Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Festinger's account of discomfort from holding contradictory beliefs and motivated rationalization.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory was introduced by Leon Festinger in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), holding that an individual experiencing inconsistency among cognitions (beliefs, attitudes, behaviors) feels psychological discomfort and is motivated to reduce that dissonance by changing one or more cognitions, adding consonant cognitions, or trivializing the dissonance. The theory's classic empirical demonstration is the Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) study in which participants paid $1 to lie about a boring task subsequently rated the task as more enjoyable than those paid $20 — explained as the smaller payment producing greater dissonance, which was reduced by attitude change. Subsequent extensions include Bem's self-perception theory (offering a parsimonious alternative for some cases), Aronson's self-consistency reformulation (dissonance arises particularly when self-concept is threatened), and Cooper and Fazio's new look (dissonance requires perceived personal responsibility for aversive consequences). The theory is among the most cited and most empirically productive in social psychology, with application to topics from attitude change to choice rationalization to belief perseverance.
Core components
- Cognitive elements (beliefs, attitudes, behaviors)
- Consonance and dissonance among cognitions
- Motivation to reduce dissonance
- Three reduction strategies (change cognition, add consonant cognition, trivialize dissonance)
- Magnitude of dissonance proportional to importance and number of dissonant cognitions
- Subsequent reformulations (self-perception, self-consistency, new look)
Primary use case
Foundation for understanding attitude change, belief perseverance, post-decision rationalization, and motivated reasoning; influence on persuasion theory, marketing, and political communication; clinical relevance for understanding self-deception and resistance to evidence; framework underlying many behavior-change interventions that work by inducing commitment-inconsistency dissonance.
Common criticisms
- Self-perception theory (Bem) provides alternative explanation for many dissonance findings without invoking aversive arousal
- methodological concerns about whether dissonance is genuinely physiological discomfort or post-hoc explanation
- difficulty distinguishing dissonance from other affective and motivational states
- some classic findings have struggled to replicate cleanly in modern studies
- cross-cultural variation in dissonance effects (Heine, Kitayama, others) complicates universalist claims
- the new-look reformulations narrowed the original theory's scope substantially
- theory's flexibility in identifying which cognitions are 'dissonant' raises concerns about post-hoc explanation.
Lineage
- Siblings
- Heuristics and Biases Program, Dual-Process Theory