Almost half a century ago, The Cognitive Dissonance Theory was developed by one of the foremost names in social psychology, Leon Festinger whose influential work on social comparison theory made him step forward in the social psychology field. According to Festinger, Cognitive Dissonance Theory applies to almost every situation we face in daily life. It’s mostly used in decision making and problem-solving.
Before we dive into Cognitive Dissonance, let’s grasp what Cognitive Dissonance means in simple terms. Let’s say you organized a trip to Bali with your friends. You sorted everything out before you started your journey. You packed your swimsuits, you got your lotions and you created a list of places that you would visit during your break in Bali. You thought together you would have a great time and all in anticipation of how pleasant your trip would be. Once you got Bali, you saw the flash news about the sudden hurricane in the region. You realized that it didn’t turn out as you planned because you weren’t able to take beach photos and went to sightseeing with your gang, instead you found yourself with a room full of baggage and empty wallet looking helplessly back at you because you already spent your savings for this trip. And you became a little bit upset and disappointed because of the inconsistency between your expectations and your experience. At times like this dissonance arouses, and it needs to be diminished. The more the state of being mentally strained, the more you will want to find a way to get away from it. It’s very similar to a person who is dead hungry is more likely to eat faster than a person who is less hungry. It may not anatomically identical to the same drive but it more or less looks like it.
Eliminating discrepancy is the most viable (although sometimes it’s not applicable) way to resolve the dissonance. So it goes like this: If your behavior and your attitude do not match, you may need to consider alternating one or both. One of my observations on this is about Psych students. They tend/desire to study psychology in order to understand themselves and reason how they interact with the world. They want to understand how their knowledge of behaviors and how their knowledge of attitudes correlate. Although I think it’s more like a ‘phototropism‘ seen in plants’ movements, which is a kind of mechanism that adopted by plants so that they can get as much light as possible, it’s difficult to make immediate changes. Besides, I think immediate changes are not real changes at all, they can merely be temporal replacements of the reel.
So my opinion on this groundbreaking yet slow solution can be applied with below 3 fundamental steps:
Change beliefs
Everything is pretty much possible when you just believe it. But here is an example; There was a time I was buying a pack of gum at a deli on the corner while my friend was waiting for me outside. I was trying to hurry for no reason at all, and then I realize I paid for one and got two gums. While we were walking down the street I told my friend I feel bad about this gummy purchase. He told me “if that makes you feel down and put a meaningless pressure on you, just go and return, but if you can change your perspective on this act and keep moving everything is also going to be OK. ” He told me he wouldn’t bother himself with too small neglects in life. The state of cognitive dissonance arises when you believe that two of their psychological representations are inconsistent.
Change actions
Action speaks louder than words. Try to realize what feelings, emotions causing the things that you don’t want to do anymore. You can reduce dissonance if you work on the significance of various ‘cognitions’.
Let’s look at how my gummy situation shaped on the way. I returned the gum because I felt like I was not in the mood of changing my belief at that moment.
Change perception of action
Know that you have the ability to change the way you perceive things and your actions respectively. You’re the master of own design. Although he made me realize that everything is OK, and life does not only consist of 1s and 0s. He also helped me to look from a different perspective and track how I’m making my decisions based on my perception along the way. So finding missing points and getting the knowledge of how your decision-making mechanism works alter your perception.
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