On the Characteristics of the Cognitive Dissonance State: Exploration Within the Pleasure Arousal Dominance Model PMC

The application provides a social psychological basis for the constructivist viewpoint that ethnic and racial divisions can be socially or individually constructed, possibly from acts of violence (Fearon and Laitin, 2000). Their framework speaks to this possibility by showing how violent actions by individuals can affect individual attitudes, either ethnic or racial animosity (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen, 2015). Though a person may not always resolve cognitive dissonance, the response to it may range from ignoring the source of it to changing one’s beliefs or behavior to eliminate the conflict. Mismatches between your beliefs and actions can lead to feelings of discomfort (and, sometimes, coping choices that have negative impacts), but such feelings can also sometimes lead to change and growth. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort you feel when you have two contradictory beliefs or values.

Study 1: Hypocrisy Paradigm

If the person changes the current attitude, after the dissonance occurs, they are then obligated to commit to that course of behavior. While most scholars agree on the notion that the CDS is aversive, this assumption has remained untested for a long cognitive dissonance and addiction time (Devine et al., 1999). Early studies on the valence of dissonance arousal mainly used the misattribution paradigm (Zanna & Cooper, 1974). In this paradigm, a plausible explanation is offered to participants to justify their discomfort.

• This is problematic because many cognitive dissonance paradigms are likely to induce negative emotions other than the CDS.
• Notice that dissonance theory does not state that these modes of dissonance reduction will actually work, only that individuals who are in a state of cognitive dissonance will take steps to reduce the extent of their dissonance.
• The subjects’ believed the tasks to be boring, but they told the confederate that the tasks were interesting.
• That’s how recognizing and resolving the cognitive dissonance you experience can help you understand yourself better and the values and beliefs that really matter to you.
• Resolving dissonance may help prevent us from making bad choices or motivate us to make good ones.

Limits on the Evidences for Cognitive Dissonance Aversiveness

The stronger the discrepancy between thoughts, the greater the motivation to reduce it (Festinger, 1957). In other words, he could tell himself that a short life filled with smoking and sensual pleasures is better than a long life devoid of such joys. In this way, he would be decreasing the importance of dissonant cognition (smoking is bad for one’s health). However, new information such as “research has not proved definitely that smoking causes lung cancer” may reduce the dissonance. In other words, they were more likely than participants in the other two conditions to increase the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and to decrease the attractiveness of the unchosen alternative.

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You don’t want to move, but your partner is excited about the promotion and you want them to be happy. Little by little, you begin to consider the pros of living in a small town. You’ll replace them and always pick up after your dog in the future. Almost all items loaded accordingly to their respective components except one item of Pleasure that loaded on Arousal (relaxed – bored) and one item of Dominance that did not load substantially on any component (important – awed). As this analysis was not pre-registered, we decided to use the latter items in the main analyses. To their dismay, the expensive and accurate gyroscope did show a drift of exactly 15 degrees/hour.

Belief disconfirmation

So the person decides to push away thoughts of infidelity until it’s impossible to deny the partner’s betrayal. To resolve the https://ecosoberhouse.com/, they disregarded the new evidence and stuck with their previous belief. Another more recent example of cognitive dissonance involves a group of “flat-earthers,” or people who believe that the Earth is flat. This group demonstrated cognitive dissonance when they reacted to the result of one of their own experiments. They wanted to prove that the Earth was not rotating, so they came up with a clever experiment.

Dissonance due to Inconsistency between Commitment and Information

Examples of cognitive dissonance include a smoker who knows cigarettes are dangerous, a company that doesn’t follow its own code of ethics, or a person who avoids speaking about a past trauma while still dealing with it in the present. Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person’s behavior and beliefs do not complement each other or when they hold two contradictory beliefs. It causes a feeling of discomfort that can motivate people to try to feel better. Cognitive dissonance theory proposes that people seek psychological consistency between their expectations of life and the existential reality of the world. To function by that expectation of existential consistency, people continually reduce their cognitive dissonance in order to align their cognitions (perceptions of the world) with their actions.

On the Characteristics of the Cognitive Dissonance State: Exploration Within the Pleasure Arousal Dominance Model

• By being assertive about your values, you can minimize continued conflict from the start but also empower yourself to hold that space for your needs.
• The “strong initiation” group of subjects were to read aloud twelve sexual words considered obscene.
• You might feel guilty, knowing you’d be in trouble if anyone found out.