Question

Briefly describe cognitive dissonance theory.

Answer 1

What is Cognitive dissonance ???
Cognitive dissonace is defined when one’s attitude and beliefs conficts or when our behaviour conflicts with our attitude
As you may already know that we tends to see ourselves as good moral smart individuals and becouse we have these assumptions about ourselves congnitive dissonance always couse discomfort.we don’t like to experince discomfort ,it’s not a very nice feeling. so what we do?
We try to reduce it . we reduce it by three basic ways….
Lets look into a example in daily life sitiution  
EXAMPLE
Jos has an alcohol addiction and jos knows he has an alcohol problem which is hurting his self image
The way to reduce the dissonance are:
1) By changing our behaviour to bring it in line with the dissonant cognition . so jos decided to quit drinking to reduce the dissonance
2) By attempting to justify our behaviour through changing our cognitions . jos thinks alcohol isn’t bad for me. It doesnot cause liver damage . in this way jos changed one of his dissonant cognitions to help reduce the cognitive dissonance
3) By attempting to justify our behaviour by adding a new cognition . so jos think’s he only drink after work because he ussually have rough days. Jos added new cognitions explaining why he drink so much to reduce the dissonance and make him feel better about his addiction
Now as we can see,when our attitude and beliefs collide ,we experience cognitive dissonance which is very uncomfortable .and unlike the way we satisfy other uncomfortable feeling ,it’s much harder to reduce dissonance
To conclude , understanding dissonance explains why so much of humans thinking is not rational but rationalizing