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What Is Cognitive Dissonance Theory?

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Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors.

This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.

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 investigated by Leon Festinger, arising out of a participant observation study of a cult that believed that the earth was going to be destroyed by a flood, and what happened to its members — particularly the really committed ones who had given up their homes and jobs to work for the cult — when the flood did not happen.

While fringe members were more inclined to recognize that they had made fools of themselves and to “put it down to experience,” committed members were more likely to re-interpret the evidence to show that they were right all along (the earth was not destroyed because of the faithfulness of the cult members).

How Attitude Change Takes Place

Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and behavior in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance). This is known as the principle of cognitive consistency.

When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance.

Notice that dissonance theory does not state that these modes of dissonance reduction will actually work, only that individuals who are in a state of cognitive dissonance will take steps to reduce the extent of their dissonance.

The theory of cognitive dissonance has been widely researched in a number of situations to develop the basic idea in more detail, and various factors have been identified which may be important in attitude change.

What Causes Cognitive Dissonance?

• Forced Compliance Behavior,
• Decision Making,

We will look at the main findings to have emerged from each area.

Forced Compliance Behavior

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).

Forced compliance occurs when an individual performs an action that is inconsistent with his or her beliefs. The behavior can’t be changed since it was already in the past, so dissonance will need to be reduced by re-evaluating their attitude toward what they have done. This prediction has been tested experimentally:

In an intriguing experiment, Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) asked participants to perform a series of dull tasks (such as turning pegs in a peg board for an hour). As you can imagine, participant’s attitudes toward this task were highly negative.

Example of Cognitive Dissonance

Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) investigated if making people perform a dull task would create cognitive dissonance through forced compliance behavior.

In their laboratory experiment, they used 71 male students as participants to perform a series of dull tasks (such as turning pegs in a peg board for an hour).

They were then paid either $1 or $20 to tell a waiting participant (a confederate) that the tasks were really interesting. Almost all of the participants agreed to walk into the waiting room and persuade the confederate that the boring experiment would be fun.

When the participants were asked to evaluate the experiment, the participants who were paid only $1 rated the tedious task as more fun and enjoyable than the participants who were paid $20 to lie.

Being paid only $1 is not sufficient incentive for lying and so those who were paid $1 experienced dissonance. They could only overcome that dissonance by coming to believe that the tasks really were interesting and enjoyable. Being paid $20 provides a reason for turning pegs, and there is, therefore, no dissonance.

Decision Making

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

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.

Either way, you would experience dissonance. If you took the job you would miss your loved ones; if you turned the job down, you would pine for the beautiful streams, mountains, and valleys.

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, yet it assures you that you must accept the disadvantages of the chosen alternative.

Brehm (1956) was the first to investigate the relationship between dissonance and decision-making.

Female participants were informed they would be helping out in a study funded by several manufacturers. Participants were also told that they would receive one of the products at the end of the experiment to compensate for their time and effort.

The women then rated the desirability of eight household products that ranged in price from $15 to $30. The products included an automatic coffee maker, an electric sandwich grill, an automatic toaster, and a portable radio.

Participants in the control group were simply given one of the products. Because these participants did not make a decision, they did not have any dissonance to reduce. Individuals in the low-dissonance group chose between a desirable product and one rated 3 points lower on an 8-point scale.

Participants in the high-dissonance condition chose between a highly desirable product and one rated just 1 point lower on the 8-point scale. After reading the reports about the various products, individuals rated the products again.

Participants in the high-dissonance condition spread apart the alternatives significantly more than the participants in the other two conditions.

In other words, they were more likely than participants in the other two conditions to increase the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and to decrease the attractiveness of the unchosen alternative.

It also seems to be the case that we value most highly those goals or items which have required considerable effort to achieve.

This is probably because dissonance would be 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.

In fact, though, it seems we find it easier to persuade ourselves that what we have achieved is worthwhile, and that’s what most of us do, evaluating highly something whose achievement has cost us dear – whether other people think it’s much cop or not!

This method of reducing dissonance is known as “effort justification.”

If we put effort into a task that we have chosen to carry out, and the task turns out badly, we experience dissonance. To reduce this dissonance, we are motivated to try to think that the task turned out well.

A classic dissonance experiment by Aronson and Mills (1959) demonstrates the basic idea.

To investigate the relationship between dissonance and effort.

Female students volunteered to take part in a discussion on the psychology of sex. In the “mild embarrassment” condition, participants read aloud to a male experimenter a list of sex-related words like “virgin” and “prostitute.”

In the “severe embarrassment” condition, they had to read aloud obscene words and a very explicit sexual passage.

In the control condition, they went straight into the main study. In all conditions, they then heard a very boring discussion about sex in lower animals. They were asked to rate how interesting they had found the discussion and how interesting they had found the people involved in it.

Participants in the “severe embarrassment” condition gave the most positive rating.

If a voluntary experience that has cost a lot of effort turns out badly, the dissonance is reduced by redefining the experience as interesting. This justifies the effort made.

How To Reduce Cognitive Dissonance

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.

Change one or more of the attitudes, behavior, beliefs, etc., to make the relationship between the two elements a consonant one.

When one of the dissonant elements is a behavior, the individual can change or eliminate the behavior.

However, this mode of dissonance reduction frequently presents problems for people, as it is often difficult for people to change well-learned behavioral responses (e.g., giving up smoking).

This is often very difficult, as people frequently employ a variety of mental maneuvers.

Acquire new information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs.

For example, thinking smoking causes lung cancer will cause dissonance if a person smokes.

However, new information such as “research has not proved definitely that smoking causes lung cancer” may reduce the dissonance.

Reduce the importance of the cognitions (i.e., beliefs, attitudes).

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

A person could convince themself that it is better to “live for today” than to “save for tomorrow.”

In other words, he could tell himself that a short life filled with smoking and sensual pleasures is better than a long life devoid of such joys. In this way, he would be decreasing the importance of dissonant cognition (smoking is bad for one’s 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?

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.

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.

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Cognitive Dissonance

Festinger & carlsmith's study, festinger & carlsmith's study.

Every individual has his or her own way of evaluating their own selves and usually this is done by comparing themselves to others. This is manifested in the phenomenon called cognitive dissonance. This is further explained in Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith's study in 1954.

This article is a part of the guide:

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• 1 Social Psychology Experiments
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• 3 Bobo Doll Experiment
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• 8 Sherif’s Robbers Cave
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• 14 Understanding and Belief
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• 17 Confirmation Bias
• 18 Overjustification Effect
• 19 Choice Blindness
• 20.1 Cognitive Dissonance
• 21.1 Social Group Prejudice
• 21.2 Intergroup Discrimination
• 21.3 Selective Group Perception

Cognitive dissonance is one form of social comparison. The Social Comparison Theory was originally proposed by Leon Festinger in 1954. According to the social psychologist, the social comparison theory is the idea that there is a drive within individuals to search for outside images in order to evaluate their own opinions and abilities. The said images can be a reference to physical reality or in comparison to other people.

In the process, people look at the images portrayed by others as something obtainable and realistic, and subsequently, make comparisons among themselves, others and the idealized images.

Generally speaking, the social comparison theory explains how individuals evaluate their opinion and desires by comparing themselves to others.

Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith conducted a study on cognitive dissonance investigating on the cognitive consequences of forced compliance. In the study, undergraduate students of Introductory Psychology at Stanford University were asked to take part of a series of experiments.

It was explained to them that the Department of Psychology is conducting the study and they are therefore required to serve in the experiments. They were told that the study aims to evaluate these experiments to help them improve these in the future. The students will be interviewed after participating in the experiment and were encouraged to be completely honest in these interviews.

The participants were 71 male students in totality.

Methodology

The 71 subjects were informed that the experiment focuses on the "Measures of Performance." The participants were asked to carry out series of monotonous tasks that were meant to be boring and nonsensical. Specifically, subjects were asked to put spools onto and then off the try with the use of only one hand for half an hour, and then for the next half hour, turn square pegs clockwise in quarter turns, and then start all over again once the whole cycle's been finished for all 48 square pegs.

The subjects were divided into two groups, A and B, where Group A was provided no introduction regarding the tasks they will be performing and Group B was. Group B was given introduction by an experimenter, presenting the tasks in an interesting and enjoyable tone.

After performing the tasks, each of the subjects was then interviewed regarding how enjoyable the tasks were to him. Festinger and Carlsmith then investigated whether there's a standing evidence of cognitive dissonance where boring tasks were seen as enjoyable.

A fraction of the subjects were thanked and let go after being interviewed by another experimenter regarding ways on how the presentation of the boring tasks can be improved for future purposes. The said group served as the control group of the experiment.

The remaining subjects were asked to take the place of an experimenter, if they would want to. Their job is to give the next group of participants a delightful introduction of the tasks they have previously performed. Half of them were offered $1 to do the job, while the remaining half was offered $20.

The subjects were then again interviewed afterwards and were asked to rate four different areas of the experiment. The first area is whether the tasks were interesting and enjoyable at all. Subjects rated this using a scale of negative 5 to positive 5 (-5 to +5).

The second area is whether the experiment gave the participant an opportunity to discover their own skills, using the scale of 0 to 10. The third asks whether that subject finds the activity important, again using the scale of 0 to 10. And lastly, participants were asked whether they would want to participate again in the future in a study the same as this, using the scale -5 to +5.

Like in every other study, there are some responses that are deemed to be invalid. In Festinger and Carlsmith's experiment, 11 of the 71 responses were considered invalid for a couple of reasons.

Among the paid participants, 5 had suspicions about getting paid for the designated task. These made them question what the real purpose of the study is. In addition to these 5 exceptions, another 2 of the paid participants told the girl the truth that the tasks she will be performing are boring and uninteresting, and that they were just being paid to say otherwise. Three other participants declined the offer and another one, though he gave the girl a positive briefing, he asked for the girl's number afterwards so he can, according to him, explain to her further what the study is about.

Putting these 11 in exception, the 60 remaining responses are the following:

One of the questions that Festinger and Carlsmith were aiming to answer is how enjoyable were the tasks for the participants. Results of the experiment showed that even though the tasks were indeed boring and uninteresting, the unpaid control group rated the activity a negative 0.45 (-0.45). Those who were paid $1 rated the activity a positive 1.35 (+1.35), while those who were paid $20 gave it a rating of negative 0.5 (-0.5). The results, according to the researchers, display the cognitive dissonance phenomenon.

According to Festinger and Carlsmith, the participants experienced dissonance between the conflicting cognitions of telling someone that a particular task is interesting when the truth is, they found it rather uninteresting and boring. Those who were paid $1 were forced to rationalize their own judgments and convinced themselves that what they were doing is enjoyable because they had no other justification. On the other hand, the ones who were paid $20, apparently had the money as their primary justification for carrying out their task.

The researchers further concluded, with the help of the said results, that with $1, participants found no significant justification thus the occurrence of cognitive dissonance. When they were asked to lie about how they truly feel about the task, they force themselves to feel what they were induced to feel and express. This hypothetical stress brings the subject to intrinsically believe that the activity is indeed interesting and enjoyable.

In conclusion, people, when persuaded to lie without being given enough justification, will perform a task by convincing themselves of the falsehood, rather than telling a lie.

While it is true that the experiment took place in the 50s, the results are still being recognized up to this date. It has received widespread attention after recently being published in an academic journal.

Wikipedia: Social Comparison Theory

Festinger and Carlsmith - cognitive dissonance , Cognitive consequences of Forced Compliance

Festinger, L. and Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). "Cognitive consequences of forced compliance". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203-211.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Introduction, general overviews.

