Cognitive Dissonance Theory: Social Psychology

Graduate Student Extra Paper: Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Cognitive dissonance is a state that a person may enter when their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are not aligned with each other. This inconsistency causes dissonance, which is unwanted, so a person can be motivated to remove if the dissonance becomes too strong. To feel this dissonance, a person will need to feel responsible for their actions and the consequences of their actions. These consequences need to be aversive, irrevocable, foreseeable, and important to the person. When we are motivated to reduce dissonance, we must change either our behaviors, thoughts, or feelings to be in sync. To do this, we can either provide internal or external justifications to make ourselves feel, …show more content…
Cognitive dissonance is actually the theory that increased my interest in social psychology and change my field of study to social psychology. Cognitive dissonance falls under the category of a consistency theory. Consistency theories were very popular about sixty-years ago, but are gaining momentum again as the public tries to understand how a person can act in inconsistent ways but still see themselves a good and consistent person. This theory can be applied to a lot of areas of research, such as: politics, religion, assaults, etc. Evidence for cognitive dissonance is being gathered in cognitive psychology by using EEG machines. In 2017, Colosio and his colleagues studied what happens in our brain when we experience cognitive dissonance. According to cognitive dissonance theory, after we make a decision, we overemphasize the good in the choice that we made, and the bad in the other options. Researchers gave participants choices that would induce cognitive dissonance. Participants had a larger negative frontocentral response when making hard choices compared to easy choices. This response peaked around 60ms after participants made their choice. The brain activity present during cognitive dissonance has similar features to error-related negativity. The researchers also found the strength of the neural activity could be predicted by the frontocentral resting-state activity. They interpreted their results to mean …show more content…
This also happens in politics. Liberals have been found to value fairness and conservatives have been found to value loyalty and patriotism. When researchers presented participants with an article on pro-conservation intentions, which is typically a liberal stance, conservatives held the same conservation values and intentions as liberals when the article framed pro-conservation intentions as being a matter of loyalty and patriotism (Wolsko et al., 2016). If you view this study through the lens of cognitive dissonance theory, you can see that the conservative participants may have experienced dissonance when they were given a paragraph that said pro-conservation intentions and loyalty/ patriotism are synonymous. Dissonance would have been the result of the conservatives valuing loyalty and patriotism, but not valuing pro-conservation behaviors and stances, and being told that these two concepts are related. In order to relieve this dissonance, the conservatives in the study needed to value both loyalty/ patriotism and conservation intentions, which is exactly what the data showed. In my future research, I would be interested in what types of value or behavior changes that occur around the election of political candidates. Specifically, I would like to look at a Christian sample and understand how they justify voting for a candidate who does not hold the same