Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort experienced when a person holds two conflicting beliefs or when their actions don’t align with their beliefs.
To reduce this uncomfortable feeling, people often change their thoughts or justify their behavior to make everything feel more consistent.
For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition), they are in a state of cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Cognitive dissonance was first studied by Leon Festinger during a participant observation of a cult that believed the Earth would be destroyed by a great flood.
The research focused on what happened to the members—especially the deeply committed ones who had given up their homes and jobs for the cult—when the flood did not occur.
While less committed members were more likely to admit they had been mistaken and simply “learned from the experience,” the most devoted members tended to reinterpret the outcome to fit their beliefs.
They claimed the flood didn’t happen because of their faithfulness, reinforcing their original conviction rather than abandoning it.
How Attitude Change Takes Place
Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory says we want our attitudes and actions to match and feel comfortable inside. This is called cognitive consistency.
When our attitudes and actions don’t agree (called dissonance), we feel uncomfortable and try to fix it by changing something.
The theory doesn’t say these fixes always work, just that people try to reduce their discomfort.
Researchers have studied this idea a lot and found different things that affect how people change their attitudes.
How can I recognize when I’m experiencing cognitive dissonance in my own life?
You can recognize cognitive dissonance in your life when you notice feelings of unease, stress, or anxiety after doing something that conflicts with your beliefs or values.
For example, if you act in a way that doesn’t match what you believe is right, you might feel guilt or emotional discomfort.
You may also catch yourself trying to justify or rationalize your actions to reduce this inner tension.
Signs include second-guessing decisions, avoiding certain situations, or feeling mentally conflicted about your choices or beliefs.
Noticing these feelings is the first step toward understanding and managing cognitive dissonance.
Examples
1. Stranger Things – Eleven’s Identity Conflict
Eleven is a young girl with extraordinary psychic powers, but she also feels vulnerable and isolated because of her traumatic experiences in a secret government lab.
Throughout the series, she struggles with the tension between wanting to live a normal, peaceful life like other kids and the reality of her dangerous abilities that often put her and her friends in harm’s way.
This conflict creates cognitive dissonance: on one hand, Eleven wants to be just a regular kid; on the other, she feels responsible for using her powers to protect her friends and fight threats.
To reduce this internal discomfort, she justifies risking her safety by focusing on the importance of her role as a protector and the deep bonds she has formed.
This justification helps her reconcile the clash between her desire for normalcy and the extraordinary demands placed on her.
2. Euphoria – Rue’s Addiction vs. Recovery
Rue is a teenager battling drug addiction while simultaneously wanting to get clean and build a healthier life.
She experiences intense cognitive dissonance because her behavior (using drugs) conflicts with her belief and desire to recover.
This internal conflict produces feelings of guilt, shame, and anxiety.
To reduce this dissonance and manage her emotional pain, Rue often rationalizes her drug use by telling herself it helps her cope with trauma or that she can quit “anytime.”
These justifications provide temporary relief from the mental discomfort but ultimately perpetuate the cycle of addiction.
Her struggle vividly illustrates how cognitive dissonance can maintain harmful habits by driving self-justifying thought patterns that prevent genuine behavior change.
3. Mean Girls – Cady Heron’s Social Conflict
Cady Heron starts high school valuing kindness, honesty, and being true to herself.
However, as she becomes part of the popular clique called the “Plastics,” she gradually adopts manipulative and deceptive behaviors that conflict with her original values.
This clash creates cognitive dissonance—an uncomfortable internal conflict between who she believes she is and how she is acting.
To ease this mental discomfort, Cady justifies her manipulative actions as a necessary strategy to navigate the complex and often ruthless social hierarchy of high school.
She convinces herself that bending her values is essential for survival and acceptance, which allows her to reconcile the conflict without fully abandoning her self-image.
4. The Truman Show – Truman’s Reality Conflict
Truman Burbank lives an apparently perfect, idyllic life, but he gradually starts noticing strange inconsistencies – people acting oddly, events repeating, and the world around him feeling artificial.
His deep-seated belief that his reality is genuine clashes with these growing signs that his entire life is a staged TV show, creating intense cognitive dissonance.
This internal conflict causes Truman discomfort and confusion, driving him to question everything he knows.
Motivated by this tension, he actively seeks the truth, pushing past the boundaries of his controlled environment.
Ultimately, his determination to resolve the dissonance leads him to break free from the fabricated world and reclaim his autonomy.
5. Breaking Bad – Walter White: Family vs. Crime
Walter starts as a mild-mannered chemistry teacher who values family and integrity but begins manufacturing methamphetamine to secure his family’s financial future after his cancer diagnosis.
He faces dissonance between his self-image as a good person and his illegal, harmful actions.
As Walter continues down this path, he copes with the internal conflict by rationalizing his actions as necessary sacrifices for the well-being of his family.