• Core Historical Sources
• Biographies and Autobiography of Classic Contributors
• Classic and New Paradigms
• Other Dissonance Inducement Situations
• Moderators of Cognitive Dissonance
• Affect and Dissonance
• Physiological Measures
• Neuroimaging and the Cognitive Dissonance State
• Regulation Strategies Aiming at Inconsistency: Modes of Reduction
• Regulation Strategies Aiming at Discomfort: Palliative Regulations
• Factors Influencing Regulation
• Controversies and Critics
• Preconditions for Cognitive Dissonance
• Reformulations and New Models for the Dissonance Theory
• Intercultural Approach Dissonance and Cultural Context
• Dissonance in NonHuman Animals

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Cognitive Dissonance Theory by David C. Vaidis , Alexandre Bran LAST REVIEWED: 28 October 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 28 October 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199828340-0156

Appearing for the first time in the mid-20th century, the term “cognitive dissonance” appears nowadays about eight hundred times in PsycINFO and the original book has been cited more than forty-five thousand times in scientific publications: that is more than twice a day for about sixty years. The theory of cognitive dissonance was molded by Leon Festinger at the beginning of the 1950s. It suggests that inconsistencies among cognitions (i.e., knowledge, opinion, or belief about the environment, oneself, or one’s behavior) generate an uncomfortable motivating feeling (i.e., the cognitive dissonance state). According to the theory, people feel uncomfortable when they experience cognitive dissonance and thus are motivated to retrieve an acceptable state. The magnitude of existing dissonance depends on the importance of the involved cognitions. Experiencing a higher level of dissonance causes pressure and motivation to reduce the dissonance. Findings from several studies show that dissonance occurs when people do not act in accordance with their attitude (e.g., writing supportive arguments in favor of a topic that they do not agree upon; performing a task they disapprove). Festinger 1957 (cited under Core Historical Sources ) considers three ways to cope with cognitive dissonance: (a) changing one or several involved elements in the dissonance relationship (e.g., moving an opinion to fit a behavior), (b) adding new elements to reduce the inconsistency (e.g., adopting opinions that fit a behavior), and (c) reducing the importance of the involved elements. Early theorists in this field suggested improvement to the cognitive dissonance theory by adding restrictions for the emergence of the phenomena. Three major developments have to be considered: the commitment purpose and freedom, the consequence of the act purpose, and the self-involvement. Since the 2010s, the theory has been refined with new integrative models and methodological breakthrough. Mostly studied in human beings, several studies shift paradigms to other animals such as nonhuman primates, rats, and birds. The cognitive dissonance theory has been applied to a very large array of social situations and leads to original experimental designs. It is arguably one of the most influential theories in social psychology, general psychology, and cross-discipline sciences more generally.

The field of cognitive dissonance is broad. Several paradigms were developed and many theories coexist. There are plenty of sources, mostly scientific articles and books, that provide a wide overview of the literature on cognitive dissonance. After about a half century of the development of the theory, several authors have published condensed works and state-of-the-art pieces concerning the topic, but they often suggest a partially deviant point of view. Aronson 1992 and Brehm 2007 , written by two of Festinger’s historical students, offer historical anecdotic information as well as keystones to understand the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. In the same vein, Cooper 2019 proposes the author’s personal view of this story, focusing on his own theoretical achievements. Gawronski and Strack 2012 offers an overview of the cognitive consistency field. More aimed at advanced researchers in cognitive dissonance, Harmon-Jones 2019 (the second edition of Harmon-Jones and Mills 1999 ) is an edited volume that synthesizes modern perspectives on dissonance.

Aronson, Elliot. 1992. The return of the repressed: Dissonance theory makes a comeback. Psychological Inquiry 3:303–311.

DOI: 10.1207/s15327965pli0304_1

Aronson reviews the history of cognitive dissonance and mainly develops the self-consistency revision. This paper could be considered as the one that permits a regain of interest of the theory in the late 1990s.

Brehm, Jack W. 2007. A brief history of dissonance theory. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1:381–391.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00035.x

The paper reviews the storyline of cognitive dissonance theory, from Festinger’s very beginning up to the spreading of experimentations all over the world. The author does not develop the reformulations but presents an outline of the theory.

Cooper, Joel. 2019. Cognitive dissonance: Where we’ve been and where we’re going . International Review of Social Psychology 32.1.

DOI: 10.5334/irsp.277

Cooper examines the long history of critiques of the theory and offers a view of the current state of cognitive dissonance. Throughout the paper, Cooper reviews his important contributions to the field.

Festinger, Leon. 1962. A theory of cognitive dissonance . Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

The most essential work about the theory. Festinger develops the core concepts and then covers four situations of dissonance: consequences of decisions, forced compliance, exposure to information, and the role of social support. The last chapter also gives strong advice to improve and delimit the theory. The book has been initially printed in 1957 at Row Peterson and Company before being republished. The current available version is the one revised in 1985 by Festinger.

Gawronski, Bertram, and Fritz Strack. 2012. Cognitive consistency: A fundamental principle in social cognition . New York: Guilford Press.

This book provides an overview of the cognitive consistency field and of the place of cognitive dissonance theory.

Harmon-Jones, Eddie. 2019. Cognitive dissonance: Reexamining a pivotal theory in psychology . 2d ed. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Aimed at a postgraduate and researcher audience, this book is a collection of chapters written by various top experts in the field of cognitive dissonance. It offers a substantial panorama of the theories and research issues. The first edition was released in 1999 and the second edition proposed several updates.

Harmon-Jones, Eddie, and Judson Mills. 1999. Cognitive dissonance: Progress on a pivotal theory in social psychology . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

DOI: 10.1037/10318-000

Aimed at a postgraduate and researcher audience, this book is a collection of chapters written by various top experts in the field of cognitive dissonance. It offers a substantial panorama of the theories and research issues of the 2000s.

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Episode 20: The Cognitive Dissonance Episode

In 1957, Leon Festinger published  A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.  Along with a collection of compelling experiments, Festinger changed the landscape of social psychology. The theory, now referenced constantly both in and outside of academic circles, has taken on a life of its own. And it’s still informing new research and analysis more than 60 years later.

For the grand 20th episode of  Opinion Science , I want to give you an insider’s look at the theory–its inspiration, the people involved, the classic studies, and the remaining controversies.

Throughout the show you’ll hear from people who have studied cognitive dissonance and who knew the infamous Leon Festinger:  Elliot Aronson ,  Joel Cooper ,  Jeff Stone ,  April McGrath , and  Mike Gazzaniga .

To learn more about cognitive dissonance, check out these two books written by two of our guests:  Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of Classic Theory  and  Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) .

Download a PDF version of this episode’s transcript.

Open: Bihar Earthquake

It’s 1934. Mid-January. The people in India and Nepal are going about their day when out of nowhere, an 8.1 magnitude earthquake rumbled six miles south of Mt. Everest. It was one of the worst earthquakes in India’s history. 12,000 people died, and cities were destroyed. More than 80,000 houses were damaged. Most of the destruction was in northern India and Nepal, but people also felt the quake from more than a thousand miles away, even though these areas were spared much damage at all.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, a psychologist at Patna College—hundreds of miles from the epicenter—started recording the rumors that began spreading. The interesting thing was that during this time of panic and anxiety, people were spreading rumors that seemed like they only compounded their fear. One widely believed rumor was that there would be another severe earthquake on the next lunar eclipse day. Other rumors were that the water in the Ganges River had disappeared and that dangerous tornados and other calamities were on their way.

What sense did it make that people would be spreading anxiety-provoking rumors at a time when there was  already  so much fear?

Years later, this same question vexed the American psychologist Leon Festinger when he discovered a report of these old rumors. And his explanation grew into the theory of cognitive dissonance.

Introduction

You’re listening to Opinion Science, the show about opinions, where they come from and how they change. I’m Andy Luttrell. And this week we’re doing something a little different. Most of the time on this show I present a long interview with a social scientist or professional communicator. But this week I want to go all in to tell the story of cognitive dissonance theory. 

In 1976—almost 20 years after the theory of cognitive dissonance was first published—psychology historian Ned Jones wrote: “the dissonance research ‘movement’ has been the most important development in social psychology to date.”  

Fast forward to today, and psychologists are still studying and debating the finer points of dissonance. Thousands of experiments have been conducted, and new books updating the scientific record are still being published.

And it’s one of the concepts from the dungeons of academic psychology that’s gone mainstream. People constantly refer to it in the media and everyday conversations. But of course, when a scientific idea gets loose, it’s bound to take on a life of its own. So, today we’re gonna go deep and get some clarity on this influential and appealing theory. We’ll look at what dissonance is, what it does, and why psychologists have been fighting about it for the last 60 years.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Leon Festinger and the Origins of Dissonance

We wouldn’t have the theory of cognitive dissonance without Leon Festinger. Festinger grew up in Brooklyn in the 20s and graduated from the City College of New York in 1939. Even though he’s known for dissonance theory, he’s done just about everything else, too. After college, he went to the University of Iowa to get his PhD, where he did experiments on taste preferences in rats, developed new statistical tests, and even wrote a mathematical decision theory. When he finished his PhD, World War II was ramping up and as part of the war effort, he became senior statistician for the Committee on the Selection and Training of Aircraft Pilots at the University of Rochester. After the war, he spent time at MIT, then to the University of Michigan, then to the University of Minnesota, all the while studying how people’s beliefs and opinions adapt to their social surroundings. But our story really kicks into gear in 1955 when Festinger moves to Stanford University.

ELLIOT ARONSON : He was a really very bright guy, 39 years old, full professor with one of the highest paid faculty members on campus at age 39.

That’s Elliot Aronson. He was one of Festinger’s first graduate students at Stanford.

ELLIOT ARONSON : He and I arrived at the same time. He was just developing the theory of cognitive dissonance, at that time. And Festinger also had a reputation for being an extremely harsh, critical impatient, angry young man, which he was. And he also had the capacity to be warm and encouraging, but in order to get to the warmth, you had to go through an awful lot. There was a very high barrier there because he, he did not suffer fools gladly.

Professor Mike Gazzaniga knew Festinger from a different perspective. As a new professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, Gazzaniga met Festinger on a visit to Stanford. The two became friends and when both of them later ended up in New York City, they made a habit of getting lunch together every week.

MICHAEL GAZZANIGA : I skipped around. I was first at NYU. Then I went to Stony Brook. Then I went to Cornell. Then I was up to Dartmouth and all that time, the peg in the ground was lunch in New York with Leon.

And they’d talk about everything.

MICHAEL GAZZANIGA :  I mean, occasionally there would be an interlude where he’d talk about a recipe for potato pancakes, but normally it was about stuff, you know, intellectual stuff, and social stuff going on around us and new scientific findings. He had just such an analytical, challenging mind, you know? I mean, it’s just, you surely know people like that. I mean, he was a polymath. I mean, he knew stuff. I mean, from ancient history to the latest statistical variation to mathematics to political process science and of course, obviously social science. He just knew it all and you couldn’t find him thin in any, any area. And if he was thin, he wouldn’t be thin long. If it was of interest to him, he would, you know, Oh, I better go look that up.

But Festinger didn’t pull punches.

MICHAEL GAZZANIGA : I had written a new book and I, and I gave him a call. I was up at Dartmouth at the time, I think. And I said, so Leon, what’s new? You know, one of these conversational starters. He was on the phone in New York. And I remember his quip. He says, Well, I’m reading your new book and apparently not much. So that’s how you got it going with him and, uh, it was just sort of dry humor, you know, irony humor kind of stuff. And he just loved that kind of stuff and he’d call out the logic, whatever logical sequence you were in, he would call out the absurdity if he took a few steps further. He just was a very, very close and dear friend who was everything that people think he was in terms of his creative power, his smartness and all the rest of it. But, uh, I was lucky enough to fall into the category of being a friend too. So that was great.

So how did this feared and revered genius come up with the idea that reshaped social psychology?

Festinger had received a grant from the Ford Foundation, which was started by Henry Ford’s son—yes,  that  Henry Ford. The guy who invented the Model T car…and I guess my first car, which was a Ford Taurus? Anyhow, the Ford Foundation had reached out to Festinger to see if he was interested in summarizing all the research that had been done on the psychology of communication and social influence. The first topic his team tackled was the spreading of rumors, which led Festinger to the rumors following that giant earthquake.

To remind you where we left off with that, Festinger writes that the thing about these rumors that was so bizarre was that after this earthquake, “the vast majority of the rumors that were widely circulated predicted even worse disasters to come in the very near future.” Why add insult to injury by combining widespread fear with more widespread fear?

