Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance
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Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance involves situations that do not align with a person’s beliefs, behaviors, or attitudes. These occurrences cause mental discomfort that makes an individual change to restore balance. In that light, people experience cognitive dissonance due to things that threaten their private self-image. The uncomfortable feeling caused by cognitive dissonance can manifest itself as embarrassment, regret, anxiety, or shame (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019). For instance, if one thinks that eating red meat leads to obesity, the individual is likely to avoid it to retain good health.
A situation and a person are the primary determinants of cognitive dissonance. In particular, a specific occurrence might cause discomfort to one individual, but not to another person (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019). For instance, athletes engage in physical exercises to build their body strength to win in competitions. However, an ordinary person may perform physical activities to remain healthy. As such, despite these two groups of people engaging in a similar activity, they have different goals. That is an example of how a situation can cause cognitive dissonance in one person and fail to do the same to another person.
For a psychologist to test what matters the most in cognitive dissonance between private and public self-concepts, one should expose different people to similar tasks. ...