He convinces himself that breaking the law and risking harm is justified because it secures his loved ones’ financial security, allowing him to maintain a sense of moral purpose despite his harmful behavior.
6. The Office – Michael Scott’s Leadership Dissonance
Michael Scott frequently expresses that he cares deeply about his employees and wants to be a great boss.
However, his actions often contradict this self-perception – he can be insensitive, inappropriate, or self-centered, which sometimes harms his relationships at work.
This inconsistency between how he sees himself and how he actually behaves creates cognitive dissonance.
To reduce this uncomfortable conflict, Michael often rationalizes his mistakes, blaming external factors or misunderstandings rather than acknowledging his faults.
He might tell himself that his unconventional behavior is just his unique way of showing care, helping him maintain a positive self-image despite his problematic actions.
What causes cognitive dissonance?
Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling you get when your beliefs or actions don’t match.
This mental tension motivates you to change your thoughts or behaviors, or to find reasons to justify the difference, so you can feel more consistent inside.
1. Forced Compliance Behavior
Forced compliance behavior happens when someone is pressured to do something that goes against their true beliefs or feelings.
This creates a conflict inside because their actions don’t match what they really think.
How it works:
Since the behavior is already done and can’t be changed, the individual often reduces dissonance by changing their attitude toward the behavior.
They might convince themselves that what they did wasn’t so bad or even that they actually agreed with it all along.
Classic Study – Festinger and Carlsmith (1959):
In this experiment, participants completed a series of boring tasks (e.g., turning pegs on a board) and were then asked to tell a waiting participant that the tasks were interesting. Some were paid $1, others $20 to lie.
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Participants paid $1 had insufficient external justification for lying, so they experienced strong dissonance. To reduce it, they changed their attitudes and rated the task as more enjoyable.
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Participants paid $20 had sufficient external justification (the money), so they felt less dissonance and maintained their original negative attitude toward the task.
This study demonstrated how insufficient rewards or pressure increase dissonance and motivate attitude change.
2. Effort Justification
Effort justification occurs when people put a lot of time, energy, or effort into something disappointing or unpleasant.
To avoid the discomfort of feeling their effort was wasted, they convince themselves the outcome was worthwhile.
Why it happens:
If we spend a great deal of effort on something and then evaluate it negatively, this creates dissonance.
To reduce this, we reshape our perception, emphasizing positive aspects or finding new value in the experience.
Classic Study – Aronson and Mills (1959):
Female participants volunteered for a discussion group on the psychology of sex.
Before joining, they underwent either a mild embarrassment (reading neutral sex-related words) or severe embarrassment (reading explicit sexual material).
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After enduring the initiation, all participants listened to a very dull discussion.
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Those in the severe embarrassment condition rated the discussion as significantly more interesting and valuable than those in the mild or no-embarrassment groups.
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This showed that the severe effort justified their discomfort by increasing the perceived value of the discussion, reducing dissonance.
3. Decision Making
Making a decision between two or more attractive options often creates dissonance because each choice has both positive and negative aspects.
Why dissonance occurs:
After making a choice, people feel uneasy about the benefits they gave up from the other options.
To reduce this discomfort, they focus on the positives of their choice and downplay the negatives, helping them feel confident and satisfied with their decision.
This process is known as spreading of alternatives.
Classic Study – Brehm (1956):
Participants rated several household products, then chose between two items that were similarly attractive. After making their choice, they rated the products again.
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Those who faced more difficult decisions (choosing between nearly equally rated items) showed greater spreading of alternatives—they rated their chosen item higher and the rejected one lower.
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This adjustment helped reduce the dissonance caused by the decision.
Additional Causes of Cognitive Dissonance
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Contradictory beliefs: Holding opposing beliefs simultaneously (e.g., believing in honesty but telling a lie) causes tension.
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Behavior conflicting with values: Acting against personal morals or values can trigger dissonance and guilt.
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New information: Encountering facts that challenge deeply held beliefs may cause dissonance, leading to denial or attitude change.
How To Reduce Cognitive Dissonance
Changing attitudes or behaviors can be difficult. Sometimes, people hold onto dissonance or engage in avoidance, denial, or other defense mechanisms that may lead to irrational or inconsistent behaviors.
1. Behavior Change
When the dissonance involves a behavior that conflicts with a belief, the most direct way to reduce it is to change or eliminate the behavior.
For example, a smoker who believes smoking is harmful may quit smoking to resolve the conflict.
However, this can be very challenging because well-learned behaviors or habits are hard to break. People often find it easier to use mental strategies before attempting behavior change.
2. Rationalization
Rationalization involves creating explanations or excuses to make conflicting behavior or beliefs seem acceptable.
Instead of changing behavior, the individual alters how they think about the situation.
For example, a smoker might say, “I only smoke occasionally,” or “It helps me relax,” which lessens the conflict without quitting.