The key, Festinger figured, was that these were rumors being spread “among people who felt the shock of the earthquake but who didn’t see any damage or destruction.” So these are people who were still feeling upset and afraid and anxious following their experience and news of the earthquake, but when they looked around, nothing was out of place—no destruction, no clear threat to their safety. “Something’s not right,” they might be thinking. “Why am I still feeling so anxious when there’s nothing scary here?” These pieces just don’t fit.

“But …if I can believe that something bad is  about  to happen, then the fear I’m feeling makes sense.” Festinger said that these rumors weren’t fear-provoking rumors after all. Instead, we might call them “fear-justifying” rumors. Beliefs that help explain why we’re still afraid.

This was the seed of cognitive dissonance.

Defining Dissonance

Okay, so what is cognitive dissonance, exactly? Well, swimming around in your head are all sorts of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs…Festinger called those  cognitions . Just a fancy way of saying “little bits of knowledge.”

And cognitive dissonance occurs whenever those little bits of knowledge are inconsistent with each other. When they don’t fit together. Specifically, it’s when one thought doesn’t logically follow from the other. Like in the case of the earthquake rumors, people’s feelings of fear didn’t logically follow from the fact that their community wasn’t any different than it was before.

Or how about another example? If you care about the environment but you fly internationally five times a year, that’s likely to produce dissonance. We can map it out by defining the two thoughts in question.

Thought #1: “It’s essential that we slow the pace of climate change.”

Thought #2: “I take one of the most environmentally-unfriendly modes of transportation constantly.”

Yikes. The second thought doesn’t logically follow from the first. If you really care about slowing down climate change, then you should not be acting in ways that contribute to it. That’s inconsistent. That’s dissonant.

And the whole idea at the center of the theory of cognitive dissonance is that when we face inconsistent bits of knowledge, it’s unpleasant, even physically uncomfortable. And we feel driven to do something about it.

Reducing Dissonance

JOEL COOPER : People just don’t let it pass. We can’t let it pass any more than we can let you know, let it go when we’re thirsty and we need to get, we need a drink of water. We’ve got to find the water. 

That’s Joel Cooper. He’s a professor of psychology at Princeton University and author of the book:  Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory.

JOEL COOPER : Festinger’s saying when you, are in a situation of inconsistency, you’ve got to find the proverbial water. You’ve got to do the resolution. There are really so many things people can do to resolve the inconsistency. The point is we have to find something to do.

So what  do  we do?  How  do we feel okay again when we’re hit with a bad case of dissonance? I talked to April McGrath, psychology professor at Mount Royal University. A few years ago she published an article on all the ways in which people deal with dissonance.

She notes that Festinger proposed three ways people address dissonance when they experience it.

APRIL MCGRATH : So, change a cognition or behavior. Add a cognition. Or alter the importance of the cognition.

So let’s explore these three modes of dissonance reduction. And as we encounter them, let’s keep our example in mind: someone who’s struck with the realization that they’re an environmentalist who often travels on airplanes.

Option #1. Change a cognition or a behavior. If two thoughts don’t fit together, you can update one of them to bring everything into balance. Like if an app stops working on your phone, you can update the software to make it compatible again. Same with your thoughts—if one thought isn’t compatible with the other, you might need to update one of them. In this case you could back away from your environmentalist values, I don’t know—become a climate change denier. Then your international trips are fine.

But maybe you’ve invested too much in that belief—you’re the chairperson of the Earth Day committee, you’ve written books on the horrors of climate change. It’s going to be near impossible to actually change that part of the equations. 

So if you can’t change the belief…

APRIL MCGRATH : I mean going forward, I guess you could try to change your behavior and you could try to fly less and do more teleconferencing or something like that.

To stay true to your environmental values, you could update your actions so that your thoughts and behaviors are in harmony.

At least in this example, both changing beliefs and changing behaviors sounds too hard. Fortunately, we’ve got options!

Option #2: Add a cognition. This just means introducing a new thought to the equation that helps you justify the inconsistency.

APRIL MCGRATH : So one reduction mode that I think would fall under adding a cognition is denying responsibility.

If I didn’t cause the inconsistency, it’s not my job to do anything about it. So when it comes to the flying environmentalist…

APRIL MCGRATH : If you thought of it, as you know, it was a necessary part of perhaps your job or what you have to do, then you really don’t have any choice and you have to take these flights. So you’re totally justified in partaking in those behaviors.

But let’s say you’re definitely responsible. You could try to deal with the dissonance by bringing in a different kind of rationalization. Maybe you try to claim that that air travel actually  doesn’t  harm the environment at all. Then your behavior is fine.

But that might be a little far-fetched.

APRIL MCGRATH : The different ways to reduce dissonance are constrained by reality.

At this point it would be a little hard to deny flying’s environmental footprint. It’s too well-established, and most people aren’t completely delusional—they still need to reduce dissonance within the bounds of reason.

The third option that Festinger outlined was trivializing the inconsistency—minimizing its importance. The amount of dissonance we experience is based on how important the inconsistent thoughts are. When two cherished beliefs clash, it makes for lots of dissonance. But if the pieces are trivial, then we don’t really care that they conflict. This means that when we’re faced with dissonance, rather than changing our beliefs and finding a way to justify the inconsistency, we could just say: “Eh, this one’s not a big deal.”

APRIL MCGRATH : Yeah, you know what, flying isn’t great for the environment, but there’s also lots of other behaviors that negatively affect the environment. And maybe, you know, you haven’t engaged in those recently. So by comparison, doing some flights, isn’t, isn’t quite so bad.

So any of these three strategies—changing one of the inconsistent pieces, adding a new thought that justifies the inconsistency, or just rendering the inconsistency trivial—they all serve to combat the bad feeling we get when we experience cognitive dissonance.

APRIL MCGRATH : And then, well, another option, would be distraction or forgetting. You don’t actually have to do something to directly deal with the discrepancy. And lots of us experience distractions throughout our days. And so we can easily distract ourselves with our phones or other devices. And we can also just, you know, forget about it and move on to something else that’s going to take over our attention.

Faced with all of these ways to reduce dissonance, which ones will people choose? Unfortunately, that’s one of the less developed aspects of dissonance theory, but there’s been some work on it. Although all of these strategies could address the unpleasant feeling that comes with cognitive dissonance, they differ in how useful they are in the moment, but they also differ in how  difficult  they are. And if you’ve ever resigned yourself to keep watching something on TV because you couldn’t reach the remote…you know people are good at avoiding things that take effort. With dissonance, it can be hard to change our behavior or let go of something we’ve believed for a long time. If the belief is pretty minor, we can rethink it but otherwise it’s easier to simply justify the inconsistency.

Granted, this seems to paint a pretty pathetic picture of human beings… 

APRIL MCGRATH : I think sometimes, you know, when people learn about cognitive dissonance theory, it’s brought up as this example of how irrational people are. And it’s like, Oh, look at how silly we are. And we do all these things to justify our behavior. But, you know, lots of dissonance researchers have made the argument that this is actually an adaptive process. There’s actually a good function served by this, which is that well, you know, we have to make sense of our world. And we also want to be able to act effectively. That discomfort that you feel when you recognize a discrepancy indicates, Oh, something is off here. I need to address something. And you have to figure out what to do in order to go forward. And alleviating dissonance, I think this is something that we do on a daily basis, and it’s important that we’re able to do that because we don’t want to get stuck in these dilemmas. We want to be able to proceed with our day, go on to other things and act appropriately. So as much as the theory is sometimes talked about in a way to say like, Oh, look how ridiculous we are. I think there’s actually a really adaptive process here. And it’s important to be able to alleviate dissonance.

Hey everyone. Just butting in to say thanks for listening. I also want to ask—if you like and support the show, please take a minute to leave a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Share with your friends, social media networks, and that one uncle who seems to think he understands psychology but doesn’t. You can keep up with the show by subscribing and following @OpinionSciPod on Facebook or Twitter. Thanks so much for your support. Back to the show!

Experiment #1: Saying Something You Don’t Believe

Okay, the first example of dissonance we’ll consider is a now-classic experiment by Leon Festinger and Merrill Carlsmith. The study came out in 1959—after Festinger’s book on dissonance and after some of the original studies, but this,  this  is the study that put dissonance on the map. As Joel Cooper puts it—

JOEL COOPER : my view is that Festinger and Carlsmith–that study changed the landscape

Or as Elliot Aronson calls it: 

ELLIOT ARONSON : the single most important experiment ever done in social psychology

So we know about Festinger—but who’s Merrill Carlsmith? He was actually a college senior who took a class with Festinger and came up with the idea for the study as his final paper. Can you imagine being a college senior and coming up with a study that rocks an entire academic discipline? I have a PhD and I’m still working on that.

ELLIOT ARONSON : I actually worked with Merrill Carlsmith to bring him up to speed as an experiment or because he was a pretty stiff guy when he was an undergraduate. He got a lot better. He became my graduate student at Harvard. So, you know, we stayed together, but as an undergraduate, I knew him and liked him at Stanford when I was a first year graduate student. And so I worked with him, I trained him to be an effective experimenter, and we knew it at the time we thought, you know, I wasn’t sure this, that experiment would work, but I understood the theory. And when those results were coming out, it was very exciting.

So what is this study, and why did it change the game?

Let’s go back to Stanford University in the late 50s. 

Students in the intro to psychology course had the chance to sign up for all sorts of psychology studies. One of them was listed as a 2-hour study on “Measures of Performance.” Why anyone would choose that is beyond me, but they got a bunch of students to sign up.

When a student would arrive, he’d sit down at a table and was given a bunch of spools. His task? Take 12 spools and put them on a tray, one at a time, using just one hand. Then empty the tray. And do it all over again…for  half an hour!  Thirty minutes of putting spools on a tray, emptying the tray, putting spools back on the tray, emptying the tray, putting spools back on the tray, emptying the tray…

Oh, and the fun had only begun! The experimenter took the spools away and then gave the student a board with 48 square pegs—and these pegs were like knobs you could turn. So for next half hour, the student would turn each of these 48 pegs a quarter turn, then start back at the beginning and rotate them all a quarter turn again, then back to the beginning…another set of quarter turns…

And what was the point of all this spool organizing and peg turning? The point was just to give everyone an unpleasant experience. After spending an  hour  silently doing monotonous, repetitive tasks for no reason,  anyone  would have to be thinking, “This has to be the most boring hour of my life.”

But the experiment had only just started cooking. Because when the student finishes, the experimenter has one more favor to ask.

EXPERIMENTER : O.K. Well, that’s all we have in the experiment itself. I’d like to explain what this has been all about so you’ll have some idea of why you were doing this. Well, the way the experiment is set up is this…

The experimenter explains that they’re studying how people’s expectations affect their performance on mundane activities. So sometimes they have an actor pretend to be another student who just took the experiment, and this actor tells the next participant that the experiment is actually really fun and interesting…leading them to  expect  to have a good time.

EXPERIMENTER : Now, I have a sort of strange thing to ask you. The thing is this…The fellow who normally does this for us couldn’t do it today—he just phoned in, and something or other came up for him—so we’ve been looking around for someone that we could hire to do it for us. We’ve got someone waiting who is supposed to be in that other condition, and we were wondering if you could be our actor today. And if you’re willing to do this for us, we’d like to hire you to do it now and then be on call in the future, if something like this should ever happen again. Do you think you could do that for us?

So just to be clear, the idea is that the person who just spent an hour doing a mind-numbing, painfully boring study is about to go out and tell the next participant that it was actually really fun. And that’s going to make for some dissonance!

In other words, thought #1 is that they just did the world’s most boring study.

Thought #2 is that they told someone it was actually fun. These are inconsistent. Telling someone the study is fun doesn’t logically follow from believing the study is actually boring.

But hang on—there’s one more detail I haven’t told you yet. When the experimenter’s asking the student to be their substitute actor, sometimes he sweetens the deal a bit, saying:

EXPERIMENTER : We can pay you a dollar for doing this for us. 

But  sometimes  he says: 

EXPERIMENTER : We can pay you twenty dollars for doing this for us.

Now, remember this is 1959. If we adjust for inflation, $1 then is like $9 now. 

But $20 then is more like $180 now.

So these students are either getting paid a piddly amount of money to lie to another student, to tell them that they had an amazing time in the study, or they’re making bank, pulling in a ton of money to tell the same lie. 

