Book Review-Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology

There’s a lot of research that has been done on cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology is a guide to evaluate the research and what we’ve learned over the 60+ years since it was first proposed.  (See A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance for Leon Festinger’s original work.)  The perspective of the editor is to provide differing points of view to allow readers to draw their own conclusions.  Contrast this a bit with Joel Cooper’s views in Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory, which doesn’t include criticisms of his proposed revisions to the model – some of which are relatively serious concerns.

The Cases

It’s convenient to speak of cognitive dissonance as a single unified theory as Festinger originally formulated it.  However, since his initial formulation, several special cases have appeared:

• Free-Choice – People reevaluate their choices after making them, and often show a greater preference for the choice they’ve chosen.
• Belief-Disconfirmation – Rather than changing a belief that has been contradicted by the evidence, a person works hard to protect that belief.
• Effort Justification – The more effort a person puts into something, the more likely they are to like it.
• Induced (Forced) Compliance – One can justify their behavior by claiming that their compliance was forced, thereby eliminating the dissonance between their actions and their beliefs.

The Theories

There are several variations of the theory that have emerged as well:

• Self-Perception – Proposed by Daryl Bem, this revision states that people form their attitudes from their behavior. Bem proposed that people cannot access their mood and cognition to develop their attitudes.
• Impression Management – The intersection of Erving Goffman’s work (see Stigma) on impression management and cognitive dissonance, this theory proposes that the dissonance is due to the impact on our ability to manage the impression of others about us.
• Self-Affirmation – People want to affirm themselves.
• Self-Consistency – People want their experiences to be consistent with their self-view.
• Aversive-Consequences – People experience distress when their choices lead to adverse consequences. This is Joel Cooper’s perspective as fully described in Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory.

Misattribution

One of the ways that developing cognitive dissonance can go awry is if the person has another way to attribute their discomfort.  If they believe that a situation is inherently discomforting, then they may misattribute the dissonance created by their conflicting cognitions to the situation.  This “resolves” the dissonance, but only in a short-term way, as it’s likely the discrepancy will arise again in different circumstances.

When trying to make people aware of their inconsistencies, it’s important not to give them an easy “out.”  If you do, they make take that easy exit and neutralize the power the dissonance has to help them change.

The Role of Commitment

The power of dissonance comes from the difference between ideas and the degree to which those ideas are difficult to move.  Cognitions, which are not difficult to move, will not arouse much dissonance, because the cognition will be changed before it registers much dissonance.  The commitment to the ideas can be that they’ve communicated their beliefs to others (see Change or Die) or that it seems fundamental to who they are.

Lack of Choice

Another danger when trying to rely on the effects of cognitive dissonance for behavior change is the risk that you may accidentally trigger a reinforcement effect.  Cognitive dissonance only occurs when the person believes that they have a choice.  If they feel that they are directly or indirectly being coerced into a behavior, they’ll generate no dissonance.  Instead, there may be a reinforcement of their opposition to the behavior.

The tricky bit is visible when we look at some of the classic experiments in psychology which failed to replicate.  Walter Michel’s marshmallow test hasn’t replicated well.  (See The Marshmallow Test for the core experiment.)  Maybe there’s something to the fact that the nursery was connected to Stanford.  Asch has said that his conformity effect may have been a sign of the times.  (See The Upswing for more.)  The experiments of Stanley Milgram on people’s willingness to inflict seemingly lethal electrocution were powerful on the Yale campus (even in an unimportant basement room) but failed to replicate when moved down the street to a strip mall.  (See The Lucifer Effect and Moral Disengagement for more on these experiments.)  Even the Stanford Prison Experiment performed by Phillip Zimbardo has controversy about the degree to which Zimbardo coached the bad behavior he wanted.

What these have in common is a variable (which wasn’t replicable) that subtly influenced the results and therefore it made their experiments not replicate.  The introduction of a lab coat, title, or something about the environment led people to believe that they didn’t have a choice – or that led them to a different choice.

Justification for Behaviors

At the time, it was heretical.  Classic learning theory said that the stronger the reinforcement, the greater the learning.  Economists predicted that if you gave people $20, they’d change their behavior more than if you gave them $1.  Greater rewards led to greater results, but cognitive dissonance predicted something else.  Cognitive dissonance predicted that people would use the $20 they got as justification for their behavior.  It was enough to make most people decide they weren’t doing the behavior – they were earning money.

