Group control is maintained through information about a member’s past, gained either through formal confessionals or through other members’ reports. This includes coached — and imaginary or exaggerated — confessions of childhood, “remembered” through highly-suggestive supposed counseling or group self-abasement (a central technique of Maoist thought reform). If a member shows signs of wishing to leave the group, they will be aware that the leadership has this information, and the threat of disclosure may be used to bring the member back into line or to keep them silent.
Dealing With Dissonance in Therapy: 4 Tips
- The full text can be requested from the authors free of charge via the ResearchGate website.
- This can mean either changing behavior or ignoring the truth to avoid discomfort.
- Dissonance is the result of inconsistency between two or more cognitions, and these cognitions may represent one’s attitudes, thoughts about one’s behavior, or other stored information.
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Individualism is discouraged and putting “God” or the group first is the norm (in this case, “God” often proves to be the leader). Prohibited or censured thoughts, feelings and activities (of self or others) must be reported to superiors. Where people live and with whom they can live is highly significant, because members of destructive cults violate the human right of free association by ordering or shaming members into ostracizing, shunning or disconnecting from non-believers. This approach to attitude change helps us understand https://ecosoberhouse.com/ why people may be influenced linearly by the attractiveness of the communicator, or by the communicator’s status and presumed knowledge. It also helps us understand better why people sometimes resist persuasion attempts (see discussion below), since some factor such as forewarning of persuasion has activated their thoughtful analysis of the positions being advocated. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.
Consumer decision-making
- Life is filled with decisions, and decisions (as a general rule) arouse dissonance.
- Although the concepts of harmony and conflict were not new and had been proposed earlier by Heider (Heider, 1946), Cognitive Dissonance theory made a major contribution to the concept of consistency (Cooper, 2007).
- The total tension of a dissonance is the proportion of the inconsistent cognitions to the consistent cognitions that one has, each weighted by its importance.
- Firstly, Festinger integrated various concepts, including attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, value and behaviours, which had been considered separately as a single construct of cognition.
- Conversely, we may justify or trivialize negative behavior or even end the relationship.
That is, there is mental discord related to a contradiction between one thought (in this case, knowing he did something wrong) and another (thinking that he is honest). To be independent thinkers, we need information from reputable sources, and the right to choose those sources for ourselves. Mind control groups systematically indoctrinate members to distrust critics, former members, and all and any negative media reports. Some groups tell members to avoid newspapers, books, articles, TV, radio and any academic, science-based information.
Understanding the effects of cognitive dissonance
Eating meat does not psychologically fit together with not wanting to hurt animals, and together they cause an internal conflict. Moreover, most individuals would be expected to feel some degree of agency when it comes to their food choices. As mentioned, there are many dissonance-reducing strategies that omnivores can employ to reduce the discomfort that arises. However, one way to prevent cognitive dissonance from emerging in the first place is to simply dissociate meat from its animal origins. The literature that is based on cognitive dissonance theory has broadly covered four phases of the process, namely, cognitive discrepancy, dissonance, motivation and discrepancy reduction (Hinojosa et al., 2017). The cognitive discrepancy phase considered a conflict between two or more cognitive elements.
For instance, they may justify their sedentary behavior by saying that their other healthy behaviors—like eating sensibly and occasionally exercising—make up for their largely sedentary lifestyle. cognitive dissonance theory Cognitive dissonance can often have a powerful influence on our behaviors and actions. It doesn’t just influence how you feel; it also motivates you to take action to reduce feelings of discomfort.
- Consequently, an increasing number of people became largely separated from animals used in food production and, thus, had less contact with the animals they consumed.
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- Moreover, it has been argued that one qualifying condition for dissonance to emerge is that individuals feel responsible for their actions (Cooper & Fazio, 1984).
- The existence of such inconsistency causes mental discomfort and motivates the individual to take some actions to reduce or eliminate it.
- Organisms are motivated by the state of dissonance and they may engage in ‘psychological work’ to reduce the inconsistency.
- The motivation phase focused on the motivational nature of dissonance to reduce the psychological discomfort.
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Decision Making