Okay, so the student got a dollar or $20, told the next participant that he had a ball putting spools on a tray, and as far as he’s concerned, the study’s over. But the ruse kept going. The experimenter said that the psychology department was interviewing a handful of students who participated in research studies apparently just to see how the research projects were going. So after everything seemed to be done, the student walked to another office to answer some questions about the study.

This interviewer—who apparently had no connection to the boring study—asked a few simple questions about how interesting the activities were and whether they’d be interested in signing up again.

If we go back to our dissonant thoughts—believing the study’s boring but also having told someone it was fun—how might people reduce that dissonance and feel okay?

Well, if you got a ton of money to do it, you could rationalize the inconsistency, thinking, “Sure, I lied, but I got paid a lot to do it.” And so when they got to the interviewer’s office, the students who had been paid $20 were happy to say: “Oh yeah, that study? Garbage. Not at all interesting or fun.”

But what if you only got a measly dollar? That’s not enough to justify the fact that you lied. You’re still stuck with the dissonance of saying one thing but believing another. How can you bring some consistency back into your brain? Well, you can’t take back what you said. But if you could convince yourself that the study was actually pretty interesting, then there’s no more dissonance! What you said to that poor student is actually what you believed—you would have said it even if you got nothing! And sure enough, when they got to the interviewer’s office, the students who only got paid a dollar said the study was interesting and they’d happily participate in another one like it.

Okay, so this study is a powerful test of cognitive dissonance theory—it created dissonance for the participants by making them believe one thing but say another and showed that when dissonance can’t be reduced any other way, people will change their own beliefs to make the dissonance go away.

But why is it…

Well, at the time, these findings challenged psychology’s primary way of understanding things. Back then, psychologists were focused on how people’s behavior is reinforced by rewards. The bigger the reward, the better we learn.

Probably the most famous psychologist who talked about reward and reinforcement was B. F. Skinner. He designed these simple tools to give pigeons some food as a reward for performing some action. And after rewarding the right behavior over and over again, he could train pigeons to do all sorts of things. I’ve tried the same with my cat, but I’m not having as much luck.

But the basic idea championed by Skinner and his pigeons was that we learn to do things we’re rewarded for. We call it  reinforcement theory .

JOEL COOPER : Everybody believes that rewards are critical to motivating behavior. Now Festinger and Carlsmith come and say, no rewards actually can reduce motivation. … And then you, you find major players in the field going after the theory, trying to show you why it was wrong.

The problem was that it was the people who got the  smallest  rewards—just $1—who ended up liking the whole study the  most . This was not okay with reinforcement theory. But in hindsight, it’s clear that Festinger was onto something, and he was bold enough to confront psychology’s assumptions with data to prove it.

ELLIOT ARONSON : And I actually talked to Fred Skinner about those a few years later when I was teaching at Harvard and he couldn’t really explain it, he really couldn’t explain it, or you tried, we will have lunch together. And, uh, and he thought, um, He thought, well, I’ll come up with an answer. So in terms of reinforcement theory, and I’ll give you a call and he never did so, but it’s, it was an amazing experiment.

Experiment #2: A Worthless Initiation

Okay—so the $1/$20 study showed us that we feel dissonance when we say something we don’t believe, and we can convince ourselves that we  actually  believe what we said as a way to bring balance back to our thoughts.

Let’s look at another kind of dissonance.

Have you ever put a lot of effort into something that ended up not being worth it? Or you spent a bunch of money on something that turned out to be basically garbage? Like imagine a big touring Broadway show is coming to your town. You shell out $100 for a ticket, go to a fancy dinner beforehand, arrange for a babysitter, the curtain rises…and the show is just not very good. The story’s boring, the music isn’t quite to your taste, the acting is…fine. That would make for some dissonance!

Think about it– Thought #1: I just spent a lot of my hard-earned money and devoted my whole evening to seeing this show.

Thought #2: This show sucks.

Well, you can’t get your money or your evening back, so you might try to resolve your dissonance by thinking…hey, you know, the music was actually very well performed, and the story did have some interesting turns that I didn’t see coming. You know what? The show wasn’t that bad. I’m glad we went.

Ta-da! Dissonance averted.

Another of the classic studies in cognitive dissonance tested this sort of scenario to see if people would actually convince themselves that a bad experience was actually worth the effort. It was a study by our friend, Elliot Aronson and his colleague, Judd Mills. 

ELLIOT ARONSON : I had been reading for another course some stuff by John Whiting, the anthropologist, and he was talking about how different indigenous groups usually have initiations into adulthood and some of the initiation were extremely severe. And it dawned on me, because I was also taking Festinger’s course in which he was talking about dissonance theory. And I was thinking, well I wonder if the people end up being more patriotic and really liking being a member of their tribe, much more than people who go through a mild initiation.

And so he constructed an initiation experience for student research participants. They first asked college women to volunteer to participate in a discussion group about the psychology of sex, figuring this would be a topic of interest for college students.

When a student would arrive to participate, the experimenter would say:

EXPERIMENTER : You’re going to join a group that’s been meeting for a few weeks already. They’ve already started this week’s discussion, but we need to make sure you’re ready to join them. Although most people are interested in sex, they tend to be a little shy when it comes to discussing it, which is a problem for our study. So it’s extremely important to arrange things so that the members of the discussion group can talk as freely and frankly as possible. We recently decided to screen new people before they join the group using what we call an “embarrassment test.” We’ll just ask you to read some sexually oriented material out loud so we can see if you’re comfortable discussing the topic.

At this point, the experimenter gives the young women a stack of index cards with words printed on them for her to read out loud.

For some of the women in the study, the words are pretty mild:  prostitute, virgin, petting .

But for other women, the words were more explicit: [bleeped].  And  they were asked to read a passage from a romance novel where the characters get it on.

And the more severe screening test might be embarrassing today, but this was in the 50s when it would have been even more trying for young women to be saying these things out loud to a male experimenter.

So everyone passes the test, they’ve been thoroughly initiated into this discussion group. Since that day’s discussion was already in progress, the women who just passed the initiation would only be allowed to listen in on the group’s discussion over an intercom. And what lewd and stimulating topics was the group discussing?

DISCUSSANT : So, the book was saying that for mating rituals, birds have, like, feathers—I forget what color, but like…blue? Or something? But that was supposed to be part of the mating stuff for birds—or one kind of bird.

It was a boring, bumbling, goes-nowhere discussion of the secondary sex behaviors in lower animals. Not what these women had signed up for! For the women who did the mild initiation, this was no big deal. But think of the dissonance for the women who went through a more severe initiation!

Thought #1: I just underwent a mild trauma, saying [bleeped] in front of this stranger to prove I’m worthy of the group.

Thought #2: This group sucks.

So when participants filled in a survey at the end of the session, women who did the mild screening test were happy to say, “Yeah, that was a boring discussion and those other women don’t seem that interesting either.” 

But the women who did the more severely embarrassing initiation? They had more dissonance to resolve. Lo and behold, they were more likely to say, “Well, the discussion touched on some interesting topics and those other women made some good points.” In other words—it was worth the effort it took to qualify for this group.

And these women weren’t just putting on an act. They seemed to really believe it.

ELLIOT ARONSON : a lot of the debriefing we did after these experiments really showed us how deeply the subjects were involved in the process of dissonance reduction, to the point where they would argue with us when we gave them the explanation of the experiment after it was over. You know, in my experiment, for example, when I explained our theory to them afterwards, most of the people in the severe initiation condition would say: Well, that’s a very interesting theory.

So you’re saying that that people who go through a lot of effort to get into the group, they ask themselves, why did I do all this work to get into such a boring group? Well, actually, you know, it wasn’t so boring. There was a lot of stuff in there that was interesting. You know, some things that the guys would say to me, “Well that’s an interesting theory and I’m sure it’s right for some people, but that’s not what happened to me. I really liked the group. I liked it from the outset!”

Experiment #3. Caught in a State of Hypocrisy

We’ve seen how cognitive dissonance can spring from saying something you don’t believe or putting lots of effort into something that isn’t that great. Let’s look at one last example of dissonance and the way that people deal with it.

When people tell us to do something that they themselves  don’t  do, we call them hypocrites. If you’ve ever heard someone tell you: “Do as I say, not as I do,” you’ve heard them basically admit to being a hypocrite.

But if we notice  ourselves  being hypocrites, that creates dissonance. Like imagine I tell you how important it is for you to eat healthy foods but then I realize that my last five meals were basically French fries and apple pie, those two things—what I told you to do and what I do—they’re inconsistent, so how do I fix my dissonance?

Jeff Stone is a psychology professor at the University of Arizona, and he studies how hypocrisy can actually make people take better care of themselves.

JEFF STONE : We defined hypocrisy as a situation where people are advocating a course of action, like a health behavior. We all know we should engage in, uh, a good example for where I live in Arizona is, people need to practice some unprotected behaviors.

We have a lot of sun here. Skin cancers is a concern. And so it’s well known and well accepted that people should use sunscreen, spend less time in the sun if they can, if they’re going to be out there, wear sun-protective clothing. These are all things that people know they should do, but interestingly, they don’t do them.

And so we can create hypocrisy in a situation like this, where we get people to advocate, “Hey, we should all use sunscreen. We should all practice sun protective behaviors.” That in itself doesn’t cause a lot of dissonance, because there’s nothing really inconsistent about it. But if you then remind them of the fact that they themselves don’t do what they just told everybody else to do, now you’ve created an inconsistency for them. And what we find in our research is that when we put people in those kinds of situations, where we get them to advocate, uh, a health behavior, that’s well accepted and then we make them mindful for the fact that they don’t do what they just told everybody else to do, that induces that inconsistency, that leads to dissonance. We find in our research that that can motivate people to say, Oh man, you know, I believe in this thing, I don’t do it. I should really make a change. And they’re much more likely at that point to adopt the health behavior. In this case, they’re more likely to acquire a sample of sunscreen, as a way of, of resolving the inconsistency between what they’ve said and what they know they do.

So, faced with an inconsistency between what you do and what you tell other to do, you can bring some balance back by changing your own behavior. Practice what you preach. After all, you can’t easily take back what you said, but you can adjust your behavior going forward.

This has some intriguing possibilities for getting people to act the way they know they should be acting. One study in Australia tested whether this kind of hypocrisy-related dissonance could be used to encourage people to conserve electricity. In the hot part of the year, researchers got a list of addresses from air conditioning companies, and they mailed surveys to those addresses. The survey included a question asking people how much they believed it was their personal duty as a responsible citizen to save as much electricity as possible. Pretty much everybody agreed that saving electricity was important, and so a few weeks later, they sent out a follow-up letter to just some of the people who completed the original questionnaire. This letter basically said: “In that questionnaire from a few weeks ago, you told us that you strongly believed in the importance of saving electricity, but our records show that your house actually uses a lot of electricity. So, here’s a pamphlet with some tips for conserving energy. Take care!”

That letter was written to highlight those people’s hypocrisy and inject some dissonance into their lives. When struck with the inconsistency between the values they openly endorsed and their own personal behavior, how could they reconcile that dissonance? 

The researchers were able to get readings from the electricity meters at everyone’s house to see how much energy they were actually using. And over the course of four weeks, the people who got a letter pointing out their hypocrisy actually used less electricity than people who never got a letter like that. The idea is that those households compensated for their hypocrisy by actually living up to the values they proclaimed in that initial survey.

JEFF STONE : When people ask me, you know, how to use this or how it works, I always say that it works really great for things that people know they should do, but they don’t. The fact that it’s something they know they should do, you’ve got the cognition’s heading the direction of, this is the behavior change that we want to accomplish. And then it’s really just, how do you make them aware that they don’t do what they’re telling everybody else to do? And that’s, that’s what kind of sets the stage for the dissonance to occur and motivate them to want to change their behavior. So any, any topic that sort of fits that formula? I think it has a chance of working with.

New Perspectives

It’s pretty clear by now that cognitive dissonance occurs when people grapple with two inconsistent thoughts, and they try to deal with their dissonance using a variety of tools, which can make them update their beliefs, change their behavior, etc. Seems pretty straightforward. Well, this is social science…nothing is straightforward.

