Synonyms

Inconsistency; Inconsistency resolution

Definition

In its original definition, cognitive dissonance is a state of arousal caused by having co-occurring cognitions such that one follows from the obverse of the other. Dissonance is experienced as an unpleasant tension-like state and needs to be reduced. A cognition is an individual piece of knowledge about the world or about one’s internal states.

Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is a ubiquitous aspect of human social life. Introduced into the scientific literature by Leon Festinger (1957), the concept was defined as a state of arousal caused by inconsistency among a person’s cognitions. In Festinger’s view, people abhor inconsistency. When faced with discrepancy among cognitions, people experience a motivation akin to hunger or thirst. It is an uncomfortable drive-like state that we are motivated to reduce. We resolve our inconsistencies in myriad possible ways that are designed to alleviate the tension state and restore equanimity.

Festinger (1957) offered a set of hypothetical examples that helped to describe some of the circumstances that might lead to the arousal of dissonance. Among those circumstances are choosing to smoke when you know that smoking is damaging to your health, making a statement contrary to your true opinions, choosing one commodity or action from a set of attractive alternatives, holding an opinion that is inconsistent with more general values or opinions, or observing events that are inconsistent with past experience.

Despite our preference for consistency, there are numerous times in our daily lives in which we are confronted with a set of inconsistent cognitions. Because the perception of inconsistency leads to an uncomfortable state of arousal, we have developed ways to reduce the inconsistency. We may respond to inconsistency by changing a cognition to make it fit with other cognitions we hold. We can also change the importance of a cognition or act to avoid noticing the inconsistency altogether.

Aging may affect the dissonance process. At the very least, the cognitions that people find to be important change with age. Young children may be invested in the toy they are allowed to choose; young adults may be profoundly affected by the cost of attending university; older adults may be most interested in the types of leisure activities they can choose or the age of retirement from their careers. More profoundly, changes in memory and emotional processes may also affect the quality and magnitude of dissonance arousal, and changes in mental and physical health status may also affect the way that dissonance is experienced in people’s lives.

The plan of this entry is to describe the basic tenets of cognitive dissonance theory and the focal areas that have received the preponderance of research attention. Alternative formulations of dissonance will be examined as will the accompanying evidence for those alternatives. Changes in mental processes and brain activities that characterize passage into older age will be presented along with a discussion of the ways that such changes affect the arousal and reduction of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance as Function of Choice

Our lives are replete with choices. We choose a breakfast cereal to begin the morning, we choose the clothes we put on, and, possibly, we choose the means of transportation we use to shop or go to work. If we have been fortunate in our lives, we have chosen the job we currently have or the school that we attended. What is little noted in all of these choices is the fact that choices create the conditions for the arousal of cognitive dissonance. Imagine a couple that has recently retired and decided to change their living accommodations from a private home to a retirement community. They have narrowed their choice to two facilities that they view as highly attractive. One community offers excellent recreational activities but comes at a steep cost. Another may have a dearth of recreational facilities but has excellent food and costs appreciably less. The choice is an important one for it has implications for future lifestyle and happiness.

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that these retirees will experience cognitive dissonance as soon as they decide which facility to join. Prior to the choice, the many facets of the decision were examined carefully and objectively. In the pre-decision period, people try to make the very best decision possible and consider their options without bias. However, once the decision is made, then every attractive feature of the unchosen alternative stands in contradiction to the choice that was made. So, too, does every unattractive feature of the chosen alternative. For example, if the retirees decide to join the facility that had the best recreational activities, they will be comforted by the fact that recreation – as well as all other positive features of this choice – fit with their decision. They can envision hours on the treadmill, or the golf course. On the other hand, the cost of the facility will make it less feasible for them to travel for holidays or family visits. Moreover, by choosing the facility with the better recreational activities, the couple will not be able to savor the excellent meals at the second facility.

