What is Cognitive Dissonance?

This is when you hold a belief that is usually longstanding and very strong for you and it is questioned. When this belief is questioned like this it creates much upset for you and a psychological effect takes place in their brain unable to hold the two conflicting beliefs at the same time. The prefrontal cortex part of the brain is affected when this condition happens to you. The stages that you will go through are feeling discomfort from a tension between beliefs and ones actions, having high tension seeing a response that will lower any cognitive dissonance from happening to you. In order to stop feeling upset you will need to get more information and facts to work from that will help you to deal with the inconsistent behaviour, situation or belief that you hold. When you do this it will lower the discomfort and upset that you hold. You will have questions about your decisions that you may have made because your personal values don’t align with this new information that you have. You can feel guilty or even feel ashamed for how your feel and think which is why you will feel upset. You may need to rationalise your actions or any further actions that you make in the future as a result of this situation.

Even when facts and evidence to state one of the beliefs are not true are shown to you often you will refuse to belief the new belief or fact. As you can not hold two different beliefs at the same time so this causes much confusion and upset for you. This uncomfortable feeling you have creates cognitive dissonance for you. It will be found that you will only accept the original longstanding belief and will reject and refuse the new belief to be true for you. The person will be found to rationalise, ignore and deny the new information no matter how much evidence is shown to them. It can also be the discomfort a person feels when their personal behaviour does not align with their personal values or core beliefs that they hold. Having two contradictory beliefs about something that you hold one belief true above the other. This creates inconsistent thoughts, beliefs or even attitudes that relate to your behaviour and personal decisions. You will need to change or alter an attitude or belief that you hold true to you so you can feel better and not be emotionally upset by this! This relates to domestic violence as you can have an old belief that stops you from looking at what is happening to you and that you are in domestic violence and need to leave the situation for your safety. 

There are 5 different kinds

1 Post decisional dissonance

2 dissonance from wanting something you can’t have.

3 Dissonance due to inconsistency between attitudes and behaviour.

4 Dissonance due to inadequate justification and dissonance due to inconsistency between commitment and information.

5 It is when you are forced to do something learning new information or faced with a decision with two similar choices.