Those who received the paltry offering couldn’t often complete the mental gymnastics to believe they didn’t do it of their own accord.  The result was greater cognitive dissonance and therefore greater long-term behavior change.  This counter-intuitive hypothesis was confirmed.  People who were offered little for a variety of behaviors seemed to have more dissonance and more attitude and behavior changes.

Another pitfall that we have when using cognitive dissonance to motivate change is that if we offer too much in the way of incentives, we’ll break the effect.  This is like Edward Deci’s observation that explicit rewards often break intrinsic rewards.  (See Why We Do What We Do.)

Organizing Stories

The work of James Pennebaker is clear that allowing people to write down their stories has a positive effect on their ability to process their trauma.  (See Opening Up.)  Lisa Feldman Barrett speaks of her own challenges with decoding what she was feeling in How Emotions Are Made – including how she confused illness with love.  What this says is that our grasp of how we feel and what our body is doing is more tenuous than we’d like to believe.

When people are asked about their feelings before giving them a chance to build a narrative, we see amplification of feelings – and distorted perceptions.  That is to say that if we want the effects of cognitive dissonance to work in the right direction, we have to create space for people to process their experiences into their autobiography before asking them about their feelings.

Discrepancies Without Consequences

As was mentioned earlier, Joel Cooper proposed a revision that has cognitive dissonance only occurring when there’s a negative outcome.  The outcome didn’t need to be predictable, only foreseeable.  The requirement for free choice remains in Cooper’s revision.  The real challenge to this is where cognitive dissonance effects seem to occur when there are no discernable consequences.

While this is problematic for Cooper’s theory, it’s important to remember that all models are wrong – though some are useful.  Cooper’s revision captures a non-trivial percentage of the space of cognitive dissonance and provides a useful thought framework for trying to trigger cognitive dissonance.  It may be that it is wrong, as the evidence implies, but it may still be a good framework for creating action.

Belief Intensification

What if, rather than changing beliefs to match the reality that you’ve observed, your beliefs morph into a more virulent and intense form?  That’s what seems to happen when cults that make predictions are confronted with the reality that their predictions are wrong.  Their beliefs become even more extreme.  The dates move, and the reasoning becomes more complex.

Sometimes, people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their resolve that they’re right –and that can be problematic if your goal is to change their perspectives.

Weak and Strong Reinforcement

The forces that drive cognitive dissonance to change are like the slingshot effect that NASA uses to fling satellites into outer space.  The slingshot effect works because of the proximity of the satellite to the source of gravity.  It’s the proximity that does the work.  Similarly, it’s the degree to which two options are of equal strength that powers the cognitive dissonance-driven change.  As a result, the more even the options are, the more they’ll be driven apart by cognitive dissonance.

Sometimes, the learning behaviors that should be more highly coupled to bigger rewards show the reverse results with reinforcement working better when the reward is small.  Even pigeons seem to favor the treats that require more work.

Forced Reevaluation

In the end, dissonance forces the reevaluation of beliefs.  This is something that we rarely do as humans.  While we know that the Earth isn’t flat and it’s rotating, we speak of sunrise as if the sun is rising above a flat earth.  While this is a simple linguistic aspect of our world, it surfaces a deeper awareness that the things we learned as children – or that our ancestors learned as children – are rarely tested.  The need for consistency and the awareness of this inconsistency can force us to reevaluate our beliefs in ways that allow us to more accurately represent reality in our minds.

Many speak of meditation and downtime to allow for reevaluating life’s priorities, but nothing has a focusing effect like knowing that two beliefs that you hold dear are utterly incompatible.

Dissonance Reduction Strategies

As we’ve seen above, there is an alternative to resolving the discrepancy.  Here are some of those alternatives:

• Ignore – Simply failing to recognize the discordant belief.
• Discount – Providing a reason why the belief isn’t that important.
• Provide Alternate Explanations – Providing alternative explanations that don’t require the beliefs to be in conflict.
• Exception to the Rule – Viewing the data as a fluke or exception, thereby discounting it or limiting the degree to which is should be considered discordant.
• Blame – Blame someone else so that the results can be explained away without internally discordant beliefs.
• Numbing (e.g. alcohol) – Temporarily delaying awareness by numbing, often but not exclusively through alcohol or drugs. Binge-watching television, surfing the internet, and chronic business can all be forms of numbing.