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that, once having made a choice, all of the consequences of that choice that are inconsistent with the selected alternative become grist for the dissonance process. The perception of inconsistency – for example, foregoing the excellent food at the rejected community and paying the steep price at the chosen community – creates the aversive feeling state of cognitive dissonance. In order to reduce the aversive state of dissonance, the couple is motivated to reevaluate the components of their decision in order to support the conclusion they came to. They can decide that they did not really want to be saddled with the burden of having to go to the rejected community’s elaborate dinners and that traveling is not a highly prized activity after all. They might also engage in selective memory by recalling all of the consequences consistent with their choice while forgetting those that are inconsistent. In the end, dissonance theory predicts that the couple will become more satisfied with their choice than they were when they made their selection. In brief, the inconsistency created by making a difficult choice between alternatives arouses the uncomfortable tension state of dissonance. In order to reduce dissonance, the chosen alternative is seen as more attractive and the rejected alternative becomes less attractive. This is known as the “spreading of alternatives,” one of the signature predictions of cognitive dissonance theory.

Numerous laboratory studies have supported this prediction (Cooper 2007). In the first empirical investigation of the consequences of free choice, Brehm (1956) asked adult consumers to rank a number appliances in terms of how attractive they would be to own. The consumers were then given an opportunity to select one of two highly attractive items. The choice was a difficult one because the items had been ranked similarly in attractiveness. Brehm found that, following the choice, the participants came to feel that the item they had chosen was even more attractive than it had been prior to the choice and the item they had rejected was rated as less attractive. The spreading of alternatives following a choice has been replicated with children and adult participants and is robust across cultures (Cooper 2007).

Cognitive Dissonance and Induced Compliance

Induced compliance is the name given to the social situation in which someone is induced to argue for a position that is contrary to the person’s own beliefs. In the first experiment of its type, Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) asked participants to engage in a performance task in the laboratory that was designed to engender a negative attitude. It was tedious, boring, and apparently without purpose. Participants were then induced to lie to a person who was waiting to take part in the experiment. They were asked to convince the alleged next person that the performance task was fun, engaging, and enjoyable. Because the statement was clearly contradictory to the participants’ attitudes, it aroused cognitive dissonance. In order to reduce the arousal of the unpleasant tension state, participants changed their attitudes to make them more consistent with their behavior – that is, they came to agree that the task was interesting.

Dissonance has a magnitude (Festinger 1957). People who hold cognitions that are incompatible can experience dissonance to different degrees. Some of the variance is due to individual differences in tolerance for inconsistency (Cialdini et al. 1995). Most of the research on the magnitude of dissonance, however, has focused on situational differences in the inducement for counterattitudinal behavior. For example, asking people to make a counterattitudinal statement for a small, or no, incentive creates more dissonance than making the same request for a substantial incentive. Festinger and Carlsmith predicted and found that making attitude-discrepant speeches in return for a small incentive ($1) created more attitude change than making attitude-discrepant speeches for a large incentive ($20).

The situation that Festinger and Carlsmith employed in their research was well controlled but somewhat artificial. Enjoyment of a specific laboratory task is not a concern in most people’s lives. Nonetheless, there are instances in people’s lives in which they may find themselves advocating positions that they do not fully endorse and these may lead to the arousal of cognitive dissonance. Imagine that a special interest group hires a retiree to advocate for privatization of a pension or retirement system. Although the retiree does not endorse privatization, he consents to advocate on behalf of this plan. Consistent with dissonance theory predictions, the retiree is likely to change his attitude in favor of privatization. The less he is paid for his advocacy, the greater the dissonance and the greater the attitude change in favor of the privatization plan.

Empirical research has supported the prediction that people change their attitudes toward important issues that affect their lives. People have been induced to change their attitudes about banning controversial speakers, students have changed their attitudes toward raising tuition, and taxpayers have changed their attitudes about raising taxes after being induced to make statements contrary to their attitudes. And, as in the laboratory, the less the incentive, the greater the dissonance and the more the attitude change (Cooper 2007).

