Cognitive Dissonance

Fesinger's (1957) Cognitive Dissonance Theory has been one of the most popular theories in psychology. It is so popular that I had actually heard of it before ever even taking a psychology class, which is more than I can say for any of the other theories I've studied in psychology. Festinger's theory works upon the belief that people are consistency-seekers. In other words, people want their behavior and their attitudes to match up. The theory states that when a person carries out an action or behavior that does not match up with their attitudes, then that person will tend to change their attitudes in order to match up with their behavior. So, instead of the person's attitudes affecting their behavior, their behavior is affecting their attitudes. There are, of course, conditions that are necessary for this to take place. According the Cooper and Fazio (1984) four conditions are necessary: the behavior must produce unwanted consequences, they must feel personal responsibility for the unpleasant outcomes of the behavior, , they must feel physiological arousal, and a person must make an attribution for that arousal to his or her own behavior.

I just recently witnessed a friend of mine experience cognitive dissonance. And I'll attempt to analyze it using the theory. I have a pair of shoes that I have had since my junior year in high school that I still wear all the time. They are Vans slip-on shoes and my friend thinks they are are a stupid type of shoe so he always makes fun of me for wearing them. Recently he bought a pair of shoes exactly like them, saying that he bought them for functional reasons. We both do slacklining (an activity like tight rope walking where you tie a line between two trees and walk across it) and he said that he wanted a pair of flat-bottomed shoes so he wouldn't have to go barefoot all of the time. He said he would only wear the shoes while slacklining and not any other time. When I saw that he bought them I guaranteed him that he would start wearing them all the time because they are so comfortable, but he assured me that he wouldn't. Recently, though, he has started wearing them all the time. When I brought it up to him he told me that he always liked the shoes and that he was just messing with me before. So, his attitude was that the type of shoes was stupid, and his behavior was that he started wearing the shoes, which caused dissonance. Therefore, he had to make a change in order to get rid of the dissonance, so he changed his attitude and said that he liked the shoes all along. Its kind of a stupid story, but I think my friend illustrates cognitive dissonance well.

References

Cooper, J, & Fazio, R. H. (1984). A new look at dissonance theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (vol 17, pp. 229-267). New Yoir: Academic Press.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.