Invitation to Psychology

240 Chapter 7 Thinking and Intelligence

© The New Yorker Collection, 1995. Mick Stevens from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

colleagues wondered, to reduce the dissonance

between “The world is still muddling along on the

21st” and “I predicted the end of the world and

sold all my worldly possessions“?

Festinger’s team predicted that believers who

had made no public commitment to the proph-

ecy, who awaited the end of the world by them-

selves at home, would simply lose their faith.

However, those who had acted on their convic-

tion by selling their property and waiting with

Keech for the spaceship would be in a state of

dissonance. They would have to increase their

religious belief to avoid the intolerable realiza-

tion that they had behaved foolishly and others

knew it. That is just what happened. At 4:45

a.m., long past the appointed hour of the saucer’s

arrival, the leader had a new vision. The world

had been spared, she said, because of the impres-

sive faith of her little band.

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that in

more ordinary situations as well, people will resist,

dismiss, or rationalize information that conflicts

with their existing ideas or behavior, just as the

people in the arthritis study did. To reduce the dis-

sonance between “I smoke” and “Smoking could

kill me,” cigarette smokers have two choices: quit

smoking, or reject or minimize the evidence that

smoking is bad. Those who don’t quit tend to

persuade themselves that they will quit later on,

that smoking helps them relax, or that they don’t

want a long life, anyhow (“It will be shorter but

sweeter”).

You are especially likely to reduce dissonance

under three conditions (Aronson, 2012):

1

When you need to justify a choice or decision

that you made freely. All car dealers know about

buyer’s remorse: The second that people buy a

car, they worry that they made the wrong decision

or spent too much, a phenomenon called postdeci-

sion dissonance. You may try to resolve this dis-

sonance by deciding that the car you chose (or the

toaster, or house, or spouse) is really, truly the best

in the world. Before people make a decision, they

can be open-minded, seeking information on the

pros and cons of the choice at hand. But after they

make that choice, the confirmation bias will kick

in, and they will now notice all the good things

about their decision and overlook or ignore evi-

dence that they might have been wrong.

2

When you need to justify behavior that conflicts

with your view of yourself. If you consider

yourself to be honest, shoplifting will put you

in a state of dissonance. To avoid feeling like a

hypocrite, you will try to reduce the dissonance

by justifying your behavior (“Everyone else does

postdecision disso-
nance In the theory of
cognitive dissonance,
tension that occurs when
you believe you may have
made a bad decision.

rejecting or modifying one of those inconsistent

beliefs, changing your behavior, denying the evi-

dence, or rationalizing:

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Tension

(cognitive

dissonance)

Efforts to reduce

dissonance:

Reject belief

Change behavior

Deny the evidence

Rationalize

Cognitions conict

Behavior conicts with

attitude or belief

Watch the Video Carol Tavris: What Is Cognitive

dissonance? at MyPsychLab

Years ago, in a famous field study, Leon

Festinger and two associates infiltrated a group

of people who thought the world would end on

December 21 (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter,

1956). The group’s leader, whom the researchers

called Marian Keech, promised that the faith-

ful would be picked up by a flying saucer and

whisked to safety at midnight on December 20.

Many of her followers quit their jobs and spent

all their savings, waiting for the end to come.

What would they do or say, Festinger and his