An additional feature of the induced compliance situation critical for the maximization of dissonance is that the attitude-discrepant behavior must lead to an unwanted consequence. If a retiree makes a statement advocating privatization of pension plans, the statement will lead to dissonance if there is a consequence to his behavior. The likelihood that someone will be convinced by the counterattitudinal statement facilitates maximal cognitive dissonance and will lead to attitude change.

Effort Justification

People often engage in effortful activities in order to achieve a goal. In the literature on effort justification (Aronson and Mills 1959), effort is considered to be any activity that is difficult and unpleasant or would otherwise not be engaged in. Imagine that a person hopes to join a book discussion club at a neighborhood senior citizen center. Imagine, too, that the group has requirements that could be considered onerous. In order to join, members have to pay a deposit as a precaution against damages, must read and write reports on several books so that their reading and intellectual abilities can be assessed, and agree to lead more than their share of group discussions. Assuming that the deposit, the extra reading, and reports are unpleasant or effortful, then engaging in them arouses cognitive dissonance. If they were engaged in for the purpose of joining the club, then the club ought to be a very good one in order to justify the amount of effort expended. Suppose that objectively it is only mediocre. In that case, the effort expended to join the group is inconsistent with the group’s quality. This increases the amount of dissonance. The unpleasant arousal state can be reduced by distorting the perception of the quality of the group. Rather than viewing the book club as mediocre, people can alter their attitude to believe that the group is wonderful, thereby justifying the effort and expense they paid to join.

Alternative Models of Dissonance

The New Look Model. Cooper and Fazio (1984) proposed an alternate model for the basis of cognitive dissonance. They outlined a theory in which dissonance is caused by assuming responsibility for a behavior that results in a potentially unwanted consequence. In the New Look model, dissonance is not aroused by inconsistent cognitions per se but is rather a coping strategy to deal with one’s responsibility for bringing about aversive events.

The New Look model raises an important issue that affects many people as they age. Any number of unwanted consequences may occur as a function of growing older. People may need to retire because of failing health or because of arbitrary age restrictions. Home environments may need to be modified or people may need to move to special care facilities. These consequences of aging are often unwanted and aversive, which seem suited to evoking the arousal of dissonance. Dissonance often works to the advantage of people who must make difficult decisions about retirement or health because it typically serves to make them feel more positively about the decisions they have made. The critical factor that determines whether the unwanted consequences of aging lead to dissonance is whether people feel personally responsible for the occurrence of the aversive events. In principle, if dissonance is aroused, it will lead to cognitive activity designed to reduce the dissonance. If moving to a senior facility leads to something objectively unwanted, people will experience dissonance and take action to reduce it. It would be reasonable to predict that people will be motivated to like their new living facilities as a way to reduce dissonance – but only to the extent that they feel personal responsibility for their choices. If they feel retirement has been forced on them or they had no role in a decision to move to a new facility, then dissonance will not occur and there will be no motivation to raise their evaluations.

The Action-Based Model. Harmon-Jones (1999) proposed a functional approach to the motivation for cognitive dissonance. The action-based model suggests that people are motivated to reduce inconsistency because the negative arousal interferes with people’s distal motivation to prepare for unequivocal action. Because inconsistent cognitions imply inconsistent actions, the discrepancy needs to be resolved.

Self-Esteem Approaches. Aronson’s self-esteem model (Aronson 1968) and Steele’s self-affirmation theory (Steele 1988) suggest that the central motivation for dissonance arousal and reduction is to maintain a high sense of self-esteem. Acting inconsistently threatens people’s self-worth. Therefore, restoring consistency is at the service of reestablishing a self-worth and global self-esteem.

Self-Standards Model and the Role of Self-Esteem in Aging. Stone and Cooper (2001) proposed a resolution of the role of self-esteem in dissonance. They showed that the effect of the self in the arousal of dissonance is moderated by the standards that are used to evaluate the consequences of behavior. When people behave, they assess the valence of the consequences by comparing them to a particular standard of judgment. Stone and Cooper’s self-standards model proposes that the choice of standards of judgment moderates the role of the self in the dissonance process. When people are motivated by situational or dispositional factors to assess their behavior against normative standards of judgment, such as “How would most people assess this behavior?”, then self-esteem does not factor into the dissonance process. However, when people evaluate their behavior by using a personal standard of judgment, then self-esteem is very much a part of the dissonance process. As a general rule, the higher the self-esteem, the greater is the dissonance.