Protecting Beliefs

Often, we will protect our beliefs so that we don’t realize conflicting beliefs, or we process them in ways that prevent falsification of our cherished beliefs.  Some of the strategies for protecting our beliefs are:

• avoiding exposure to such information,
• reducing negative feelings arising from inconsistency,
• actively discounting the inconsistent information,
• generating alternative explanations for the contradictory information,
• deeming it as an exception to the rule, or
• reinterpreting the status of one’s beliefs in a manner that makes them unfalsifiable.

Cognitive Dissonance Comes from Sense Making

As humans, we’re constantly trying to make sense of the world around us.  (See The Righteous Mind.)  We experience cognitive dissonance, because we can’t find a way to represent reality to ourselves.  We’re forced to find new ways to think and new beliefs to form.  Maybe it’s time to make sense of Cognitive Dissonance.

Book Review-Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory

We do not like inconsistency.  That’s the fundamental driver behind Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory.  Joel Cooper provides appropriate nods to Leon Festinger – and those he studied with.  (See A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Festinger’s book, for his direct perspective.)  Cooper’s perspective is one that isn’t fully embraced across all the research on cognitive dissonance.  However, there is some research supporting his perspectives and lots of confusing results.  Cooper does a good job of summarizing what we’ve learned and acknowledging some of the challenges in the results we’ve seen.

Best Rewards

One of the great advancements that was brought forth by cognitive dissonance is a push back against classical operant conditioning, which suggests that the greater the reward, the better the learning.  What cognitive dissonance research discovered was that smaller rewards actually create a bigger change in behavior.  This counter-intuitive answer changed the way that people thought about learning.  If there’s too big a reward, the change is minimal.  This is similar to Deci’s discovery that external rewards break intrinsic rewards.  (See Why We Do What We Do.)  What we “knew” about motivation and how to change behaviors was broken by the reality: experiments proved that classic behavioral modification therapy couldn’t explain these results.

It’s described as “inverse linear relationship between incentive magnitude and attitude change.”  In short, the larger the reward, the smaller the change.  It mattered.

Suffering

Another curious finding appeared with connections to cognitive dissonance.  The greater the struggle to obtain something – particularly membership in a group – the more people liked the achievement.  The groups were better, and the awards were more meaningful.  All of this served to minimize the occasional torture that was endured to get there.  Hazing rituals are officially forbidden for Greek organizations (fraternities and sororities), yet there are still news stories about how these rituals have gone awry and people are injured.  Members of these organizations frequently stand by these rituals that they themselves endured.

Classical theories of change and conditioning cannot explain the transformation from pain and self-questioning to assurance that these goals were worth the effort.  However, cognitive dissonance posits that the gap between the memory of the hard work and the reality of the result must be resolved.  We have to think the work was worth it to address the effort we put in.

Threats and Punishment

Every parent wants to know how to teach their children right from wrong.  They want to shape their behaviors in ways that lead to productive and happy adults.  Here, cognitive dissonance and the research that tested the theory have another surprising suggestion.  Make the threats and consequences mild rather than severe.  When the threats are mild, the child can believe that the desired behavior was their idea, and cognitive dissonance can slowly but steadily change their attitudes and motivations in the desired direction.

Practically, it means offering a subtle reprimand for eating candy before dinner rather than an explosion.  The severe threat or punishment absolves the systems that drive cognitive dissonance from their need to engage.

Disengagement

Albert Bandura wrote a guide for how to bypass some of our built-in morality.  In Moral Disengagement, he explains the mechanisms that would separate people from their morality with striking regularity.  They essentially come down to ways that a person doesn’t need to accept responsibility – or complete responsibility – for their actions.  Der Führer ordered me, so it wasn’t really my decision.  Cognitive dissonance faces the same forces that disable its power for resolving inconsistencies in our lives.

By being able to claim that the decision wasn’t ours, or that we had no choice, cognitive dissonance is disabled and rendered helpless.  That’s why it’s important to consider how we may be subtly or overtly creating “outs” for people when we’re trying to leverage cognitive dissonance for positive change.  Many research efforts have been undone by subtle coercion that the researcher didn’t intend.

Learning

Not every result in the study of cognitive dissonance has yielded clear results – even those where the confounding problem of coercion has been eliminated.  One such set of experiments is around the impact of dissonance on learning.  The theory – coupled with learning theory – predicted that simple learning should be enhanced by cognitive dissonance while complex learning should be inhibited.

