In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly or subconsciously hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions. Being confronted by situations that create this dissonance or highlight these inconsistencies motivates change in their cognitions or actions to reduce this dissonance, maybe by changing a belief, by explaining something away, or by taking actions that reduce perceived inconsistency. Relevant items of cognition include people's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance exists without outward sign, but surfaces through psychological stress when psychological discomfort is created due to persons participating in an action that creates conflicting beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors, or when new information challenges existing beliefs. According to this theory, when an action or idea is psychologically inconsistent with the other, people automatically try to resolve the conflict, usually by reframing a side to make the combination congruent. Discomfort is triggered by beliefs clashing with new information or by having to conceptually resolve a matter that involves conflicting sides, whereby the individual tries to find a way to reconcile contradictions to reduce their discomfort. This need to reduce discomfort can be used for applied interventions as a catalyst for attitudinal change, such as in the induced hypocrisy paradigm, shaping pro-social behaviours or disengaging and deradicalising extremists. In When Prophecy Fails (1956) and A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency to function mentally in the real world. Persons who experience internal inconsistency tend to become psychologically uncomfortable and are motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance. They tend to make changes to justify the stressful behavior, by either adding new parts to the cognition causing the psychological dissonance (rationalization), believing that "people get what they deserve" (just-world fallacy), taking in specific pieces of information while rejecting or ignoring others (selective perception), or avoiding circumstances and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance (confirmation bias). Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory is still one of the most influential social theories in modern social psychology. Festinger explains avoiding cognitive dissonance as "Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."
Originator Leon Festinger, born in 1919 in New York City, was an American social psychologist whose contributions to psychology include cognitive dissonance theory, social comparison theory, and the proximity effect. In a 2002 American Psychological Association article, Festinger is cited as the fifth most eminent psychologist of the 20th century, just after B.F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Bandura, respectively. In 1957, Leon Festinger introduced the theory of Cognitive Dissonance, which describes how psychological stress occurs when a person has cognitive inconsistencies, such as conflicting behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs. As mentioned in Persuasion and Influence in American Life, instead of perpetuating a constant state of psychological tension, people often try to reclaim their mental balance by rationalizing the behavior in question or by adjusting their beliefs. The framework of Festinger's theory, as well as his fascination with the way people evaluate their beliefs and internal inconsistencies, was influenced in part by his earlier work on Social Comparison Theory, which is important when trying to explain why the tension arises from dissonance. Festinger graduated from the City College of New York in 1939; he then received his PhD in Child Psychology from the University of Iowa. He was initially inspired to enter the field of psychology by Kurt Lewin, known as the "father of modern social psychology", and his work in Gestalt psychology. Studying under Kurt Lewin for most of his academic career, Festinger returned to collaborate with Lewin at the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Throughout this research, Festinger noticed that people often like to stick to consistent habits and routines to maintain order within their lives. These habits may include everyday activities like preferring a specific seat during their daily commute or eating meals at consistent times. Any disturbance to this order can lead to mental unease, which may manifest in altered thought processes or beliefs. Festinger concluded that the sole means of alleviating this discomfort is by adjusting either their actions or beliefs to restore consistency. Since his publication of A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance in 1957, Festinger's findings have helped to understand peoples' personal biases, how people reframe situations in their heads to maintain a positive self-image, and why one may pursue certain behaviors that misalign with their judgments as they seek out or reject certain information.
Relations among cognitions To function in the reality of society, human beings continually adjust the correspondence of their mental attitudes and personal actions; such continual adjustments, between cognition and action, result in one of three relationships with reality:
Consonant relationship: A cognition or action consistent with the other, e.g., not wanting to become drunk when out for dinner and ordering water rather than wine Irrelevant relationship: A cognition or action unrelated to the other, e.g. not wanting to become drunk when out and wearing a blue shirt Dissonant relationship: A cognition or action inconsistent with the other, e.g. not wanting to become drunk when out, but then drinking more wine anyway
Magnitude of dissonance The term "magnitude of dissonance" refers to the level of discomfort caused to the person. This can be caused by the relationship between two different internal beliefs, or an action that is incompatible with the beliefs of the person. Two factors determine the degree of psychological dissonance caused by two conflicting cognitions or by two conflicting actions:
The importance of cognitions: the greater the personal value of the elements, the greater the magnitude of the dissonance in the relation. When the value of the importance of the two dissonant items is high, it is difficult to determine which action or thought is correct. Both have had a place of truth, at least subjectively, in the mind of the person. Therefore, when the ideals or actions now clash, it is difficult for the individual to decide which takes priority. Ratio of cognitions: the proportion of dissonant-to-consonant elements. There is a level of discomfort within each person that is acceptable for living. When a person is within that comfort level, the dissonant factors do not interfere with functioning. However, when dissonant factors are abundant and not enough in line with each other, one goes through a process to regulate and bring the ratio back to an acceptable level. Once a subject chooses to keep one of the dissonant factors, they quickly forget the other to restore peace of mind. There is always some degree of dissonance within a person as they go about making decisions, due to the changing quantity and quality of knowledge and wisdom that they gain. The magnitude itself is a subjective measurement since the reports are self relayed, and there is no objective way as yet to get a clear measurement of the level of discomfort.
