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In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as the mental phenomenon of people existing with unwittingly and fundamentally conflicting cognition. [1] Being confronted by situations that challenge this dissonance may ultimately result in some change in their cognitions or actions to cause greater alignment between them so as to reduce this dissonance. [2]
Cognitive dissonance theory explains changes in people's attitudes or beliefs as the result of an attempt to reduce a dissonance (discrepancy) between contradicting ideas or cognitions. In the case of effort justification, there is a dissonance between the amount of effort exerted into achieving a goal or completing a task (high effort ...
Social psychology utilizes a wide range of specific theories for various kinds of social and cognitive phenomena. Here is a sampling of some of the more influential theories that can be found in this branch of psychology. Attribution theory – is concerned with the ways in which people explain (or attribute) the behaviour of others. The theory ...
Theories of cognitive dissonance as well as its alternatives are based on the assumption that the attitudes and beliefs one holds are fixed entities. Recently psychologists have progressed from categorizing psychological phenomena as static, to recognizing the dynamic aspects that vary with different contexts.
Dissonance can result from an action dissonant with either a negative or positive concept. For example, Aronson [3] showed that students who failed numerous times at a task showed evidence of dissonance when they later succeeded at the same task. Some even changed correct answers to present a consistent image.
Individuals are compelled to initiate motivated reasoning to lessen the amount of cognitive dissonance they feel. Cognitive dissonance is the feeling of psychological and physiological stress and unease between two conflicting cognitive and/or emotional elements (such as the desire to smoke, despite knowing it is unhealthy).
While not a theory of motivation, per se, the theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. The cognitive miser perspective makes people want to justify things in a simple way in order to reduce the effort they put into cognition. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, or actions ...
The theory of insufficient justification formally states that when extrinsic motivation is low, people are motivated to reduce cognitive dissonance by generating an intrinsic motivation to explain their behavior, and similarly more likely to decline a desired activity when presented with a mild threat versus a more serious threat. Insufficient ...