3. Justification through New Information
People often seek or emphasize new information that outweighs the conflicting belief.
For instance, a smoker may focus on studies suggesting that “research has not definitively proven that smoking causes lung cancer,” thus reducing the dissonance by questioning the strength of the original belief.
4. Attitude Adjustment
Another powerful way to reduce dissonance is by adjusting one’s attitudes or beliefs to better align with behavior.
This includes “spreading apart the alternatives,” where a person increases the attractiveness of their chosen behavior and decreases the appeal of the rejected options or conflicting beliefs.
For example, someone might convince themselves that “living for today” and enjoying pleasures like smoking is more important than worrying about long-term health consequences.
This reduces the perceived importance of the dissonant cognition, such as “smoking is harmful to my health.”
Critical Evaluation
There has been a great deal of research into cognitive dissonance, providing some interesting and sometimes unexpected findings.
It is a theory with very broad applications, showing that we aim for consistency between attitudes and behaviors and may not use very rational methods to achieve it.
It has the advantage of being testable by scientific means (i.e., experiments).
However, there is a problem from a scientific point of view because we cannot physically observe cognitive dissonance, and therefore we cannot objectively measure it (re: behaviorism). Consequently, the term cognitive dissonance is somewhat subjective.
There is also some ambiguity (i.e., vagueness) about the term “dissonance” itself.
Is it a perception (as “cognitive” suggests), a feeling, or a feeling about a perception? Aronson’s Revision of the idea of dissonance as an inconsistency between a person’s self-concept and a cognition about their behavior makes it seem likely that dissonance is really nothing more than guilt.
There are also individual differences in whether or not people act as this theory predicts. Highly anxious people are more likely to do so. Many people seem able to cope with considerable dissonance and not experience the tensions the theory predicts.
Finally, many of the studies supporting the theory of cognitive dissonance have low ecological validity. For example, turning pegs (as in Festinger’s experiment) is an artificial task that doesn’t happen in everyday life.
Also, the majority of experiments used students as participants, which raises issues of a biased sample. Could we generalize the results from such experiments?
How do people resolve the dissonance when two central aspects of their identity conflict?
In one study, researchers wondered how gay men who were strongly identified with their Christian church dealt with anti-gay pronouncements from their ministers.
One way to resolve dissonance would be to change their behavior – that is, to change their church or even leave their religion.
But those who decide to stay in the church resolve dissonance by focusing on the shortcomings of the minister.
For example, they say, “It’s not my religion that promotes this prejudice—it’s the bigotry of this particular preacher” (Pitt, 2010).
Cultural Aspects of Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a universal psychological phenomenon, but the specific beliefs or behaviors that cause dissonance, as well as how people reduce it, can vary significantly across cultures due to differing social norms.
In collectivist societies, where maintaining group harmony often takes precedence over individual desires, outward dissonance-reducing behaviors may be less visible.
However, individuals in these cultures may experience stronger internal dissonance when their actions bring shame or disappointment to their family or community.
For example, Japanese individuals might vicariously experience dissonance on behalf of close friends or family members who behave inconsistently (Sakai, 1999)
In turn, they may adjust their own attitudes to align with the dissonance-reducing behaviors of those in their social group.
Additionally, the public or private nature of a decision interacts with cultural values to influence whether dissonance arises and how urgently it needs to be resolved.
Choices made in public, where social evaluation is high, tend to create more pressure for dissonance reduction, especially in cultures emphasizing social conformity.
What is the difference between cognitive dissonance theory and balance theory?
Cognitive dissonance theory, proposed by Festinger, focuses on the discomfort felt when holding conflicting beliefs or attitudes, leading individuals to seek consistency.
Heider’s Balance Theory, on the other hand, emphasizes the desire for balanced relations among triads of entities (like people and attitudes), with imbalances prompting changes in attitudes to restore balance.
Both theories address cognitive consistency, but in different contexts.
References
Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177.
Brehm, J. W. (1956). Postdecision changes in the desirability of alternatives. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52(3), 384.
Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Festinger, L. (1959). Some attitudinal consequences of forced decisions. Acta Psychologica, 15, 389-390.
Festinger, L. (Ed.). (1964). Conflict, decision, and dissonance (Vol. 3) . Stanford University Press.
Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203.
Pitt, R. N. (2010). “Killing the messenger”: Religious black gay men’s neutralization of anti‐gay religious messages. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49(1), 56-72.
Sakai, H. (1999). A multiplicative power-function model of cognitive dissonance: Toward an integrated theory of cognition, emotion, and behavior after Leon Festinger. In Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association, 48th, Oct, 1984, Osaka, Japan; Portions of this chapter were presented at the 48th Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association, Osaka, Japan, Oct 1984, and at the 7th International Kurt Lewin Conference, Los Angeles, California, Sep 1996.. American Psychological Association.