What can we expect about the role of self-esteem in the aging process? To the extent that dissonance is based on personal standards of judgment, an aging population will experience more or less dissonance depending on changes in their self-esteem over the life span. Research concerning the self-esteem of the elderly leans toward the conclusion that older adults have a lower sense of self-esteem than younger adults (Robins et al. 2002), which would suggest that dissonance may be less acute with an aging population. On the other hand, self-esteem of older adults tends to be related not only to chronological age but also with their ability to assimilate into their social environment and to manage difficult life events (Alaphilippe 2008). Self-esteem of the elderly also shows fewer fluctuations than the self-esteem of younger adults. Empirical research has not yet addressed the role of aging as a moderator of the role of self-esteem in the dissonance process but it is likely that self-esteem is a complex factor of chronological age and social circumstances.

Neuropsychology of Dissonance. Dissonance is accompanied by the psychological experience of discomfort (Elliot and Devine 1994) and by autonomic physiological arousal as assessed by elevated skin conductance responses (SCR) (Croyle and Cooper 1983; Losch and Cacioppo 1990). In the brain, research has associated cognitive dissonance with increased neural activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus, the medial frontoparietal regions, and the ventral striatum and decreased activity in the anterior insula (Jarcho et al. 2011). Such processes are found to engage quickly at the moment of decision without extensive deliberation. Van Veen et al. (2009) found that attitude change associated with cognitive dissonance engages the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula. More broadly, greater left frontal activity appears to be activated in the dissonance process, linking it to other negative, approach-oriented motivations such as anger (Harmon-Jones 2004).

Dissonance in the Aging Process

Numerous changes occur during aging that affect dissonance. The magnitude of dissonance is influenced by factors that undergo change during the life span. For example, when making a choice between alternatives, a person’s age may determine the importance of the choice and therefore the magnitude of dissonance. More fundamentally, increased age brings with it changes in psychological functioning and neurological integrity. These changes are likely to affect cognitive dissonance in fundamental ways.

Older adults experience deteriorations in neural areas important for executive functioning. The prefrontal cortex is one of the areas most affected by aging. With increasing age, the prefrontal cortex responds more slowly than, for example, the limbic system, when processing emotional stimuli (Gross 2013). The vmPFC shows marked structural decline after the age of 60 (Asp et al. 2012). Neuronal density in the frontal gyrus is measurably different when people enter their 70’s. Yet, despite the atrophy in structure, activation in areas associated with dissonance and decision making remain strong in older age. Activations in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the ventral medial frontal cortex remain strong, as do the parietal areas.

There are decreases in explicit memory with age, but the decreases are not associated with diminished ability to process or respond to dissonant information. Explicit memory does not appear to be necessary for dissonance reduction. Lieberman and colleagues (2001) tested amnesiacs whose explicit memory was impaired and compared them to normal adults in a free-choice dissonance situation. In the experiment, amnesiacs and normals were asked to make a selection between attractive alternatives. Lieberman et al. found that amnesiacs engaged in choice-supportive reevaluation of the alternatives despite their having no explicit recollection of the initial choice. Consistent with dissonance theory, and similar to the responses of normal participants, amnesiacs spread the attractiveness of the choice alternatives to support the initial decision they had made.

Older adults are more averse to negative affect than are younger adults. For example, they are more likely to rate highly arousing negative stimuli as more negative than do younger adults and are vigilant to minimize the occurrence of negative experiences. Older adults concentrate on avoiding regret and boosting contentment (Carstensen and Hartel 2006). When asked to report their emotional experiences, older adults report as many positive emotional experiences as younger adults but report fewer negative experiences (Carstensen et al. 2000). In general, older adults spend more time and resources regulating emotional experiences, both in laboratory research tasks and in daily life tasks, and do so with a bias that leads to emotional satisfaction (Scheibe and Carstensen 2010).