Conceptually, simple learning is enhanced by motivators.  Malcolm Knowles et al. explain the forces that drive learning in adults in The Adult Learner, and one of those factors is the need to know.  Cognitive dissonance can provide that reason.  This amplification of simple learning was what the research found.

However, contrary to what the coupling of cognitive dissonance and learning theory would predict, complex learning tasks weren’t inhibited.  The distinction between simple and complex learning may seem abstract, but the line is drawn, because we’ve recognized that stress and fear inhibit complex learning.  There are many perspectives and theories about the gap between the two.  Often, we’re reminded of the apparent division between lower-level, implicit types of learning from the more complex, prefrontal cortex types of learning.  Kahneman uses the analogy of System 1 and System 2 in Thinking, Fast and Slow, and the model holds up for learning.

The question remains why researchers didn’t see a reduction of complex learning in scenarios of cognitive dissonance.  My answer is that cognitive dissonance is a different kind of stressor that’s not about short-term survival and therefore may influence learning differently.  Researchers will argue that the mechanisms they use for stress are often completely arbitrary and fake, but they still seem to have impact.  A classic approach is to create a time pressure either in the form of instruction or as an incentive for time-based performance.

Complicating the situation is that other research results indicated precisely the opposite – with no effect on simple learning and an inhibitory impact on complex learning.  Clearly, the forces at play in the intersection of cognitive dissonance and learning are nuanced.  While I’m convinced that simple learning is encouraged with dissonance with no ill effects for complex learning, that may not universally be the case.

Fear

In Emotion and Adaptation, Richard Lazarus explains fear as a cognition.  He explains the evaluation process and how that process works.  Ultimately, he proposes that we evaluate a situation to determine the degree of appropriate fear.  Cooper recounts research by Schachter and Singer, which proposed that fear is a label we can apply to arousal.  In other words, we have a biological, unconscious response to something, and we label that arousal with the word fear.

This explains a curious result of research, where cognitive dissonance’s impact was disabled when participants were provided with an alternative explanation for the arousal that dissonance created.  When injected with a placebo and told of expected anxiety, participants attributed their dissonance arousal to the drug – and then failed to change their attitudes to resolve the inconsistency of thought.

This finding shows us that we need to be careful to not provide an excuse for the arousal that cognitive dissonance provides lest we nullify its effect on changing attitudes.

Curiously, it was discovered that the valence of arousal could be experimentally manipulated.  Participants in research could be encouraged to lean towards excitement or anxiety with the subtle manipulation of prompts and responses.  This suggests that the way people interpret cognitive dissonance may be subjective.

Amphetamine

When the placebo mentioned above was changed to an amphetamine, a stimulant, the results changed.  In the placebo research, people attributed their arousal to the drug and therefore didn’t change.  However, when given an amphetamine, people in every group showed more attitude change.  One potential explanation for this is the arousal was of greater magnitude and therefore demanded a greater response.  Even low-choice participants, who could have claimed that they didn’t have to address their behavior discrepancy because they weren’t given options, changed.

Perhaps the low-choice condition failed to generate arousal and therefore there was no need to change, but the addition of amphetamine caused an arousal that needed to be addressed.

Commitment

Another interesting factor at play in cognitive dissonance is the degree to which someone commits to the behavior.  People with stronger commitments seem to have greater moves towards consistency.  Commitment is a bit of an odd word, because it implies an internal state, but that state can be driven externally.  Write an essay that’s destroyed afterwards, and the commitment is low – even if you passionately believe in what you’ve written.  Write it and share it to a disinterested party, and it goes up slightly.  Write it and have it shared with a decision-maker, and it goes up again.  Deliver a public speech, where we believe the audience can be persuaded, and commitment soars.

The greater the commitment to the position, the greater the forces at play and the more attitude or behavior adjustment we’d expect to see from the forces of cognitive dissonance.

It’s important to note that the effect seems to be eliminated if the person or people we’re speaking with seem to be unmoved or unmovable.  If we believe that our counter-attitudinal statements were rejected, no attitude change occurs.  Our perceptions of efficacy matter.