Reduction Cognitive dissonance theory proposes that people seek psychological consistency between their expectations of life and the existential reality of the world. To function by that expectation of existential consistency, people continually reduce their cognitive dissonance in order to align their cognitions (perceptions of the world) with each other and their actions. The creation and establishment of psychological consistency allows the person affected with cognitive dissonance to lessen mental stress by actions that reduce the magnitude of the dissonance, realized either by changing with or by justifying against or by being indifferent to the existential contradiction that is inducing the mental stress. In practice, people reduce the magnitude of their cognitive dissonance in four ways:
Change the behavior or the cognition ("I'll eat no more of this doughnut.") Justify the behavior or the cognition, by changing the conflicting cognition ("I'm allowed to cheat my diet every once in a while.") Justify the behavior or the cognition by adding new behaviors or cognitions ("I'll spend thirty extra minutes at the gymnasium to work off the doughnut.") Ignore or deny information that conflicts with existing beliefs ("This doughnut is not a high-sugar food.") Three cognitive bias theories are proposed proponents of cognitive dissonance (Note: they are not distinct, they draw from each other): 1. Bias Blind Spot — the tendency to perceive oneself as less susceptible to biases than others, 2. The Better-Than-Average-Effect — the tendency to believe that one is overall superior to others in terms of ability and character, and 3. Confirmation Bias — the tendency to interpret and understand information in a way that supports preexisting beliefs, thoughts, feelings, etc. Having congruent, or perceived as congruent cognition is required in order to function in the real world according to the results of The Psychology of Prejudice (2006), wherein people facilitate their functioning in the real world by employing human categories (i.e. sex and gender, age and race, etc.) with which they manage their social interactions with other people. Based on a brief overview of models and theories related to cognitive consistency from many different scientific fields, such as social psychology, perception, neurocognition, learning, motor control, system control, ethology, and stress, it has even been proposed that "all behaviour involving cognitive processing is caused by the activation of inconsistent cognitions and functions to increase perceived consistency"; that is, all behaviour functions to reduce cognitive inconsistency at some level of information processing. Indeed, the involvement of cognitive inconsistency has long been suggested for behaviors related to for instance curiosity, and aggression and fear, while it has also been suggested that the inability to satisfactorily reduce cognitive inconsistency may – dependent on the type and size of the inconsistency – result in stress.
Selective exposure Another means to reduce cognitive dissonance is selective exposure. This theory has been discussed since the early days of Festinger's proposal of cognitive dissonance. He noticed that people would selectively expose themselves to some media over others; specifically, they would avoid dissonant messages and prefer consonant messages. Through selective exposure, people actively (and selectively) choose what to watch, view, or read that fit to their current state of mind, mood or beliefs. In other words, consumers select attitude-consistent information and avoid attitude-challenging information. This can be applied to media, news, music, and any other messaging channel. The idea is, choosing something that is in opposition to how you feel or believe in will increase cognitive dissonance. For example, a study was done in an elderly home in 1992 on the loneliest residents—those that did not have family or frequent visitors. The residents were shown a series of documentaries: three that featured a "very happy, successful elderly person", and three that featured an "unhappy, lonely elderly person." After watching the documentaries, the residents indicated they preferred the media featuring the unhappy, lonely person over the happy person. This can be attested to them feeling lonely, and experiencing cognitive dissonance watching somebody their age feeling happy and being successful. This study explains how people select media that aligns with their mood, as in selectively exposing themselves to people and experiences they are already experiencing. It is more comfortable to see a movie about a character that is similar to you than to watch one about someone who is your age who is more successful than you. Another example to note is how people mostly consume media that aligns with their political views. In a study done in 2015, participants were shown "attitudinally consistent, challenging, or politically balanced online news." Results showed that the participants trusted attitude-consistent news the most out of all the others, regardless of the source. It is evident that the participants actively selected media that aligns with their beliefs rather than opposing media. In fact, recent research has suggested that while a discrepancy between cognitions drives individuals to crave for attitude-consistent information, the experience of negative emotions drives individuals to avoid counter attitudinal information. In other words, it is the psychological discomfort which activates selective exposure as a dissonance-reduction strategy.
