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The discomfort felt when holding two contradictory attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors.
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Example: Doing something even though you know it’s wrong.
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Dissonance Theory suggests people reduce their cognitive dissonance to achieve consistency. For example:
- By changing the behavior
- Justifying the behavior by changing the conflicting cognition
- Justifying the behavior by adding new behavior
- Ignore or deny information. Selective exposure theory also suggests this response.
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Despite the dissonance, people may be unwilling to change their beliefs in light of new information because:
- The change may be painful or involve loss.
- The present behavior may be otherwise satisfying
- Making the change may simply not be possible.
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Normalcy Bias - people underestimate the likelihood of a disaster when it might adversely affect them. This is despite threat warnings.
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Effort Justification - attributing the value of an outcome one puts effort into achieving as greater than the objective value of the outcome.
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IKEA Effect - consumers place a high value on products they partially created.
- It can be attributed to a psychological need to feel competent. Feeling like we’re incapable at something increases our desire to prove ourselves and appear competent.
- Another reason is effect justification. When we put effort into something, we want to believe there was a good reason to do so.
- Another reason is that we like things we associate with ourselves.
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Ben-Franklin Effect - people like someone more after doing a favor for them. The rationalization is that they help others because they like them.