Cognitive Dissonance Theory Essay

If the individual believes that the result of accepting the behaviour will have a positive effect then the

The student's who were paid $1 said the experiments, which were time consuming and boring, were fun, while those that were paid $20 straight up told the truth and said the tasks were boring. The students that were paid $20 experienced little dissonance, so they were honest in their responses. However, those that were paid $1 had to justify spending a considerable amount of time doing pointless tasks, so they said the tasks were enjoyable. Another experiment that Festinger completed was where students were paid either $1 or $20 to perform certain tasks. When the students who were paid one dollar were asked about the task, many replied saying that the task was fun. However, the students who were paid $20 told the truth that the task was boring. The students who received $20 seemed to appear little dissonance, while the other students had to justify why they were doing a mundane task for such a low price, so they said that the task was fun. From all of these experiments, Festinger believed that “we spend our lives paying attention only to the information that is consonant with our beliefs, we surround ourselves with people who will support our beliefs, and we ignore contradictory information that might cause us to question what we have built”

After reading chapter five I noticed cognitive dissonance throughout a large portion of the book. Cognitive dissonance was described in class as being a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. A good example of this was found on page 182 where the author writes about how we all tell our self that African Americans “deserve” all of this even though we know, but do not want to acknowledge that white Americans are less likely to be convicted of the same crime done by blacks. Cognitive dissonance applies here because we know that this mass incarceration is not fair or morally right to do, however, our behavior does not try to stop it from happening. Instead of doing what our beliefs say is right we try to convince ourselves that it is the African Americans fault that they are

“The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones—is an unpleasant feeling the Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when ever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish.” (p.13)

“We, the First Presidency…of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God…” This is the opening line in The Family: A Proclamation to the World, given by former President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Gordon B. Hinckley, in September of 1995. This is one of the main doctrines in the LDS faith. In light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling regarding the legalization of gay marriage in 2015, these two ideologies, what is socially acceptable versus the standards of the LDS faith, stand contrary to one another. This contradiction causes what is known as cognitive dissonance. Many people have noted that members of the LDS faith have felt this dissonance from society, but what about those people of the LDS faith who identify as LGBT or experience same sex attraction on some level? The more we identify the two things that oppose each other, the greater the cognitive dissonance.

Topic Background/Introduction: To get a positive response from an individual, one must offer a reward. To stop a particular response from an individual, one must present a punishment. The greater the reward and more severe the punishment, the more likely the individual is to respond to or stop the behavior. To achieve continued compliance, one has to continue to give a reward or punishment. Cognitive dissonance occurs when someone has two or more contradicting attitudes and behaviors. The only way to fix this is to change an attitude to match the behavior or change the behavior

There can be many explanations for why an employee would call in sick to work when he or she is not really sick. One reason could be explained through the attribution theory. The attribution theory explains the behavior like this can be explained by attributing it to either the employee’s internal disposition or to an external situation. The employee’s internal disposition could be that the employee always seems to have a bad attitude to his or her job duties and that his or her personality is pessimistic or lazy. The employee’s external situation could be that he or she has a manager who is constantly micro-managing them, which makes them unhappy at work, or the employee has a coworker who is their counterpart who is slacking at work. The employee may have to work harder at the job than the other employee to get their collective tasks completed. This may lead to the employee calling out sick because of his or her internal disposition – they are just lazy and do

When determining a course of action regarding the topic of my choosing for this paper, the ideals behind cognitive dissonance allowed for me to put to paper for the very first time, a topic that I believe fulfills the requirements of the assignment, and one that bears great presence in my life. As some may have gathered throughout our tenure in this course, I am mother to my nine beautiful children. Though I despise the formalities attached to assignment of titles, attention must be paid toward the fact that I have two stepsons, Dominick & Zachary – ages seven and six. I have always harbored an oppositional stance toward the idea of referring to them, or parenting them in a fashion as though they are

The show, ChoreoProject, was presented by sjDanceco and presented various types of dance performances from classical to contemporary works. The piece that I enjoyed from this show was Cognitive Dissonance. In this dance piece, Erwin Columbus both choreographed and was the dancer. Erwin Columbus used music from Kerry Muzzey for his piece. In Cognitive Dissonance, he told a story of himself having negative, inconsistent thoughts and his journey of fighting off those thoughts from his mind. With fast and dramatic movements along with intense music, Columbus was able to grasp my attention and teach me how it feels to have negative, inconsistent thoughts that can negatively control one's body.

Cognitive dissonance theory is based on several fundamental assumptions. One is that humans are sensitive to the inconsistencies between actions and beliefs. Accordingly, we all recognize when we are acting in a manner that is consistent with our attitudes. Secondly, the recognition will definitely lead to dissonance that will drive the persons involved to resolve the situation (Gladwell, 2005). This dissonance can be solved through change beliefs, change actions and change perception of action. The individual in this case has to be

Rokeach (1960) asserts that Belief Congruence Theory can be applied when whether there is a group of people is having similar beliefs that will result in social harmony or a group of people that is having different beliefs which conversely will bring to disharmony. In fact, this theory is one of the theories of Prejudice. “Belief is more important than ethnic or racial membership as a determinant of social discrimination” (Rokeach, 1960, p.135). In another word, this statement illustrates that belief is a crucial element in resulting in cognitive dissonance or cognitive consonance. The scene above shows Mike eventually accepts the beliefs that uphold by his colleagues and they then uphold the similar beliefs which are the belief in the value of cooperation.

There is something that troubles me. I have been influenced to trust that “not everything that can be invented has been invented”, yet I have already begun to believe that we are coming close to this limit of technological progress. The result of this most likely stems from my laziness. In other words, I am losing my hunger for challenges. My easygoing life has become so natural, that my craving for a fun and easy route in life continues to increases. Now, how this connects UC Berkeley’s MET program was actually quite predictable.

“Your best friend is having a beer bash tonight. Everyone you talk to indicated their positive intentions of going to the best beer bash of the millennium. However, you have a Psyc 135 final next morning that you haven't studied for. Your midterm scores have been low going into the final, but everyone claims that the final is easy every semester. Should you stay home and study for the final or go to this millennium beer bash and merrily consume alcohol?”

An obvious implication of cognitive dissonance theory is that if one wants to change someone’s attitude, one could try to create dissonance concerning that person’s attitude and hope that desired attitude change would result. However, there are other implications of Cognitive Dissonance as well. Much of the research on dissonance has focused on decision-making, counter-attitudinal advocacy, forced compliance, and selective exposure to information.

In the ________ dissonance research paradigm, participants typically do something that they ordinarily would avoid (e.g., say something that is not true, write a counter intuitive essay) and are provided a good or poor reason for having done so.