Unwanted Consequences

The major revision to cognitive dissonance proposed by Cooper and his colleagues is the idea that cognitive dissonance requires a consequence, and it only appears when that consequence was foreseeable.  Foreseeable is a standard less than predictable; it’s only reasonably possible.  (See The Suicide Lawyers.)  Even if there’s a 10% chance that something can come as a result of a behavior, it may be sufficiently foreseeable and therefore something that causes cognitive dissonance.

While this perspective is partially supported, it limits the scope of cognitive dissonance and requires us to stretch the limits of consequences to their maximum extreme.  We’ve got to believe that the consequences can be very small – like someone forming a negative impression of us.

As a framework for story telling and converting a desire to change into a framework for action, it is useful.  You simply expose someone to the potential negative consequence as a result of their actions and then you allow those consequences to happen.  This should be sufficient to cause an attitude shift – presuming that none of the ways that cognitive dissonance can be subverted are present.

Personal Responsible

One of the predecessors, then, that comes as a part of this proposed revision is that for a person to experience cognitive dissonance, they must accept some level of responsibility for their action having caused the negative consequences.  A failure to take personal responsibility because of one of the previously discussed ways or other, less common ways eliminates the need to address the dissonance – because they won’t experience any.  When perceived as random events, there is no need for someone to modify their beliefs or behaviors.

Self-Consistency and Self-Affirmation

Two other proposed revisions to Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory are a theory of self-consistency and a theory of self-affirmation.  Self-consistency says that we strive to resolve how our behaviors don’t match our values.  Self-affirmation proposes that our attitudes and behaviors should be self-affirming (positive).  Both revisions have mixed but ultimately negative evidence.

Self-consistency struggles with the challenge of articulating a single belief system for an individual.  As Reiss’ work in both Who Am I? and The Normal Personality and the work of Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind point out, our behavior is driven by a set of conflicting values and fundamental beliefs that we must constantly reconcile.  This means it’s hard to believe that people are recognizing their inconsistency.

Self-affirmation struggles when we realize that affirmation may be discordant with how a person feels and therefore may make the inconsistency and discrepancy worse rather than better.  (See Compassion and Self-Hate.)  Fundamental structural problems like this, in addition to the evidence, has made it difficult for either of these revisions to the theory of cognitive dissonance to be accepted.

Distraction

While not a permanent strategy, it is possible to defer processing of cognitive dissonance by means of distraction.  This can be either intentional, purposeful distraction, or by simply being too busy to take a step back and reflect.  Dangerous conditions can occur where people are too busy to recognize dissonance for long periods of time: when they suddenly have time, they end up processing all of the dissonance at once – with sometimes tragic results.

We’ve all heard stories of the people who take a vacation and suddenly have an identity crisis.

Comparing Self vs. Other

One of the challenges in developing an irrefutable theory for cognitive dissonance is that it’s an internal, mental process that is therefore not subject to direct observation.  There are simple differences in how you evaluate yourself – whether you use a progress milestone like a growth mindset (see Mindset), or you judge yourself against those around you.  The research on happiness seems to imply that people always want more than their peers.  They want 10% more than they’re currently making – but more than that, they’re also looking to do better than their peer group.  (See Thinking, Fast and Slow and The Righteous Mind.)

Group Salience

Cognitive dissonance is also influenced by forces beyond the individual.  Their group memberships and the social norms created as a part of those groups can have a profound impact on cognitive dissonance – if they’re primed.  In Influence, Robert Cialdini explains how priming people to see themselves a particular way or as a part of a particular group dramatically changes the degree to which they’ll behave in ways that are consistent with their prior statement or with the perceived preferences of the group.

If you want people to behave more like a group, make sure that that group is more salient in their minds while they’re making the decision.

Public Separation

Bill Clinton was known as the Teflon president, because the scandals never seemed to stick to him.  Even when he had to admit to his extra-presidential interactions with Monica Lewinsky, his approval ratings climbed.  Though most admitted that they didn’t approve of his actions, they still approved of him as a president.  This odd response makes sense when people disconnected his personal ethics from what they perceived to be the skills necessary to run the country.

These odd pathways can confound attempts to predict what effect – if any – cognitive dissonance will have.

All Theories Are Wrong

George Box, an economist, said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”  This statement captures the core of the discussions about cognitive dissonance and proposed revisions.  The original model has its limitations, and the revisions attempt to get at resolving them.  Ultimately, we need to remember that though Cognitive Dissonance may be wrong, it probably is useful.

