Understanding Cognitive Dissonance and its Impact

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Recommended: Festinger’s process model of cognitive dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance is a state of discomfort resulting after an individual recognizes an inconsistency between their attitude and behavior or multiples attitudes. ( Baron and Branscombe, 169) It most often occurs when forced compliance is involved as well as when a person states something they do not truly believe, reject an object the person finds compelling, or find out an investment was not worth investing. (Baron and Branscombe, 169) Dissonance can lead to attitude change when the less-leads-to-more effect is applied. A person barely given enough reward to participate in counterattitudinal behavior produce greater attitude changes compared to ones receiving larger reward. This effect is due to the belief that the participants were more responsible for the actions and the negative effects resulting from their actions. (Baron and Branscombe, 170) Cognitive dissonance can be reduced via direct and indirect methods. Direct methods focus on altering the attitude and behavior inconsistency that causes the dissonance and indirect methods adopt external tactics to distract the individual from the dissonance (Baron and Branscombe, 171) The first …show more content…

I reported that homelessness is somewhat of a social problem, yet I have not contributed to resolving the issue. I want to address the problem, but I am unsure on how to help. Oftentimes, we feel the need to reduce our inconsistencies and restore balance between attitudes and behaviors because we do not want to harm ourselves or others by continuing the discrepancies a good example is drinking and driving. Another reason for restoring balance is so we do not feel a negative emotion. People are emotionally-driven and do not want to feel uncomfortable, so they try to rebalance their attitude and behaviors to achieve positive emotions instead of negative. Finally, being called out for their own hypocrisy, tends to alter their behavior to match their

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