Even in the earliest days of dissonance theory, a small war broke out between the dissonance camp and people studying reinforcement theory. Here’s Joel Cooper again:

JOEL COOPER : So you get, Janus and Gilmore. You get Rosenberg, you get, you know, people well established in social psychology, trying to indicate where Festinger and Carlsmith were wrong. And then it gets propelled, right? When people take you seriously and try to dispel your theory, then you’re– then, and especially if subsequent data support your theory, you know, you’ve really changed the game and that’s really what happened.

But while Festinger may have won the war with reinforcement theory, the storm had only started brewing. Psychologists started to pick at dissonance theory, asking whether it was as simple as Festinger said it was, whether it was really just the existence of inconsistent thoughts or whether the story might be a little different.

The New Look

One of the major attempts to tweak dissonance theory was spearheaded by Joel Cooper and his colleagues. And it started in response to a new study that challenged dissonance theory. A psychologist named Milton Rosenberg had been critical of dissonance, and he ran an experiment that apparently should have confirmed dissonance theory…but it didn’t. It was a lot like the study we heard about earlier where students had to lie about how much they liked a study. Except in this case, he gave Ohio State students either 50 cents or $5 to write an essay arguing that the OSU football team shouldn’t allowed to play in the Rose Bowl. So just like the other study, people were paid a lot or a little to say something they didn’t believe. But when Rosenberg did the study, he got the opposite results—the students who got paid more were the ones who went on to actually agree that OSU shouldn’t participate. It was as if reinforcement theory was right!

But Cooper thought there was something fishy about Rosenberg’s version of the study.

JOEL COOPER : I had the feeling that actually Rosenberg, he did something different and that difference might be important. And I think that what Rosenberg did was take away people’s choice, and maybe choice matters, maybe choice matters more than Festinger ever thought that it did.

The idea is that Rosenberg got people to agree to do  something  in exchange for $.50 or $5, but the students didn’t actually realize that they were agreeing to betray their own beliefs until it was too late. So they never actually had a  choice  to write an essay they didn’t agree with. They got stuck doing it.

So Cooper and his team ran a new experiment. Sometimes they’d make sure that people understood that they were being asked to write an essay they didn’t agree with and assured them they had the choice to opt out. Other times they did like Rosenberg and forced people to write an essay they didn’t agree with.

Give people a choice, and they feel dissonance. But—

JOEL COOPER : If you take away that choice, then dissonance simply doesn’t apply. And reinforcement works and people change their attitudes as a direct function of the magnitude of reinforcement. So choice is really important.

And it’s not just choice. Cooper started to think that Festinger ignored some other things, too.

JOEL COOPER : What would happen if you did Festinger and Carlsmith’s study, but nobody believes you? You know, what, if you were saying something you didn’t believe but you were saying in a closet where nobody overheard you. Does that create dissonance? Well, in some ways– and you have choice and you could put in reward or no reward, but does anybody care if nobody hears?

So they would do studies where they ask people to say something they don’t believe…

JOEL COOPER : … and they, get lost, you throw them away and nobody’s going to read them… and they don’t create dissonance. And so, you know, that’s, that was another piece of the puzzle.

So he started amassing all these findings where people who acted inconsistent with their beliefs didn’t really experience dissonance  unless  certain conditions were met. Unless they had a choice in their behavior. Unless they were committed to the behavior. Unless the behavior had unwanted consequences. Unless you could foresee those consequences. This all informed Cooper’s new outlook on dissonance, which he’s appropriately called: The New Look Model of Dissonance.

JOEL COOPER : What we said in the New Look is that dissonance seems to be created when people feel responsible for creating an aversive state of affairs. And by aversive, we mean any state that people would rather not have brought about.

So something you bring about that’s aversive might be convincing somebody to believe in a position that you don’t believe in, like who the next president should be. Then you say something, let us say, if I can be a little political, pro-Donald Trump and somebody hears that and you say, Oh my God. They might believe that. Or they do believe that … like, God, I can’t, that’s an aversive state. Or I suffered to get into this group. And the group isn’t even any good. That’s an aversive state.

Are you responsible for that? Did you cause it? If you take responsibility, now we have cognitive dissonance. Anything that absolves you from responsibility eliminates cognitive dissonance. Anything that turns the state into a positive state eliminates the cognitive dissonance.

And we thought with that simple statement– not quite as simple as inconsistency leads to dissonance, but the notion of being responsible for having brought about an aversive state that leads to dissonance. And that encompasses just about all the research we could think of in cognitive dissonance. There are no longer exceptions to the rule. That was the rule.

The Importance of the Self

Another point of contention in the early days was: do all varieties of thoughts that are inconsistent lead to dissonance? Elliot Aronson recalls his time as a more senior student in Leon Festinger’s lab…

ELLIOT ARONSON : I was his major Domo and training the younger students to be able to do the research and stuff like that. And when someone would come to me with a hypothesis and say, well, Elliot, do you think that’s dissonant? And I would say, you know, I’m really not sure.  If you really want to know what’s dissonant with what ask Leon. And Leon got so, he got so angry at me for doing that because I did it as a joke, you know, but I, but in reality, Leon and I would argue about these things all the time.

And eventually Aronson came to the idea that dissonance is really about how we think of ourselves, who we are as a person. What really matters isn’t that you said something you don’t believe or you tried hard to get into a group that’s actually boring. Instead, the dissonance is really a conflict between what you’ve done and the kind of person you think you are.

ELLIOT ARONSON : So I could recast, for example, the initiation experiment as: I am a very smart person and I’ve done a very stupid thing. I went through hell and high water in order to get into a group that turned out to be boring and worthless. Okay? So those are the two cognitions. One of them is my self-concept. If my self-concept was that I was a dumb guy who always did stupid things, there would be no dissonance. You see?

We can apply the same thinking to other studies we’ve seen. With hypocrisy, the dissonance is not just a discrepancy between what you told people to do and what you yourself do, the dissonance is that you think of yourself as a person of integrity but you don’t practice what you preach! Or with the studies where people say things they don’t believe, the dissonance isn’t the inconsistency between what you said and what you believe. It’s the inconsistency between seeing yourself as an honest person and knowing that you lied to someone. 

But was this a radical revision of the original theory?

ELLIOT ARONSON : I remember seeing Leon and saying, okay, I got it all figured out. And Leon said, you’re right, we argued about whether I should be stating it that way, because he thought that limited the scope of the theory. And he was right that it did limit the scope of the theory, but sometimes you have to limit the scope in order to make it more accurate. And so my idea was not to say– it wasn’t a new theory. It was saying at the center of the theory, dissonance is most painful when it comes into contact with an aspect of our self-concept.

The Legacy of Dissonance Theory

So Cooper is saying things like choice and unwanted consequences matter. Aronson is saying this is about the self. But these are just two examples. A host of new theories have emerged to chip away at how dissonance works: the self-standards model, the radical dissonance theory, the action-based model, self-perception theory, the meaning maintenance model. Psychologists have shown that dissonance works differently in different cultures, they’ve scanned people’s brains as they experience dissonance, they’ve created computer models of dissonance, they’ve tested dissonance in children and capuchin monkeys.

We just can’t get dissonance theory out of our heads. What Ned Jones wrote in 1976 still rings true. That “the cumulative reach of dissonance research is remarkable and that the dissonance movement has been the most important development in social psychology to date.”

More than sixty years ago, Leon Festinger had a brilliant insight and called it the theory of cognitive dissonance. That human beings are driven to toward a coherent mental life, to hold beliefs that match their actions, to treat others the way they think is right, to hold opinions that fit together. It was an audacious proposal at the time, but now is commonplace.

And after all these years, all the experiments, all the findings. What lesson does dissonance have for us? 

Jeff Stone said this:

JEFF STONE : The value is that it’s one of the ways that we know people fail to learn from their mistakes. And the importance of it is that dissonance shows us that people are not rational. They’re rationalizing. That’s so important to understand, that when we make mistakes, we do something that we wish we hadn’t, or, or just, you know, dealing with failure in one way or another. We set out to achieve some goal and it just doesn’t work out. It blows up in our face. We have a real tendency to experience dissonance under those conditions, but look for some way out of it that we don’t really realize the mistake that led to the problem in the first place.  What we don’t do is, you know, go ahead and, and realize, man, I’m somebody who’s capable of making a mistake. I can do something stupid once in a while. I might do something immoral once in a while and, you know, rather than rationalize that and find a way to justify it, what really we need to be able to do so that we don’t make those mistakes again, is sort of confront that head on. But if all we rely on to reduce our dissonance is around rationalizations and our justifications, well we’re never really going to realize that it was us, um, and, and that was our mistake. And so we’ll never, we’ll never really improve. We’ll never avoid that mistake again, in the future. To me, that’s one of the things I hope when I teach this topic in my classes, as students walk away with is their appreciation for that. And it takes some ego strength as I like to say, to kind of look at yourself in the mirror and go, I made a bad mistake here, you know? I’m responsible. And so I have to take responsibility and make it better next time.

Thank you so much to Elliot Aronson, Joel Cooper, Jeff Stone, April McGrath, and Mike Gazzaniga for agreeing to be on the show. When I started Opinion Science, I had the idea to do a special episode like this someday, and I’m hoping to do more deep dives like this in the future. I’m arbitrarily calling this the end of the first season of this podcast, but before it wraps up, I’ll be releasing the full interviews with Joel Cooper and Elliot Aronson over the next couple weeks. We’ll resume regularly scheduled programming soon after that!

Keep up with new episodes of the podcast by following @OpinionSciPod on Facebook and Twitter, or hop on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. to catch up on past episodes. And of course, leaving a review of the show will help this little podcast grow. Thanks for all your support so far.

For a full transcript and references for this episode, you can go to the episode page on OpinionSciencePodcast.com.

Okeedoke—I’m exhausted. I made this episode over the course of a couple months during a global pandemic, while we bought and moved into our first house, and while preparing for an uncertain new academic year. So I’m gonna go take a nap, but I’ll see you again soon for more Opinion Science. Buh bye…

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Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Leon festinger and the cognitive dissonance theory, causes of cognitive dissonance, belief disconfirmation, forced compliance, decision making, effort justification, how do we deal with cognitive dissonance, we change our beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors.

In some situations, people can change their beliefs to resolve cognitive dissonance. For example, in the When Prophecy Fails study mentioned above, some “less faithful” cult members were able to change their beliefs and move on with their lives. However, it is usually not that easy to change one’s belief.

We change the degree of importance of the cognition

Introduce information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs, applications of the cognitive dissonance theory.

Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance is quite similar to Jean Piaget’s concept of cognitive disequilibrium, as exemplified by a child’s unavoidable experience of a state of conflict when he encounters a novel stimulus that does not fit in with his current repertoire of experiences. This state of disequilibrium proves useful in motivating the child to learn about his world as he moves through the different Piaget stages of development .

Cognitive Dissonance Theory (CDT)

Cognitive dissonance theory: a review, introduction.

Cognitive dissonance theory was first presented by Leon Festinger in 1957 in order to explain the relationships between the motivation, perceptions and cognitions of an individual (Festinger, 1962). It clarified the conditions that motivate individuals to change their opinions, attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. Festinger (Festinger, 1962) defined the ‘cognition’ as any piece of knowledge that an individual has about themself or their environment. The theory was based on the belief that people strive toward consistency within themselves and are driven to make changes to reduce or eliminate an inconsistency (Cooper, 2007). Cognitive dissonance theory began by postulating that pairs of cognitions can be either relevant or irrelevant to one another. If two cognitions are relevant and concurring, there is consonance. However, if two cognitions are relevant, but conflicting, the existence of dissonance would cause psychological discomfort and motivate the individual to act upon this. The greater the magnitude of dissonance, the greater the pressure for the individual to reduce the dissonance (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019). The existence of dissonance and the mechanisms that humans used to cope with it captured Festinger’s interest in developing cognitive dissonance theory.