Book Review-A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

It’s a classic.  A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance lays out Leon Festinger’s theory about how and why we change our attitudes.  More than 25 of the books that I’ve reviewed contain a direct reference to “cognitive dissonance.”  It underlies theories of change at personal, organizational, and societal levels.  The fundamental core is simply that individuals strive for consistency in themselves.  They want their behaviors to match their values and their values to match their words.  From this simple premise, research has tried to explain the conditions under which we’ll change to reduce discrepancies.

Competing Cognitions

Festinger’s word for inconsistency is “dissonance.”  Dissonance, he argues, is an unpleasant state for humans; as a result, we’d take actions to reduce the dissonance.  The strategy would depend on the cognitions in conflict.  He describes cognitions as congruent or dissonant with one another and can be placed on a scale from important to unimportant.  He proposes that only important cognitions in dissonance with one another would provide sufficient drive for change.

There are several things that can make thoughts incongruent (dissonant) to one another.

1. Logical Inconsistency – Logically, the two thoughts cannot both be true.
2. Cultural Mores – The culture may not accept our thoughts.
3. Specific Encapsulation – Specific thoughts may be included within generic thoughts. I mentioned in my review of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) that Al Campanis considered Jackie Robinson a good man and a great baseball player – and yet would have been seen as a racist today.
4. Past Experience – The way that we’ve acted is inconsistent with who we want to be.

Resolving Dissonance

The degree of dissonance is influenced by the number of related cognitions.  Cognitions don’t exist in isolation.  There are many related thoughts and beliefs.  When we experience dissonance, we experience it as the gap between clusters of thoughts.  The greater the number of thoughts and the greater their importance to us, the more likely we will experience dissonance – and change.

Festinger proposes that we’d only move one of the dissonant thoughts (or block of thoughts) to resolve the dissonance.  We’d move whichever seemed easier.  However, changing an opinion isn’t the only approach that we have to resolving the discrepancy.

The truth is that we can change the importance of the cognitions.  For instance, if we see ourselves as a generous person, and we walked past the panhandler without making eye contact, we may decide that not being generous in that situation doesn’t mean we’re not generous – we can decide that they weren’t really in need.  Allowing us to deemphasize our behavior and reduce the pressure of the dissonance.

A different approach is to simply forget.  We know that the more salient things are in our attention, the greater we experience discomfort associated with dissonance.  By reducing our ability to recall the situation – by forgetting – we reduce the dissonance and discomfort we feel – and thus reduce the pressure to change.

The other way to resolve the dissonance, the one that makes it so interesting, is to make a change.  Change or Die explains how difficult it is to create change in an individual: 80% of people don’t change their behaviors after a heart attack, and we have 66% recidivism rate after two years.  (Recidivism refers to previously incarcerated people being convicted again.)  So, while the forces of cognitive dissonance can be powerful, they’re only valuable when harnessed properly.

Why We Don’t Change

With a powerful psychological force driving us towards consistency, why don’t we change our inconsistent beliefs?  The first reason is because once you believe something, it’s hard to “unbelieve” it.  It’s like trying to not think about white bears – it’s not possible.  (See White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts.)  If we believe that grass is green, it’s hard to not see the grass as green.

Another factor is the “freezing factor.”  Kurt Lewin proposed that change required unfreezing, changing, and freezing the change.  That is, there’s a certain inertia around the way we do things today.  To accomplish change, we must break through this inertia, make our change, and ultimately recreate inertia around the new, changed, behaviors.  (See Lewin’s change model for more about this change process.)  Following the model, another reason we don’t change is because the freezing effect is overly powerful over time.  Aspects of cognitive dissonance reinforce the decisions that were made and approaches that are in use by amplifying their benefits or minimizing the benefits of the alternatives.

The mere fact that we’ve made a decision creates dissonance at some level.  For everything we’ve decided, we’ve said no to something else, whether directly or indirectly, because of a limitation of resources.  The degree of dissonance seems to increase substantially the more similar the weight and utility of the options are.  The closer the options are, the greater cognitive dissonance will cause them to spread.

Cognitive Disengagement

It is, however, possible to disable the power of cognitive dissonance.  Simply removing the perception of choice eliminates the power of cognitive dissonance to help reinforce the change.  A judge orders a person to attend a rehabilitation program.  The result is the person feels forced, and their perceptions of their abuse of a substance is likely to change less than had they made the choice on their own.  But more importantly, it’s not the degree of coercion that matters, it’s the perception of it.

