Cognitive Dissonance

What is it?
Cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) happens when we realise there is a big gap between what we are doing and what we think we are doing. When it happens it make us feel uncomfortable (an emotion) but you must remember that it’s actually a good thing because it may just prompt change within us.
Once the new change is internalised and practised regularly, it soon requires very little effort to maintain it. Some other experience may then subject you to re-evaluate, reformulate and prompt the cycle change once again.

How to use it
Cognitive dissonance is central to many forms of persuasion to change beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours. As a facilitator, educator, mentor or friend, you can inject that tension suddenly or allow it to build up over time. People can be moved in many small jumps or one large one. Hopefully, it will lead to a change for the better.

In an educational setting, Neighbour (1992) says it’s important for the teacher to make dissonance a major feature of a tutorial and other teaching. It’s the resulting emotion that drives and motivates the learner to learn.

Fox et al, 1999, says one must not become complacent to the change which results because it may quickly decay unless reinforced by practice, arising from improved performance, positive feedback and the feeling of gratification.

Application • If you have a trainee who doesn’t seem that bothered about bettering himself, talk to them and find out what’s going on. Usually, there is something else in their personal lives if previous supervisors have given nothing but praise. However, there are those who lack motivation or are a bit lazy. Those ones need a bit of cognitive dissonance. If you can make them realise themselves that they are not happy with what they are doing, then they will motivate themselves to reduce the cognitive dissonance gap and bring what they do in life close to what they want to do in life.

However, be careful again! The dissonance gap can also be reduced by justifying one’s behaviour, blaming others or being in denial. If you see this happening – you need to do some resetting! Why don’t smoker’s stop smoking when they know it’s bad for them? Because they usually close their cognitive dissonance gap by justifying it somehow.

Justifying your cognitive dissonance – examples
Here are some examples of how many people, when thrown into cognitive dissonance, will simply go into justifying mode. They don’t do this on purpose or knowingly – it’s more subconscious.

• Ever had an argument and been quite nasty to someone close to you that you like? Well, that act of nastiness creates dissonance because in your mind you generally are fond of that person and usually want to be nice to them. To reduce that dissonance, the best thing to do would be to apologise. The worse thing to do is make them understand why you were so nasty or tell them what they did that made you so horrible – justifying your cognitive dissonance! In the long run, the justification of your cognitive dissonance in this particular context might be responsible for driving you both away. • A lot of people who go on expensive courses subsequently rate them highly (better to justify the high fee than to admit you’ve been conned). • Likewise, the more difficult it is to get on a course, the more likely the attendees are likely to highly rate it (to justify the exhaustive effort of initially trying to get on). • The more convoluted or difficult the subject, the more profound it must be (otherwise, you are admitting you are thick!). • Again, tougher courses are rated highly – not because they’re any good, but usually because one wants to justify the reason for expending so much energy!

Okay, last one and this one is for you shopaholics out there: if you’ve ever bought a whole load of items (or even just a single expensive item) and felt guilty, angry or ashamed of yourself afterwards – welcome to the world of cognitive dissonance.

References • Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

• Fox RD, Mazmanian PE and Putnam RW (1989), Changing and learning in the lives of physicians. Praeger, London. • Neighbour R (1992) The Inner Apprentice Plymouth UK; Petroc Press