As people age, they become more proficient at knowing the emotional effects of future events and have the enhanced ability of tailoring their emotion-regulatory strategies to meet contextual demands (Scheibe and Carstensen 2010). Thus, the future emotional implications of decisions may be weighted heavily by older adults, suggesting that because the elderly are concerned with their view of self, decisions and actions that go against their attitudes and views may intensify their experience of dissonance. This effect in the elderly can be further understood through the life-span theory of control (Heckhausen & Schulz 1995), which suggests that people’s capability to regulate their environments and attain their growth-related goals declines in older adulthood. Therefore, older adults increasingly use secondary control tools, such as emotion regulation, which is aimed at changing the self to be able to adjust to a given situation, instead of relying on primary control strategies that change the situation itself.

The increase need for emotion regulation combined with diminished structural integrity of frontal brain activity suggest that older adults devote more of their cognitive resources to regulating emotion, with particular emphasis on avoidance of negative states. Because cognitive dissonance is experienced as a specifically negative emotional state, older adults are motivated to engage in dissonance reduction, consistent with their orientation to avoid negative emotional states. Mather and Johnson (2000) examined people’s recollections of the positive and negative features of choice alternatives in a free-choice (Brehm 1956) situation. Older adults (64–83) and younger adults (18–26) were given the option to choose an alternative in a set of two-choice options. Choices included selections of which of two houses they would prefer or about which of two candidates they would select for a job. Several positive and negative attributes of each alternative were described. Following their choice, participants were asked to recall as many of the attributes as they could remember. The older participants showed more choice-supportive memory than the younger adults. Older adults remembered more positive attributes and fewer negative attributes of the alternatives they selected. They also recalled more negative and fewer positive aspects of the alternatives they rejected. Older participants also misattributed attributes of the alternatives in a choice-supportive manner. When given the opportunity to attribute positive and negative features to the alternatives that had not been mentioned in the original list, they made errors of memory in the same choice-supportive fashion.

In order to assess the crucial role played by emotion regulation, participants were either asked to remember the facts or remember how they felt when making their decisions. Younger adults did not show choice-supportive memory when asked for a factual review. They manifested the choice-supportive memory effect only when asked how they felt. Older adults showed the choice-supportive memory effect regardless of condition, indicating that they used selective and distorted memory as ways to adjust negative feelings that were aroused by dissonance.

In Mather and Johnson’s research, participants were also administered a neuropsychological test battery to measure frontal brain region pathology. The results showed poorer overall memory among people identified with neuropathological disorders but found even greater ratios of choice-supportive memory in this subpopulation. This is consistent with the notion that the weakening of cognitive executive function causes people to put more of their available resources toward the goal of regulating emotion by becoming more emotionally satisfied with the choices they made (Mather and Johnson 2000).

Further research (Mather and Johnson 2000) confirmed that the distortions of memory are consistent with dissonance theory predictions. Participants either chose one of the alternatives or were assigned one of them. Results confirmed that choice-supportive memory distortions occurred only in the free-choice conditions known to produce cognitive dissonance (Brehm 1956) but not in conditions in which the alternatives were merely assigned.

Conclusion

Cognitive dissonance is a state of aversive arousal that occurs when people perceive inconsistency among their cognitions. Although dissonance was not theorized to be age related, empirical work on dissonance had been primarily focused on convenience samples of young adults. Recent research suggests that, to the extent that gerontological factors influence the course of cognitive dissonance, older adults may be particularly sensitive to dissonance effects. With increasing age, changes in psychological functioning imply different needs, goals, and abilities. Although regions of the brain associated with memory and executive function show structural and functional decline with age, regions associated with cognitive dissonance show no consistent pattern of decline. Instead, research in emotion regulation suggests that the need to achieve positive emotional states increases with age along with the concomitant sensitivity to potential negative threats. Cognitive dissonance is a potential threat. Reducing it in a choice-supportive manner appears to be an increasing priority of the aging process.

Cross-References