The concept of cognition was relatively new at the time of the introduction of cognitive dissonance theory. Before that, the relationship between human attitudes and behaviours was understood as a complex process that involved motivational, emotional, affective and perceptual factors (Krech, 2019; Rosenberg, 1966). Therefore, the theory was one of the breakthroughs for research in the psychology field as it revolutionised thinking about human psychological processes. More specifically, the theory explains how rewards affect attitudes and behaviours and how behaviours and motivations affect cognitions and perceptions (Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2007). Although the concepts of harmony and conflict were not new and had been proposed earlier by Heider (Heider, 1946), Cognitive Dissonance theory made a major contribution to the concept of consistency (Cooper, 2007). The theory is different compared to other consistency theories as it defines dissonance and consonance in relation to a specific cognition, which usually is related to a behaviour (Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2007). Cognitive Dissonance theory made it possible to identify the determinants of attitudes and beliefs, the internalisation of values, the consequences of decisions, the effects of disagreement among individuals and other important psychological processes (Mills & Harmon-Jones, 1999). Hence, the theory received good attention from scholars in its early days, due to its few fundamental and uncomplicated principles, which could make novel and non-obvious predictions.

Cognitive Dissonance theory has two basic underlying hypotheses:

• The existence of a dissonance will cause mental discomfort and motivate the individual to reduce the dissonance and restore consonance
• To reduce the dissonance, the individual will try to reduce it as well as avoid situations or information that are likely to increase the dissonance

In simple terms, a dissonance is an inconsistency in cognitive elements, which can be knowledge, opinions, beliefs, or the behaviours of an individual. The existence of such inconsistency causes mental discomfort and motivates the individual to take some actions to reduce or eliminate it. We have millions of cognitions, many of which are in our awareness but most are not (Marx, 1976). Festinger (Festinger, 1962) theorised that a pair of cognitive elements may relate to each other in three ways. Firstly, two cognitive elements may be relevant and consonant. Secondly, two cognitive elements may be relevant but dissonant. However, identification of the relationship may also be difficult, as two elements may be dissonant in one context, but not in another (Festinger, 1962). Dissonance can arise from many sources, including, but not limited to, logical inconsistency, cultural differences, contradictions between specific opinions and their related general stand, and a disconfirmation of a past experience to a current situation (Westmeyer, 2012). Lastly, two elements can be irrelevant to each other. The is a case when a pair of cognitive elements does not imply anything concerning one another. Once again, it can be challenging to deduce such a relationship because two elements may be indirectly linked. Therefore, researchers have to consider or make a reference to other cognitions before deriving a conclusion (Festinger, 1962).

One of the features that distinguished cognitive dissonance theory from other consistency theories was the concept of dissonance magnitude. The magnitude of dissonance depends on the number and importance of cognitions that the person experiences a consonance or dissonance with. Its calculation is summarised in the mathematical expression below (Festinger, 1962). The total tension of a dissonance is the proportion of the inconsistent cognitions to the consistent cognitions that one has, each weighted by its importance.

Induced compliance behaviour: Festinger and CarlsmithFestinger & Carlsmith, 1959) used cognitive dissonance theory to study induced compliance behaviours. They set up an experimental study and asked participants to undertake a boring task for an hour. Then, the participants were rewarded either $1 or $20. The group that was compensated with a higher amount of money did not experience much dissonance, while the other group had to change their attitude and convinced themselves that the task was interesting to counter the aroused dissonance. In cognitive dissonance theory, monetary compensation can be viewed as a supportive cognition that promotes consonance. Therefore, an individual would experience minimal to no dissonance when the amount or importance of the supportive cognitions is great enough. On the other hand, if the supportive cognitions are not large or strong enough to counter the dissonance, the individual would be motivated to change attitude to be more positive as a justification for the counter-attitudinal behaviour.

Applications

Cognitive dissonance theory has been successfully applied in many fields. It has been used to explain and predict the motivational nature of dissonance that led to attitude and behaviour changes at both the individual and organisational level.

The literature that is based on cognitive dissonance theory has broadly covered four phases of the process, namely, cognitive discrepancy, dissonance, motivation and discrepancy reduction (Hinojosa et al., 2017). The cognitive discrepancy phase considered a conflict between two or more cognitive elements. The dissonance phase concerned the existence of a dissonance. The motivation phase focused on the motivational nature of dissonance to reduce the psychological discomfort. Lastly, the discrepancy reduction phase related to dissonance reduction mechanisms. The concept of dissonance is predominantly related to the post-decision or post-purchase situation (Oliver, 2009). The research on this phase commonly focused on the impacts of post-purchase touchpoints on product or service evaluation (Cohen & Goldberg, 1970), satisfaction (Engel, 1963) intention to repurchase (Hunt, 1970) and the back-out rate (Donnelly & Ivancevich, 1970) of customers. Negative emotion was another concept that has been closely invested with cognitive dissonance. Previous studies have examined the impact of anger, pain, guilt and regret on the strength of dissonance and customer coping mechanisms (Higgins, 1997; Marikyan, Papagiannidis & Alamanos, 2020; Harmon-Jones, 2004; Harmon-Jones, Harmon-Jones & Summerell, 2017; Gilovich, Medvec & Chen, 1995). Some studies also investigated moderators, such as income and product involvement (Gbadamosi, 2009), on consumer decision making. Dissonance can also be extended to other purchase phases, but its purposes will be different (Koller & Salzberger, 2009; Koller & Salzberger, 2012).

Organisational studies researchers have also applied cognitive dissonance theory to examine many issues, such as, emotional labour in the workplace (Bhave & Glomb, 2016), team dissonance (Stoverink et al., 2014), information search for decision making (Jonas & Frey, 2003) and employee job change (Boswell, Boudreau & Tichy, 2005). A review of cognitive dissonance theory at the organisation level was also conducted to integrate the relevant knowledge that was published from 2000 to 2016 (Hinojosa et al., 2017). The review revealed that most of the related studies focused on a specific stage rather than the whole process of cognitive dissonance, with the least coverage on the motivation phase. The two most studied phases of cognitive dissonance in the organisational context were the cognitive discrepancy and the discrepancy reduction phase. The cognitive discrepancy phase focused mainly on decision justification, effort justification and induced compliance behaviours as sources of dissonance in various situations, whilst the discrepancy reduction phase investigated methods that organisations used to reduce dissonance, including changes in attitudes, behaviours, values, information selection, as well as no dissonance reduction (Hinojosa et al., 2017).

Limitations

Cognitive dissonance theory has become popular among social psychology and social science researchers since its early days, due to its few tenets that are able to explain the complex process of dissonance. However, the parsimonious nature of its formulation and application made the theory subject to the paradox of simplicity and raised concerns about overlooking confounding variables (Festinger, 1957; Osgood, 1960; Zajonc, 1960). Since dissonance is not restricted to logical inconsistencies, but is also bounded by other psychological and cultural factors (Festinger, 1962), several scholars argued that dissonance was more complicated than as presented by the Cognitive Dissonance theory and not easy to create in an experiment, which also raised concerned over the experimental paradigms that have been used to demonstrate the theory (Chapanis & Chapanis, 1964; Marx, 1976). In response to the limitations of the theory, three revisions of cognitive dissonance theory have been proposed. Firstly, the self-consistency model (Abelson, Aronson & McGuire, 1968; Aronson, 1999) addressed the paradox of the simplicity of the original theory by adding self-concept as a further explanation of dissonance. Secondly, the self-affirmation model (Berkowitz, 1988) focused on the overall self-image of moral and adaptive adequacy as an alternative explanation for attitude change. Lastly, the aversive consequences model (also commonly known as ”a new look at dissonance ”) (Cooper & Fazio, 1984) also presented an alternative view on mental discomfort. This model proposed that the psychological stress was caused by the feeling of being self-responsible for inducing aversive consequences, rather than the inconsistency in cognitive elements.

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Ying Tueanrat (Business School, Newcastle University, UK) & Eleftherios Alamanos (Business School, Newcastle University, UK)

How to Cite

Tueanrat, Y.& Alamanos, E. (2023) Cognitive Dissonance Theory: A review . In S. Papagiannidis (Ed), TheoryHub Book . Available at https://open.ncl.ac.uk / ISBN: 9781739604400

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• Introduction

Social pressures in informal groups

Social comparison theory.

• Cognitive dissonance
• Psychosocial archeology

Leon Festinger

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• MLibrary Digital Collections - Bentley Historical Library - Leon Festinger papers: 1939-1988
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• Table Of Contents

Leon Festinger (born May 8, 1919, Brooklyn , New York , U.S.—died February 11, 1989, New York City) was an American cognitive psychologist , best known for his theory of cognitive dissonance , according to which inconsistency between thoughts , or between thoughts and actions, leads to discomfort (dissonance), which motivates changes in thoughts or behaviours. Festinger also made important contributions to the study of group behaviour , self-evaluation, and attitude change.

Festinger graduated with a B.A. in psychology from the City College of New York in 1939. He then entered the University of Iowa , where he studied with the German-born social psychologist Kurt Lewin and obtained a Ph.D. in 1942. One year later he moved to the University of Rochester to work as a statistician for the National Research Council’s Committee on the Selection and Training of Aircraft Pilots. He stayed there until the end of World War II .

In 1945 Festinger became assistant professor at the Research Center for Group Dynamics , which was then headed by Lewin, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The centre was committed to the application of psychological concepts and methods to solve social problems, and it attracted many talented students, including Stanley Schachter and Harold Kelley.

An important early research project was based on attitude surveys of residents in married student housing. The study documented a textbook phenomenon: friendships were more likely to occur the closer the people were physically (even by just a few yards). Similarity in attitudes was also critical: attitudes of residents tended to converge, but residents who held deviant attitudes were likely to be social isolates.

One central idea for Festinger at this time was that group members acquired similar beliefs and opinions because of social pressures toward uniformity or fitting in. In his informal communication theory , he proposed that people are susceptible to social pressures when they are attracted to a group. Such attraction occurs because some goals can be pursued successfully only with the cooperation of others or because groups provide validation about social reality, which is necessary because some opinions and beliefs cannot be tested directly or objectively (e.g., “Should abortion be legal?”; “Who is the greatest baseball player of all time?”).

Assuming that people are attracted to a particular group, they could strive for group uniformity or agreement by trying to change other people’s opinions (communication), by modifying their own views to match those of other group members (opinion change), or by rejecting divergent others as appropriate references (rejection). Such pressures should be greater in attractive groups and increase as an issue becomes more relevant to a group’s goals.

To test the theory, Festinger and his students conducted a series of laboratory experiments. Groups (or clubs) were formed of previously unacquainted individuals who were asked to discuss various issues. Factors such as types of goals, need for social reality, attractiveness, issue relevance, and so on were manipulated. In some experiments, accomplices posed as subjects and played scripted roles as group members with deviating or consensual opinions. Although precedents for this ambitious research program existed in earlier work by Lewin and the Turkish-born social psychologist Muzafer Sherif, Festinger magnified the experimenter’s role as playwright and stage director.

For his dissertation, Schachter, under Festinger’s direction, placed accomplices in groups. One adopted the majority view (i.e., the “mode”) from the beginning, another initially voiced a deviant view but over the course of the discussion adopted the consensual position (i.e., the “slider”), and a third (the “deviate”) maintained the opposing view. Observers coded group discussion behaviours. The actual subjects tried to persuade the other discussion partners. The mode was readily accepted, as was the slider after adopting the majority view. Initially, much communication was directed at the deviate, but communication declined when the deviate proved impossible to convince, and the deviate was nominated for the most undesirable club assignments. Consistent with the theory, group goals or social reality were achieved by striving for group consensus , the pressures to obtain uniformity were manifested via different behavioral routes, and deviates were rejected.

This experiment reflects several features of Festinger’s research. Festinger realized that progress in any science required methods appropriate to that field. Accordingly, social psychology needed its own experimental approach. Following Lewin’s lead, he conceived of the new methodology as a kind of experimental theatre, with cover stories, accomplices, and deception to control for confounding factors and to create a situation that was perceived as psychologically meaningful to the subject.

After Lewin’s death in 1947, the Research Center for Group Dynamics, with most of its remaining faculty, moved to the University of Michigan . In 1951 Festinger moved to a tenure-track position at the University of Minnesota , where Schachter was already on the faculty.

