can avoid this trap by reminding ourselves that we are good and decent people, so that we do not have to justify and rationalize every stupid or immoral act we perform.
