Cognitive dissonance is the situation where a person faces an inner drive of disharmony due to an encounter with a conflicting behavior, belief or attitude thereby needing to restore balance (Aronson, 2018). Dissonance involves the process of attitude change in the areas of forced compliance, the decision making process of the individual, and the personal effort. The theory applies to the conflict of cognition and behavior when it comes to forced compliance behavior. For example, if a person is discouraged from drinking in a social event by a relative who has health concerns, the individual may comply with the words and have to change their attitude. The attitude change may come regardless of the perceived pleasure when a person fails to experience instant gratification.
Additionally, the decision making process often causes dissonance in everyone. For example when choosing to move out so as to experience independence or having to choose to stay home so as to save more for the future. Therefore, one has to choose one alternative at the experience of denying themselves the joys of the other. To reduce dissonance in this situation often involves making the chosen alternative more attractive by increasing the perceived disadvantages of the other choice. Another important aspect of cognitive dissonance is effort adjustment where people tend to allude themselves on things that they have worked for long and tirelessly even if the outcome is considerably unattractive. For instance an individual going on a vegetable diet for a prolonged period without seeing any physical body weight change may cite health benefits that they experience instead of acknowledging that they wasted their time and energy pursuing a venture that was futile.
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Reducing Cognitive Dissonance
The inconsistency of the attitude, behaviors, and beliefs often leads to application of strategies to reduce the dissonance. One of the methods of adjustment is by changing a person’s belief system or eliminating a behavior. For example, a person may be aware of the dangers of excessive alcohol use that that may deter them from indulging. They then decide to stop drinking so as to deal with the dissonance of being prone to succumbing to cirrhosis of the liver. It is challenging but some people make the conscious decision of quitting alcohol and thereby eliminating the risk involved.
The second way that people deal with dissonance is by acquiring information that reduces their discomfort. For example, the person might be exposed to the information that alcohol only causes cirrhosis over prolonged indulgence. The individuals gets relief from believing that they have not consumed the substance for a long period and hence are not prone to the chronic disease. They therefore develop a belief system that supports the consistency of their behavior.
The third way of restoring the comfort is by reducing the significance of the attitudes and beliefs. For example by telling themselves that they might miss out on the short term euphoria of alcohol consumption and suffer boredom if they gave it up. A lot of people use this method to indulge in substance abuse that may lead to their demise.
Alternative Perspectives
Similar theories that explain attitude and belief conflicting behavior include the self-perception theory which states that people discard their ambiguous internal cues when dealing with conflict (Aronson, 2018). They focus more on how the behavior will be perceived by others rather than evaluating their inner moods and attitudes. Another theory that explains such behavior is the balance theory which motivates attitude change to achieve a consistency. The balance approach considers the interactions of an individual, another person, and the element defining the unit relations and the sentiment relations. For instance a man loves his wife will see the dress she wears as beautiful even though if the same dress was on another person may be unappealing. The cognitive dissonance theory is stronger than the self-perception and the balance theory because it raises that aspect of negative arousal as a consequence of conflicting contexts. The perspective evaluates the context in which people and elements interact thereby giving a suited explanation for the decision making process of human being as an entity that is highly influenced by the environmental factors.
Reference
Aronson, E. (Ed.). (2018). Social animal . Macmillan.