Paradigms There are four theoretic paradigms of cognitive dissonance, the mental stress people experienced when exposed to information that is inconsistent with their beliefs, ideals or values: Belief Disconfirmation, Induced Compliance, Free Choice, and Effort Justification, which respectively explain what happens after a person acts inconsistently, relative to their intellectual perspectives; what happens after a person makes decisions and what are the effects upon a person who has expended much effort to achieve a goal. Common to each paradigm of cognitive-dissonance theory is the tenet: People invested in a given perspective shall—when confronted with contrary evidence—expend great effort to justify retaining the challenged perspective.
Belief disconfirmation
The contradiction of a belief, ideal, or system of values causes cognitive dissonance that can be resolved by changing the challenged belief, yet, instead of affecting change, the resultant mental stress restores psychological consonance to the person by misperception, rejection, or refutation of the contradiction, seeking moral support from people who share the contradicted beliefs or acting to persuade other people that the contradiction is unreal. The early hypothesis of belief contradiction presented in When Prophecy Fails (1956) reported that faith deepened among the members of an apocalyptic religious cult, despite the failed prophecy of an alien spacecraft soon to land on Earth to rescue them from earthly corruption. At the determined place and time, the cult assembled; they believed that only they would survive planetary destruction; yet the spaceship did not arrive to Earth. The confounded prophecy caused them acute cognitive-dissonance: Had they been victims of a hoax? Had they vainly donated away their material possessions? To resolve the dissonance between apocalyptic, end-of-the-world religious beliefs and earthly, material reality, most of the cult restored their psychological consonance by choosing to believe a less mentally-stressful idea to explain the missed landing: that the aliens had given planet Earth a second chance at existence, which, in turn, empowered them to re-direct their religious cult to environmentalism and social advocacy to end human damage to planet Earth. On overcoming the confounded belief by changing to global environmentalism, the cult increased in numbers by proselytism. The study of The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference (2008) reported the belief contradiction that occurred in the Chabad Orthodox Jewish congregation, who believed that their Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was the Messiah. When he died of a stroke in 1994, instead of accepting that their Rebbe was not the Messiah, some of the congregation proved indifferent to that contradictory fact, and continued claiming that Schneerson was the Messiah and that he would soon return from the dead.
Induced compliance
In the Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance (1959), the investigators Leon Festinger and Merrill Carlsmith asked students to spend an hour doing tedious tasks; e.g. turning pegs a quarter-turn, at fixed intervals. This procedure included seventy-one male students attending Stanford University. Students were asked to complete a series of repetitive, mundane tasks, then asked to convince a separate group of participants that the task was fun and exciting. Once the subjects had done the tasks, the experimenters asked one group of subjects to speak with another subject (an actor) and persuade that impostor-subject that the tedious tasks were interesting and engaging. Subjects of one group were paid twenty dollars ($20); those in a second group were paid one dollar ($1) and those in the control group were not asked to speak with the imposter-subject. At the conclusion of the study, when asked to rate the tedious tasks, the subjects of the second group (paid $1) rated the tasks more positively than did the subjects in the first group (paid $20), and the first group (paid $20) rated the tasks just slightly more positively than did the subjects of the control group; the responses of the paid subjects were evidence of cognitive dissonance. The researchers, Festinger and Carlsmith, proposed that the subjects experienced dissonance between the conflicting cognitions. "I told someone that the task was interesting" and "I actually found it boring." The subjects paid one dollar were induced to comply, compelled to internalize the "interesting task" mental attitude because they had no other justification. The subjects paid twenty dollars were induced to comply by way of an obvious, external justification for internalizing the "interesting task" mental attitude and experienced a lower degree of cognitive dissonance than did those only paid one dollar. They did not receive sufficient compensation for the lie they were asked to tell. Because of this insufficiency, the participants convinced themselves to believe that what they were doing was exciting. This way, they felt better about telling the next group of participants that it was exciting because, technically, they weren't lying.