At the University of Minnesota, Festinger developed social comparison theory, his second major contribution to social psychology. Informal social communication theory was about the power of the group over the person. In contrast, social comparison theory emphasized how individuals evaluate their own opinions and abilities against those of others.

Social comparison theory posited that people evaluate their abilities and opinions by comparing them with those of others when it is not feasible to test them directly. Comparison leads to pressures toward uniformity (i.e., similarity), but the tendency to compare will cease if others are too different in dimensions that are related to the ability or opinion at issue. For opinions, agreement with others who presumably are also motivated to hold correct views tends to make people feel more confident. For abilities, observing those with similar abilities allows people to learn what actions they are capable of.

Social comparison theory also recognizes a distinctive feature of abilities. People want to be slightly better than everyone else because the desire to be better or to improve is emphasized in Western cultures . This means that, in Western cultures, complete opinion agreement may be satisfactory to everyone, but completely equal abilities will not be—implying that “a state of social quiescence is never reached,” as Festinger put it.

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Book Table of Contents

Chapter Contents

Cognitive Dissonance

Leon Festinger introduced cognitive dissonance theory in a 1957 book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance . Festinger's theory said that when a person holds contradictory elements in cognition (producing an unpleasant state called dissonance) the person will work to bring the elements back into agreement or congruence .

An experiment by Festinger and Carl­smith (1959) brought cognitive disso­nance theory to the attention of American social psychologists. Eliot Aronson, himself a famous social psychologist and former student of Festinger, called this "the most important experiment in the history of social psychology" ("Social Research­er", 1984).

At the beginning of the Festinger and Carlsmith experiment, student volunteers were asked to perform a simple and boring task. Before the subjects left the experiment, the experimenter comment­ed that his research assistant would be unavailable to help the following day.

Would the subject be willing to do a small favor for the experimenter? The favor was to take the place of the research assistant, who was supposed to prepare subjects for the experiment by giving them a positive attitude toward it.

Participants were asked, "Would you please tell the next subject in line that the experiment was fun and enjoyable?" Participants who agreed to do this were paid either $1 or $20.

$20 in the 1950s was equivalent to over $100 now. One group was being paid that amount to lie to the next subject about the boring experiment. The other group was paid 1/20th as much, the equivalent of about $5 now.

How did the Festinger and Carlson experiment work?

Subjects in both groups typically agreed to tell the next subject that the experiment was interesting. When experimenters asked later for the truth, the highly paid subjects said the experiment was actually boring. On the other hand, people paid only $1 were more likely to say, when asked later, that the experiment was "not bad" or that it was "interesting."

How do we explain this? Festinger observed that the subjects were put in a psychologically uncomfortable position. They had not enjoyed the experiment, but now they were asked to lie and say they had enjoyed it.

How could they explain their own behavior to themselves? Subjects who received $20 had no problem explaining their behavior to themselves. They were paid a lot of money to lie, and that explained why they lied. So they did not have to change their true attitudes.

The subjects who received $1 did not have a very good reason to lie. To reduce the feeling of discomfort about lying, they persuaded themselves they actually enjoyed the experiment. Their attitudes changed to fit their behavior , reducing the uncomfortable feeling of dissonance.

Festinger and Carlsmith had cleverly set up an opposition between behavioral theory, which was dominant in the 1950s, and Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory. Behaviorists would have predict that a reinforcement 20 times bigger would produce more change. Instead the opposite happened.

Festinger explained it this way in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957):

The existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance. (p.3)

In other words, a contradiction (dissonance) between attitude and behavior is uncomfortable, so it motivates a person to change behavior or attitudes (whichever is easier to change) to eliminate the contradiction.

If you have a negative attitude toward something, but you behave like you enjoy it, this causes dissonance. That is uncomfortable, unless you have a good explanation for your behavior (such as being paid a lot of money). To achieve consonance, something has to give.

Typically the behavior is in the past, by the time the person feels dissonance, so the behavior cannot be changed. Therefore the person's attitude changes.

This subtle dynamic makes cognitive dissonance a powerful tool for changing attitudes. It implies that if you want to change attitudes, all you have to do is change behavior, and the attitudes will follow along.

As long as people are not paid a lot of money or given some other obvious inducement to perform the behavior, they will convince themselves it is enjoyable. They will decide they wanted to do it anyway, or that maybe it was a good idea, in retrospect.

A concrete example involves the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s in the United States. Many people resisted school desegregation, saying, "You can't change people's behavior before you change their attitudes."

Psychologists familiar with dissonance theory said just the opposite. Their research suggested to them that if the laws changed first, forcing a change in behavior, the attitudes would follow along later.

In a classic piece of cognitive disso­nance research, researchers assigned students to different sides of a debate about the merits of college football. One side argued that football was good for a university, the other side argued that it was harmful. After the debate, students expressed beliefs closer to their debate position than before (Scott, 1957).

Scott himself, in the tradition of old-time behaviorists, interpreted this result as "reinforcement of verbal behavior." Through the lens of cognitive dissonance theory, however, the explanation was a bit different.

What happens when students are asked to defend positions contrary to their beliefs?

The students presumably put some effort into building and defending their arguments. Doing so, they started to identify with the arguments and accept them as their own. To do otherwise would have been to create conflict or dissonance (lack of harmony) between their attitudes and their behavior.

Kenneth Boulding, an economist and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, described a pattern that relates to cognitive dissonance. He called it the Sacrifice Trap:

If we once start making sacrifices for anything–a family, a religion, or a nation–we find that we cannot admit to ourselves that the sacrifices have been in vain without a threat to our personal identity.

Our identity is in part created by identifying ourselves with the organization or the community for which the sacrifices have been made. In these circumstances, the object of sacrifice becomes "sacred" and it is in a position to demand further sacrifices. (Boulding, 1969)

What is the Sacrifice Trap?

Ben Franklin gave some peculiar advice that makes sense in the context of cognitive dissonance theory. Franklin said if you want someone to like you, get that person to do you a favor .

How can you get someone to like you, according to Ben Franklin?

This works (according to cognitive dissonance theory) because, once the person has put out time and energy to help you, the person must develop an attitude consistent with the behavior. So, to avoid dissonance, the person likes you.

The opposite of Franklin's principle is described by Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer (1951). If you want to dislike someone, do them wrong.

There is perhaps no surer way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him a grave injustice. (p.47)

Hoffer pointed out that, after the Nazis had started persecuting the Jews, it became easier for the average German citizen to hate the Jews.

What similar but opposite statement appears in Hoffer's book The True Believer ?

As a rule, cognitive dissonance theory predicts that attitudes and behaviors will remain in synchrony. If you change your attitudes, then presumably your behavior will change. More surprisingly, if you change a person's behavior, attitudes change to match the behavior .

This has many practical implications. Some have already been discussed. If you want somebody to like you, induce the person to perform "liking behavior" such as doing you a favor.

If you want to keep people from hating each other, work on eliminating hateful behavior. "Fight acts, not feelings," is the banner of anti-racist social scientists. (Goleman, 1991)

The same logic applies to selfish concerns such as getting other people to respect you. Cognitive dissonance theory implies that if you demand respect, you will get it.

What are some practical implications of cognitive dissonance theory?

You should not put up with abuse, because people who treat you poorly will adopt negative beliefs about you, in order to be consistent with their behavior toward you. If you make people treat you with respect, they will respect you more, in order to reduce dissonance between their attitudes and their behaviors.

--------------------- References:

Social Researcher. (1984, August) Psychology Today , pp.40-45.

Boulding, K. E. (1969) The grants economy. Michigan Academician, 1 , 3-12.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance . Evanston, IL: Row & Peterson

Festinger, L. & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959) Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203-210.

Goleman, D. (1991, July 16) New way to battle bias: fight acts, not feelings. New York Times , p.C1.

Hoffer, E. (1951) The True Believer . New York: Harper & Row.

Scott, W. A. (1957) Attitude change through reward of verbal behavior. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 55 , 72-75.

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Leon Festinger (Psychologist Biography)

In 2002, the Review of General Psychology ranked Leon Festinger as the 5th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.

Who Is Leon Festinger?

Leon Festinger was a renowned American psychologist, researcher, and author. He is best known for developing cognitive dissonance theory and social comparison theory. In addition to challenging the dominance of behaviorism, Festinger spearheaded the use of scientific experimentation in social psychology.

Leon Festinger's Birth and Parents

Leon Festinger was born on May 8, 1919 in Brooklyn, New York. His father and mother were Jewish-Russian immigrants named Alex Festinger and Sara Solomon Festinger. Festinger’s parents departed Russia for the United States just before the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

When Alex Festinger left Russia, he was known to be an atheist and a radical. He would maintain these ideals for the rest of his life. Alex Festinger worked as an embroidery manufacturer. He and his wife Sara were self-educated.

Early Educational Background

From an early age, Leon Festinger showed a deep love for science. He attended Boys’ High School in Brooklyn and was a very good student. Although he was extremely intelligent, some of Festinger’s childhood friends described him as “an aggressive, sometimes scathing critic.” During his teenage years, he read psychologist Clark Hull’s book entitled Hypnosis and Suggestibility and discovered a scientific field that “still had questions to be answered.”

After leaving Boys’ High School, Festinger enrolled at the City College of New York. He earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1939 under the guidance of Max Hertzman. Festinger then pursued graduate studies under Kurt Lewin at the University of Iowa. Festinger was interested in Lewin’s efforts to establish psychology as a field with “dynamic processes involving perception, motivation, and cognition.” However, when Festinger arrived at the university, Lewin’s interests had shifted to “group dynamics” or social psychology .

At that time, Festinger was not interested in social psychology at all. He believed the field lacked scientific rigor, hard data, and clarity. As a result, he did not take a single social psychology course and chose instead to focus on Lewin’s earlier work. Festinger earned his master’s degree in child behavior in 1940 and his PhD in child behavior in 1942.

Embracing Social Psychology

Festinger continued his research at the University of Iowa until 1943. He then moved to the University of Rochester to work as a senior statistician for the National Research Council’s Committee on the Selection and Training of Aircraft Pilots during World War II. In 1945, Festinger moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to join Kurt Lewin ’s Research Center for Group Dynamics as an assistant professor. It was during his time at MIT that Festinger eventually began to investigate and embrace social psychology.

Festinger’s initial interest in social psychology was sparked by accident. He was asked to conduct a study on how satisfied MIT students were with their on-campus housing. Festinger discovered that students who had close social relationships had similar views on housing, while students who had differing attitudes on housing tended to be social isolates. These findings led Festinger and his assistants to develop experimental approaches that many people consider to be “the birth of systematic experimental social psychology.”

Festinger continued his work at the University of Michigan in 1948 and the University of Minnesota in 1951. He published his paper on social comparison theory in 1954. In 1955, Festinger moved to Stanford University and published his theory of cognitive dissonance in 1957. In 1968, he left Stanford for The New School in New York City, where he conducted research on the visual system and perception.

Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory:

What is Cognitive Dissonance?

Cognitive dissonance is the psychological tension people experience when they become aware of discrepancies between two of their cognitions (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, plans, and knowledge about their behavior). According to Festinger, humans have a strong desire for consistency among cognitive elements. When they become aware of inconsistencies, it triggers an unpleasant psychological state of arousal, which then motivates them to reduce the inconsistency. Cognitive elements that conflict with each other are said to be dissonant, while those that are consistent with each other are termed consonant.

All of us have experienced cognitive dissonance at some point in our lives.

We may think fast food is bad for our health, but can’t resist stopping at Mcdonald's on our way home from work. We may consider ourselves to be honest, but try to cheat on an online exam. In such situations, the conflict between what we think and what we do results in mental discomfort.

How was the Theory Developed?

The theory of cognitive dissonance was first published in 1957 . Festinger developed the theory after studying events surrounding a deadly earthquake that occurred in India nearly two decades before. People living in nearby areas, who felt the shock but experienced no ill-effects, began spreading rumors that even worse disasters would come upon their villages.

