Cognitive Dissonance

Understanding the psychology and behavior of the human mind and how it manages itself

has often been the subject of many great researches in the past and to this day. One topic of

psychology this article will cover is the cognitive dissonance theory. This theory assets that

humans experience psychological stress when confronted by ideas or events that contradict some

of their beliefs; this comfort is brought upon by a fear of the unknown. In other words, when

faced with a situation in which the mind registers that it is contradicting itself, the load will cause

a psychological stress which compels the person to do or rationalize anything in order to restore

balance to their system. The perception of an idea or a situation in which one’s own words or

actions do not match one another inflicts a psychological pressure on the psyche of the person.

Some evolutionary neurologists believe that one of the ways our minds evolved over the ages

was in being able to play tricks on itself to preserve the person’s mental health. In a sense,

natural selection made it so that humans were able to avoid interacting with ideas or paths that

might lead to an inner clash of mini selves within the realms of one’s supposedly collective

mind. This inability to, coupled with the increased need for analysis forces the brain to overwork

itself and start a process of inner self-destruction. In this paper, the focus will be on

understanding how cognitive dissonance can play a role in affecting how we feel and think

towards certain things: how it can subconsciously influence our decisions in life or our opinions

on certain topics, and how it can manifest in so many instances, explaining how and why people

react in that particular manner; among other areas. The later part of the paper includes our

privately conducted survey to test a few of the concepts explained here.

Such behavior can be explained by a new theory concerning "cognitive dissonance." This theory

centers around the idea that if a person knows various things that are not psychologically
 consistent with one another, he will, in a variety of ways, try to make them more consistent. Two

items of information that psychologically do not fit together are said to be in a dissonant relation

to each other. The items of information may be about behavior, feelings, opinions, things in the

environment and so on. The word "cognitive" simply emphasizes that the theory deals with

relations among items of information. (Festinger 1962)

Understanding cognitive dissonance helps researchers understand the ways our minds

work to justify their opinions and understandings when faced with a situation that forces them to

deal with a reality they did not want to think about. In an experiment by (Festinger & Carlsmith

1959), a subject group of about seventy people were assigned to do the most boring jobs and

tasks possible then go and lie to someone about how much you enjoyed the experience in order

to get them to sign on those boring jobs; when the organizers, however used a control group of

people of those seventy whom were paid about twenty times what the other subjects got paid;

with none of the participants being aware of the difference in pay, it was found that very notably,

all of the subjects whom were paid more, when asked if they thought the tasks were interesting,

all of them had no issue lying to other people; the conclusion was therefore that the people who

got paid more did not experience the cognitive dissonance the other test subjects underwent

when their integrity is challenged and subverted while also having to come to terms that they

can’t do anything about lying, since the contradiction was presumably resolved per their mind’s

logic. (Festinger and Carlsmaith 1959) What this experiment showed is that the human mind can

sometimes interfere on behalf of the person to protect the person from experiencing cognitive

dissonance. Ultimately, in order for the stress to resolve, the mind will have to rationalize a way

in which all of those actions and events do not show contradicting things about them. In a sense,

cognitive dissonance directly transfers into emotions, where irrational thoughts or sequences can

find a place to exist. It is therefore this projected image of an existence or explanation that is
foreign to them yet resembles everything they don’t believe in, which causes the mind to go into

full lockdown in order to formulate a semblance of a defense.

In our survey, we tested to see if our peers and friends would tend to give higher

performance rating to a product, if they were told it cost more. Of the 18 people we surveyed in a

quick scripted skit to eliminate other variables, the result was unanimous across all 18. Given

that a lot of people have the perception that a thing which costs more would mean I tis of higher

quality would force them to lean into letting the price tag dictate how much they think they

enjoyed using the product in reality.

People’s feedback of the product People who were told the % of Total

product was more

expensive vs. cheaper

9 Negative 9 thought it was cheaper 50%

9 Positive 9 thought it was more 50%

expensive

In conclusion, as hypothesized by the cognitive dissonance theory, given the assumption that

all the subjects had to reconcile their notion of proportionality between effort and benefit, the ones

who thought they got paid fairly or generously were able to immediately jump to that opinion in order

to justify them being wrong in their assumption and strongly taken for granted principles.
Works Cited

Festinger, L. (1962). Cognitive Dissonance. Scientific American, 207(4), 93-106. Retrieved December

6, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24936719

Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. The

journal of abnormal and social psychology, 58(2), 203.