Cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is psychological discomfort caused by inconsistency among a person’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions. It can motivate efforts to change beliefs, behavior, or how the inconsistency is understood.

Leon Festinger: Leon Festinger was an American social psychologist who developed cognitive dissonance theory. He proposed the theory and tested its predictions in influential experiments.
Festinger and Carlsmith experiment: A 1959 experiment in which participants who received a small reward for a dull task later rated it more favorably than those paid more. Its results supported the idea that weak external justification can prompt attitude change.
Attitude: An attitude is an evaluation of a person, object, group, or issue that can shape thought and behavior. Attitudes are among the mental elements whose conflict can produce dissonance.
Impression management: Impression management is the attempt to influence how other people perceive oneself or a group. Some dissonance-reducing explanations emphasize managing public image rather than private consistency.
Attitude change: Attitude change is a shift in a person’s evaluation of an object, person, group, or issue. Changing an attitude is one route for reducing conflict with an action or another belief.
Dissonance reduction: Dissonance reduction is the process of changing beliefs, actions, or interpretations to lessen perceived inconsistency. It describes the responses people use when dissonance arises.
Free-choice paradigm: An experimental method that measures how evaluations of chosen and rejected options change after a decision. It tests whether choosing between attractive options makes people reduce conflict by reassessing them.
Belief: A belief is an acceptance that a proposition is true or likely to be true. Beliefs can conflict with one another or with a person’s actions.
Self-perception theory: Self-perception theory holds that people infer their attitudes by observing their own behavior and its circumstances. It can explain attitude change in situations where dissonance theory predicts discomfort.
Belief perseverance: Belief perseverance is the persistence of a belief after the evidence that supported it has been discredited. Dissonance can encourage people to reinterpret disconfirming evidence instead of abandoning a belief.

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