“But there really wasn’t a choice” is a phrase that indicates the person either sees the decision as not close, and thus doesn’t induce cognitive dissonance, or outside of their control, which also neutralizes any cognitive dissonance forces.  Free choice remains an essential part of the formula for leveraging the power of cognitive dissonance.

Memory

We forget that memory is subject to revision.  We ignore the fact that memories aren’t like film, nor are they immutable.  In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to support the fact that our memories are reconstructed in the moment and incorporate details from our current attitude and mood that weren’t in the original memory.  One of the techniques used to eliminate dissonance is to adjust our historical memories to support our current world view.  For instance, if we previously had seriously considered alternatives to the car we purchased, our decision will reduce the degree to which we can recall having seriously considered those alternatives.

Our memories are wiped clean from our ability to recall them, they’re deemphasized in importance, or we simply rewrite the narrative of the memories to comply with our overall decision.

Mere Ownership

There’s a measurable effect that owning something has on the degree to which we’ll like it.  Barry Swartz shared this in The Paradox of Choice.  However, Festinger explains that the effect, while measurable, isn’t particularly strong.  That is, the ownership effect is something that’s real, but it doesn’t seem to sway our opinions that much.  There are a number of other smaller biases and motivators that are discussed in Influence and Pre-Suasion.  While individually they may not have much impact, collectively they may be a way to motivate change.

Just Enough

There’s a bias in trying to generate change that we should overwhelm the target with reasons why change is the right answer.  It requires a lot of energy and is therefore exhausting.  What cognitive dissonance proposes is that we should provide just enough motivation.  Overwhelming them with evidence is, on the surface, the right answer, but if any of our evidence cracks or is invalidated, the whole commitment can crumble.  If we can find ways to create difficult decisions that demonstrate that there is choice, we can leverage the power of cognitive dissonance to anchor the change – just like Lewin recommended.  (See Resolving Social Conflicts and Field Theory in Social Science.)

Loose Lips Sink Ships

During World War II, there was concern that individual information held by individuals could be assembled into useful information.  The result was a campaign to discourage people speaking about what they did know that might be assembled into useful information.  The problem was the campaign wasn’t particularly effective, and research was done on how people viewed the information that they had.

They didn’t think that mentioning their child had moved from one base to another useful.  Nor did they believe that indicating an order or a shipment of some material could be useful.  However, this is exactly the kind of information the campaign was designed to prevent being shared.  Pamphlets were generated and approaches attempted.  The result was that most people didn’t change their perceptions of whether they had information to keep secret.

The problem, in this case, is that there was no cognitive dissonance, because the idea couldn’t be generated that individuals did have information that they shouldn’t discuss openly.  The desire to be friendly couldn’t be brought into conflict with the need to protect our interests.

Discounting the Individual

One of the ways that we resolve dissonance is the internal equivalent of shoot the messenger.  We discount the information by invalidating the person who delivered the message.  This is a logical fallacy but one we trick ourselves into none the less.  This is one of the drivers for why we are all Going to Extremes.

Reality

Ultimately, one expects that reality will change people to be more in line with what they experience.  However, reality’s power to change beliefs of people is limited.  There is no end to the capacity of the human mind to come up with theories for an experience.  Geocentricism required complex corrections to account for the fact that it was fundamentally wrong, but it didn’t stop people from believing it – vehemently.  Reality was the same.  It was sending clear messages, and these messages were being interpreted incorrectly.

Science has a long history of scientists who believe things that have been long disproven.  Despite clear evidence, some people remain unmoved.

Immovable Beliefs

A portion of Japanese nationals who requested repatriation during World War II were held in camps and ultimately shipped back to Japan.  Despite being told repeatedly that the US had won the war, they returned on the ships hoping to hear the “truth” that Japan had conquered the US.  These beliefs persisted even after they landed and were told by Japanese nationals of the devastation and the surrender.

Similarly, numerous cults have made prophesies about the end of the world.  Their dates come and go, and instead of accepting that the prophecy was false, they invent elaborate stories about how they were wrong about the date – or how their faithfulness has saved the world.  So, while reality can be a powerful force, it’s not an all powerful force that can combat all delusion.  Sometimes, we need to recognize that we can’t get everyone into the conflict position required to recognize the power of A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.