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COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

General Experimental Psychology Cognitive Dissonance Lab

The theory of cognitive dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance Theory, developed by Leon Festinger (1957), is concerned with the

relationships among cognitions. A cognition, for the purpose of this theory, may be thought ofas a piece of knowledge. The knowledge may be about an attitude, an emotion, a behavior, avalue, and so on. For example, the knowledge that you like the color red is a cognition; theknowledge that you caught a touchdown pass is a cognition; the knowledge that the SupremeCourt outlawed school segregation is a cognition. People hold a multitude of cognitionssimultaneously, and these cognitions form irrelevant, consonant or dissonant relationships withone another.

Cognitive Irrelevance probably describes the bulk of the relationships among a personscognitions. Irrelevance simply means that the two cognitions have nothing to do with eachother. Two cognitions are consonant if one cognition follows from, or fits with, the other.People like consonance among their cognitions. We do not know whether this stems from thenature of the human organism or whether it is learned during the process of socialization, but

people appear to prefer cognitions that fit together to those that do not. It is this simple

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COGNITIVE DISSONANCE http://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/stephens/cdback.html

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should be possible to predict what we can do to reduce it:

Changing Cognitions

If two cognitions ar discrepant, we can simply change one to make it consistent with theother. Or we can change each cognition in the direction of the other.

Adding Cognitions

If two cognitions cause a certain magnitude of dissonance, that magnitude can be reducedby adding one or more consonant cognitions.

Altering importance

Since the discrepant and consonant cognitions must be weighed by importance, it may beadvantageous to alter the importance of the various cognitions.

The material above is the background reading for the Cognitive Dissonance Lab. These areexcerpts from Frederick M. Rudolphs page on Social Psychology. For a more detaileddiscussion on cognitive dissonance and related theories, visithttp://www.mindspring.com/~frudolph/lectuires/SOC/soc1.htm

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE http://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/stephens/cdback.html