Cognitive Dissonance Theory | Simply Psychology

When someone is forced to do (publicly) something they (privately) really don't want to do, dissonance is created between their cognition (I didn't want to do this) and their behavior (I did it). But the behavior can't be changed, since it was already in the past, so it will need to be reduced by re-evaluating their attitude to what they have done.

Life is filled with decisions, and decisions (as a general rule) arouse dissonance.

A common way to reduce dissonance is to increase the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and to decrease the attractiveness of the rejected alternative. This is referred to as "spreading apart the alternatives."

For example, suppose you had to decide whether to accept a job in an absolutely beautiful area of the country, or turn down the job so you could be near your friends and family.

Both alternatives have their good points and bad points. The rub is that making a decision cuts off the possibility that you can enjoy the advantages of the unchosen alternative & accept the disadvantages of the chosen alternative.

This is probably caused if we spent a great effort to achieve something and then evaluated it negatively. We could, of course, spend years of effort into achieving something which turns out to be a load of rubbish and then, in order to avoid the dissonance that produces, try to convince ourselves that we didn't really spend years of effort, or that the effort was really quite enjoyable, or that it wasn't really a lot of effort.

Dissonance can be reduced in one of three ways:

a) changing existing beliefs,

b) adding new beliefs, or

c) reducing the importance of the beliefs.

McLeod, S. A. (2018, Febuary 05). Cognitive dissonance . Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html