You know meat is bad for the environment. Yet, you eat it despite calling yourself an animal lover. You rest all your belief on a leader despite all the facts telling otherwise. You are trying to lose weight. You know pizza is unhealthy, yet, you eat it. If you relate to any of these scenarios, you know they cause discomfort and unease. That’s because what you believe in does not match your actions. Or your beliefs do not align with the facts. In psychology, this discomfort, which you feel, is referred to as cognitive dissonance. It can have a considerable impact on your behaviour, beliefs, decisions, actions, thinking and even mental health. Let us delve into this phenomenon to know it in detail.

What Is Cognitive Dissonance?

Do you know that cognitive dissonance is among the most researched items of study in social psychology? The term was coined in 1957 by psychologist Leon Festinger in his book ‘A Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance’. As stated above, it refers to the conflicting beliefs one holds, or there is non-alignment between beliefs and actions that causes cognitive dissonance. The following examples might help you understand it better:

• You know smoking is bad for health. Yet, you smoke.
• You tell others to eat healthy despite yourself eating unhealthily.
• You believed a certain video widely shared on WhatsApp. Later, it was busted, and the whole scenario was termed fake news. 

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Everyone experiences cognitive dissonance. However, the degree varies from person to person. For example:

• Any dissonance related to self might cause intense discomfort.
• Similarly, if a person holds a belief close and is exposed to anything opposite, it can cause discomfort.
• Also, a wide gap between beliefs can cause considerable cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance: Impact

First and foremost, cognitive dissonance causes unease and discomfort, the degree of which defers as per persons and scenarios. However, as per a leading health website, it can also make you:

• Anxious
• Stressed
• Ashamed
• Embarrassed
• Guilty
• Regretful
• Sad  

Evidently, you would look up for ways to cope with and overcome these feelings.

Also read: The Psychology Behind The Not So Sweet Taste Of Revenge

How Do People Deal With Cognitive Dissonance?

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People employ various ways to deal with the feeling associated with cognitive dissonances, such as:

• Justifying actions or beliefs, which might include blaming others for the same. For example, you know smoking is bad. Yet, smoke blaming it on work-related stress. 
• Shying away from sharing beliefs or actions to save themselves from the feelings caused by cognitive dissonance.
• Avoiding any new information that goes against their beliefs.
• Ignoring any facts, newspaper reports, fact checks that go against their beliefs.
• Seeking information to outweigh the opposing information. For example, a person gets to know that fast fashion contributes immensely to climate change. As someone concerned about the environment, buying more clothes would be the last he/she might do. However, a sale might prompt buying new clothes, and the person might make himself better by thinking about the money saved. 

These are the negative effects of cognitive dissonance. However, it can also help someone to rationalize his/her beliefs and actions to align them with new and/or true information. It can help the person to a great degree not just by saving him/her from the unease, shame, guilt, and anxiety associated with holding conflicting beliefs, but by helping with the right decisions and choices in the future.

Cognitive dissonance is linked to a person’s psychology and affects not just his/her behaviour and actions but decisions too that can prove to define the future and course of that person’s life. Hence, managing cognitive dissonance in the right way is needed. What might be the best is to allow yourself to understand the opposite information you are fed and not be rigid about your beliefs and actions. It is the toughest of all the ways you might react. Yet, it’s the most useful one that might save you from future cognitive dissonance over the same issue. Hence, be flexible, learn, understand, and adapt. 

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