At first, Festinger was puzzled as to why people would create and believe such rumors when there was hardly any evidence to support them. He later concluded that the rumors helped to justify the intense fear residents of these neighboring villages felt after the earthquake. According to Festinger, the villagers naturally became anxious and terrified after learning of the extreme devastation in neighboring areas. But given that they had sustained no damage, they also recognized that they had much less to be anxious about. Festinger believed this inconsistency between what the villagers felt and what they knew resulted in psychological tension. In order to reduce it, the villagers altered one of their beliefs, convincing themselves that they did in fact have something to fear—a more severe disaster was supposedly on the horizon.

Leon Festinger's Study with Cults

Festinger had the opportunity to explore the concept of dissonance further when he and two colleagues infiltrated a small doomsday cult known as The Seekers. The leader of the group claimed to be receiving messages from extraterrestrials called the Guardians. On the basis of these “messages,” she predicted that a global flood would destroy the world on December 21, 1954. However, cult members would be saved by flying saucers that would take them to another planet. Many believers quit their jobs and disposed of their money, homes, and possessions in preparation for that event.

The predicted doomsday came and went—no flood, no flying saucers. The group, understandably, became anxious and distraught. Suddenly, the leader claimed to have received another message from the Guardians stating that the world had been saved because of the “force of good and light” that had been spread by the group. As Festinger explained, the group attempted to decrease the dissonance they felt as a result of the failed prediction by adding this new belief to explain away the inconsistency.

The cult members (who had previously avoided publicity) immediately began a vigorous campaign to attract new recruits and media attention by describing how they had saved the world. Festinger reasoned that these efforts were designed to further reduce dissonance. If members could convince more people of what they believed, the extra affirmation would help to dispel any remaining feelings of unease over what had transpired.

Cognitive Dissonance and Cults, Religions, etc.

Cognitive dissonance continues to be used in the context of cults, religions, or other groups connected by similar beliefs. In a subreddit for former Jehovah's Witnesses , cognitive dissonance was introduced to explain how we can ignore certain facts or opinions because they go against our beliefs.

What Determines the Level of Cognitive Dissonance?

According to Festinger, two main factors influence the level of dissonance we experience in a given situation:

• The importance of the cognitions involved - The greater the importance attached to the inconsistent cognitions, the more dissonance it will cause. Let’s say you want to switch to a healthier diet but you keep eating fast food every day of the week. If you’re of average weight and have no major health issues, the inconsistency may not seem too important. On the other hand, if you learn that you have major heart disease, eating fast food every day takes on greater significance. Your unhealthy eating habits will likely trigger much more dissonance as you understand that your actions may be a matter of life or death.
• The ratio of consonant to dissonant cognitions - The more dissonant cognitions there are in relation to consonant ones, the greater the level of dissonance experienced. Imagine that Todd wants to quit drinking (cognition 1) but still finds himself at a bar every night (cognition 2). He will likely experience a measure of dissonance. But suppose Todd’s drinking caused him to lose his job, squander his savings, and has started to threaten his marriage. The magnitude of Todd’s discomfort will likely be greater since all of these additional cognitions are dissonant to (or conflict with) his drinking behavior.

How Can Cognitive Dissonance be Reduced?

Festinger specified three primary ways in which dissonance may be reduced:

• By changing one or more of the cognitions involved - To illustrate, imagine that you believe smoking is bad for your health but you’re finding it hard to break the habit. The resulting dissonance could be reduced by either changing your belief about smoking (e.g., “Smoking helps me to relax so it is actually good for my health”), or by changing your behavior (e.g., you could quit cold turkey). If you do either one of these, your belief would become consonant with your action, so dissonance would decrease.
• By adding new cognitions - You could also attempt to reduce dissonance by adding other cognitive elements that are consistent with smoking. For example, you might scour the internet for any evidence suggesting that smoking is beneficial to one’s health. You might also search for articles that discount the validity of studies demonstrating the harmful effects of smoking. If you can convince yourself that such studies are biased, your discomfort over smoking would decrease.
• By reducing the importance of the conflicting cognitions - You might agree with the overwhelming evidence that smoking is bad for your health but still struggle to quit the habit. In such a case, you could resort to trivializing the issue in an attempt to reduce your discomfort. For example, you might reason: “If smoking doesn’t kill me, something else will” or “Smoking is risky, but so is driving, flying, and even crossing the road.” You are still aware of the inconsistency between your belief and action, but by convincing yourself that it’s not really that important, you lessen your level of unease.

Social Comparison Theory

In 1954, Festinger proposed that humans have a natural drive to evaluate their opinions and abilities. When no objective means of evaluation are available, people satisfy this drive by comparing themselves to others. According to Festinger, people are most likely to engage in comparisons with individuals who are similar to them on relevant dimensions.

Social comparisons may result in a change in one’s opinion or ability. This change is usually in the direction of greater uniformity. Achieving similarity with others (i.e., fitting in) makes us more confident about our own opinions and abilities.  The extent to which a person changes, however, depends on several factors, namely the importance and relevance of the comparison group, and how attracted the individual is to that group.

In composing his theory, Festinger noted a major distinction between comparisons of abilities and opinions. He suggested that in the case of abilities, humans possess a “unidirectional drive upward” which does not apply to opinions. This upward drive is a motivation to keep performing better and better, and it leads to ability comparisons with similar individuals who are slightly more capable than we are. When we notice that another individual is better than we are in a particular area of ability, we attempt to improve our performance level.

The upward drive promotes competition and may interfere with the emergence of social uniformity. However, Festinger acknowledged that this drive might apply only to Western cultures which promote individual achievement and competition.

The Proximity Effect

Back in 1950, Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back undertook a study to determine how friendships were formed among residents of a students’ housing complex at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The researchers found that the formation of friendships was closely linked to physical proximity. This became known as the principle of propinquity - a fancy way of saying that the closer we are to someone physically, the more likely we are to be attracted to them.

This was demonstrated in Festinger’s study as residents tended to befriend people who lived in the same building and on the same floor as they did. They also socialized more with residents who lived closer to them on the same floor (e.g., those living next door), than with those who lived further away.

In addition to physical distance, Festinger and his colleagues found that ‘functional distance’ also predicted friendship formation. Whereas physical distance relates to actual space (e.g., between people or apartment units), functional distance refers to the level of contact encouraged by the design of the environment. It involves the likelihood that people’s paths will cross. The smaller the functional distance, the more likely it is that people will bump into one another. In Festinger’s study, the impact of functional distance was seen from the fact that lower floor residents who lived next to the stairway were more likely than other lower floor residents

to form friendships with those living upstairs.

Applications of Festinger’s Theory

The theory of cognitive dissonance has been used to increase health-promoting and other desirable behaviors. Usually, a state of dissonance is induced by having individuals engage in an activity that conflicts with some undesirable behavior or attitude on their part. For example, in one study, college students who often engage in risky sexual behaviors were asked to prepare and give a speech on the importance of safe sex. The inconsistency between what they typically do and what they were asked to promote triggered a state of dissonance which they were motivated to reduce. Many of them did so by increasing condom usage after the study.

The technique described here is called hypocrisy induction. When individuals become aware of a glaring inconsistency between their attitudes and actions—that is, their own hypocrisy—the resulting discomfort acts as a powerful motivator for behavior change. The same principle has been used to reduce littering, speeding and prejudiced responses, and to promote water conservation, recycling, and charitable donations.

Social Comparison Examples

Social comparison theory has also been applied in several ways, a few of which are mentioned below:

• Magazine editors often capitalize on people’s drive for social comparison in order to attract and engage readers. This is usually accomplished by offering surveys on topics such as health, relationships, and personality characteristics. These types of quizzes help people to determine how they measure up to others or to what the editor says is desirable.
• Social comparison theory may be used to improve pain management in patients. In one study, patients who were exposed to others who were managing their pain well reported feeling less pain. In addition, physiological measures suggested that the patients actually experienced less pain.
• Social comparison has also been employed as a strategy for improving study habits. One example of this is the Study Buddy application which lets students know when their classmates are studying. Such knowledge may motivate them to do likewise.

Criticisms of Festinger’s Theories

Cognitive dissonance theory remains one of the most popular theories in social psychology, but it is not without its critics. Some of the arguments that have been raised against it are:

• Many aspects of the theory are difficult to observe and assess objectively. These include the magnitude of dissonance and the modification of cognitive elements.
• Festinger does not adequately explain how people decide on a strategy for reducing cognitive dissonance.
• Many of the studies supporting the theory have been conducted in artificial lab environments which limits their application to real-life situations.
• The theory fails to address individual differences in people’s tolerance for cognitive dissonance.

In social comparison theory , Festinger suggested that people compare themselves to similar others but he did not state the basis of that similarity. In addition, some critics argue that people often engage in comparisons with individuals who differ from them in important ways and that such comparisons also supply valuable self-knowledge. Festinger further suggested that social comparison is a deliberate process but subsequent research has shown that comparisons can also be involuntary and automatic.

Another criticism of Festinger’s social comparison theory is that it does not specify the range and boundaries of social comparison. Some scholars consider this important since they doubt that people compare all of their abilities and opinions to those of others. Critics have also debated whether social comparison is primarily about self-evaluation, as Festinger suggests, or is more a matter of self-validation.

Leon Festinger's Books, Awards, and Accomplishments

Festinger wrote several books on his landmark research. His most popular works are listed below:

• Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing,  1950
• Research methods in the behavioral sciences, 1953
• When Prophecy Fails, 1956
• A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, 1957
• Deterrents and Reinforcement: The Psychology of Insufficient Reward , 1962
• Conflict, Decision and Dissonance , 1964
• The Human Legacy, 1983

Awards and accomplishments:

• Recognized as one of the ten most promising young scientists in the United States by Fortune Magazine in the 1950s
• Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1959
• Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, 1959
• Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 1972
• Elected to the Society of Experimental Psychology, 1973
• Received an honorary doctorate from the University of Mannheim, 1978
• Einstein Visiting Fellow of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1980
• Distinguished Senior Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, 1980

Personal Life

Leon Festinger married pianist Mary Oliver Ballou in 1943. The couple had three children—Catherine, Richard, and Kurt. Leon and Mary divorced years later. In 1968, Festinger married New York University professor Trudy Bradley.

Festinger closed his lab in 1979. Four years later, he expressed disappointment at what the field of psychology and he himself had accomplished. Festinger then became interested in archaeology as he wanted to see what else he could learn about human nature. His final academic pursuit was investigating why new technology tends to be adopted faster in the West than the East.

Festinger became ill with liver and lung cancer in 1988. After reading literature on cancer, speaking with medical experts, and evaluating the possible side effects of treatment, he decided not to obtain treatment for himself. Festinger passed away a few months later on February 11, 1989, before his final research findings could be published. He was survived by his wife Trudy, his three children, his stepdaughter Debra, and three grandchildren.

American Psychological Association. (2002). Eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Monitor on Psychology, 33 (7). Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug02/eminent

Drakopoulos, S. A. (2016). Comparisons in economic thought: Economic interdependency reconsidered . New York: Routledge.Fehr, B. (1996). Friendship processes .Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive technology: Using computers to change what we think and do . San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Gazzaniga, M. S. (2006). Leon Festinger: Lunch with Leon. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1 (1), 88-94. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2006.t01-3-.x?journalCode=ppsa

Morvan, C., & O’Connor, A. J. (2017). An analysis of Leon Festinger’s a theory of cognitive dissonance . London: Macat International Ltd.

Miles, J. A. (2012). Management and organization theory: A Jossey-Bass Reader. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley and Sons.

Nail, P.R., & Boniecki, K. A. (2011). Inconsistency in cognition: Cognitive dissonance. In D. Chadee (Ed.), Theories in social psychology (pp. 44-71). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Sanderson, C. A. (2010). Social psychology . Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Schachter, S. (1994). Leon Festinger. Biographical Memoirs, 64 , 98-110. Retrieved from https://www.nap.edu/read/4547/chapter/5

Suls, J. (n.d.). Leon Festinger. In Encyclopedia Britannica . Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leon-Festinger

The New York Times. (1989, February 12). Leon Festinger, 69, new school professor. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/12/obituaries/leon-festinger-69-new-school-professor.html

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October 1, 1962

Cognitive Dissonance

It is the subject of a new theory based on experiments showing that the grass is usually not greener on the other side of the fence and that grapes are sourest when they are in easy reach

By Leon Festinger

• Experiments

Leon Festinger and Cognitive Dissonance