Question

Topic: Self-Justification and cognitive dissonance

Think about a time in which you experienced cognitive dissonance after performing a behavior (e.g., saying something you didn’t believe, making a difficult choice, behaving in a way contrary to your personal beliefs, expending considerable effort to become part of a group that turns out to be worse than you had anticipated, etc.). Describe the situation in a few sentences, and respond to the following questions:

How did the cognitive dissonance make you feel? Why?

How did you resolve the dissonance? Did you change your attitude, change your behavior, add new cognitions, or something else?

Did you use external justification or internal justification to help resolve your dissonance? If so, how?

Were there any lasting effects of this experience? Explain.

Answer 1

As I grew up, I lost my faith in the religions and I believed that religions helped to maintain the hierarchy and social structure thus keeping the discrimination and differences among people alive. So, whenever my parents force me to attend the church, I feel very uncomfortable and experience cognitive dissonance because I was not able to speak against my parents.

This cognitive dissonance made me frustrated, angry and dissatisfied. I also felt helpless because I was doing something which I didn’t like to do.

I lived with that until I was 16 but later I told my parents that I was not interested in doing something that I didn’t like. To my surprise my parents also agreed.

I used internal justification to resolve the issue. I made a decision and stuck to it without worrying much about what others will think or say about it.

Yes, I learned that I should make decisions that would satisfy me and avoid any cognitive dissonance in future. I can’t live forever in the fear of how others would receive what I do, rather I should be happy about what I do without hurting anyone.