Cognitive dissonance theory

In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress (discomfort) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, when performing an action that contradicts those beliefs, ideas, and values; or when confronted with new information that contradicts existing beliefs, ideas, and values.

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance focuses on how human beings strive for internal consistency. A person who experiences inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable, and so is motivated to try to reduce the cognitive dissonance occurring, and actively avoids situations and information likely to increase the psychological discomfort.

To function in the real world, men and women continually adjust the correspondence of their attitudes and actions; which adjustments result in one of three relationships among cognitions and actions.

Two factors determine the degree of dissonance caused by two conflicting cognitions or by two conflicting actions, and the consequent psychological distress:

The psychological pressure to reduce cognitive dissonance is a function of the magnitude of the dissonance.

Cognitive-dissonance theory is founded upon the presumption that people seek psychological consistency, between their expectations and the reality of life. To function by that expectation of existential consistency, people practise the process of dissonance reduction, in order to continually align their cognitions with the actions of functioning in the real world. The creation and establishment of consistency allows the lessening of mental stress and consequent psychological distress; therefore, a person can act to reduce cognitive dissonance by change with, justification against, or indifference to the contradiction inducing the mental stress. As such, people reduce their cognitive dissonance in four ways:

Likewise, the study of The Psychology of Prejudice (2006) reported that people facilitate functioning in the real world, by employing human categories (sex and gender, age and race, etc.) with which to manage their social interactions with other human beings. That integral to the categorization is a scheme of stereotypes (social attitudes) about each category of person, which include prejudices, the generalized, negative emotions (beliefs, ideals, values) held about the category of person causing the cognitive dissonance, in a given social interaction.

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