What Is Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance can fall into just about any situation involving things from conflicting attitudes to other people’s beliefs and behaviors. What cognitive dissonance involves is the mix emotions and feelings of discomfort that leads to the change in someone’s attitude and behaviors. According to Festinger cognitive dissonance theory, Festinger suggest that people have an inner drive to hold all their attitudes and their own beliefs in harmony with out disturbance. Every individual compares themselves to other people as a way of evaluating their own selves but some attitudes may change because of factors within that person. Festinger’s theory starts from the idea that we seek consistency in our beliefs and attitudes in any situation where
This theory focuses altering an individual's attitude either through persuasion or authority. Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith performed a case study in which they asked 71 male students from Stanford University to perform a task that only required the use of one hand to turn spools a quarter clockwise turn. The purpose of this task was to make it unexciting and tedious enough that the students could possibly find any enjoyment from it. The experimental condition involved telling the subject before the experiment started that it would be fun, while the control condition did not set any expectations for the task. The students were asked to go to a room to be interviewed. The experiment involved giving either $1 or $20 to try to convince the next participant that the experiment was fun. The results showed a significant difference between the groups but there was no significant difference emerged between the $20 group and the control group. The results indicate that the $1 reward group had convinced themselves that the experiment was fun. Festinger and Carlsmith concluded that if an individual performs an action that goes against what they initially believe then their belief will typically
Many companies such as Murphy Oil, Occidental Petroleum, and Valero Energy were consistently opposed to dealing with climate change. These companies and their actions worked against the new, science-based laws that would help cut global greenhouse gases. ExxonMobil, was the worst of them all. While ExxonMobil was being so positive about the climate policy they were actually engaging in actions that undermined the efforts to deal with climate change. ExxonMobil’s contributions to the anti-climate-action lawmakers outweighed the contributions to pro-climate-action lawmakers 10 to