Forbidden behavior paradigm In the Effect of the Severity of Threat on the Devaluation of Forbidden Behavior (1963), a variant of the induced-compliance paradigm, by Elliot Aronson and Carlsmith, examined self-justification in children. Children were left in a room with toys, including a greatly desirable steam shovel, the forbidden toy. Upon leaving the room, the experimenter told one-half of the group of children that there would be severe punishment if they played with the steam-shovel toy and told the second half of the group that there would be a mild punishment for playing with the forbidden toy. All of the children refrained from playing with the forbidden toy (the steam shovel). Later, when the children were told that they could freely play with any toy they wanted, the children in the mild-punishment group were less likely to play with the steam shovel (the forbidden toy), despite the removal of the threat of mild punishment. The children threatened with mild punishment had to justify, to themselves, why they did not play with the forbidden toy. The degree of punishment was insufficiently strong to resolve their cognitive dissonance; the children had to convince themselves that playing with the forbidden toy was not worth the effort. In The Efficacy of Musical Emotions Provoked by Mozart's Music for the Reconciliation of Cognitive Dissonance (2012), a variant of the forbidden-toy paradigm, indicated that listening to music reduces the development of cognitive dissonance. Without music in the background, the control group of four-year-old children were told to avoid playing with a forbidden toy. After playing alone, the control-group children later devalued the importance of the forbidden toy. In the variable group, classical music played in the background while the children played alone. In the second group, the children did not later devalue the forbidden toy. The researchers, Nobuo Masataka and Leonid Perlovsky, concluded that music might inhibit cognitions that induce cognitive dissonance. Music is a stimulus that can diminish post-decisional dissonance; in an earlier experiment, Washing Away Postdecisional Dissonance (2010), the researchers indicated that the actions of hand-washing might inhibit the cognitions that induce cognitive dissonance. That study later failed to replicate.
Free choice In the study Post-decision Changes in Desirability of Alternatives (1956) 225 female students rated domestic appliances and then were asked to choose one of two appliances as a gift. The results of the second round of ratings indicated that the women students increased their ratings of the domestic appliance they had selected as a gift and decreased their ratings of the appliances they rejected. This type of cognitive dissonance occurs in a person who is faced with a difficult decision and when the rejected choice may still have desirable characteristics to the chooser. The action of deciding provokes the psychological dissonance consequent to choosing X instead of Y, despite little difference between X and Y; the decision "I chose X" is dissonant with the cognition that "There are some aspects of Y that I like". The study Choice-induced Preferences in the Absence of Choice: Evidence from a Blind Two-choice Paradigm with Young Children and Capuchin Monkeys (2010) reports similar results in the occurrence of cognitive dissonance in human beings and in animals. Peer Effects in Pro-Social Behavior: Social Norms or Social Preferences? (2013) indicated that with internal deliberation, the structuring of decisions among people can influence how a person acts. The study suggested that social preferences and social norms can explain peer effects in decision making. The study observed that choices made by the second participant would influence the first participant's effort to make choices and that inequity aversion, the preference for fairness, is the paramount concern of the participants.
Effort justification
Cognitive dissonance occurs in a person who voluntarily engages in (physically or ethically) unpleasant activities to achieve a goal. The mental stress caused by the dissonance can be reduced by the person exaggerating the desirability of the goal. In The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group (1956), to qualify for admission to a discussion group, two groups of people underwent an embarrassing initiation of varied psychological severity. The first group of subjects were to read aloud twelve sexual words considered obscene; the second group of subjects were to read aloud twelve sexual words not considered obscene. Both groups were given headphones to unknowingly listen to a recorded discussion about animal sexual behaviour, which the researchers designed to be dull and banal. As the subjects of the experiment, the groups of people were told that the animal-sexuality discussion actually was occurring in the next room. The subjects whose strong initiation required reading aloud obscene words evaluated the people of their group as more-interesting persons than the people of the group who underwent the mild initiation to the discussion group. In Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing (2006), the results indicated that a person washing their hands is an action that helps resolve post-decisional cognitive dissonance because the mental stress usually was caused by the person's ethical–moral self-disgust, which is an emotion related to the physical disgust caused by a dirty environment. The study The Neural Basis of Rationalization: Cognitive Dissonance Reduction During Decision-making (2011) indicated that participants rated 80 names and 80 paintings based on how much they liked the names and paintings. To give meaning to the decisions, the participants were asked to select names that they might give to their children. For rating the paintings, the participants were asked to base their ratings on whether or not they would display such art at home. The results indicated that when the decision is meaningful to the person deciding value, the likely rating is based on their attitudes (positive, neutral or negative) towards the name and towards the painting in question. The participants also were asked to rate some of the objects twice and believed that, at session's end, they would receive two of the paintings they had positively rated. The results indicated a great increase in the positive attitude of the participant towards the liked pair of things, whilst also increasing the negative attitude towards the disliked pair of things. The double-ratings of pairs of things, towards which the rating participant had a neutral attitude, showed no changes during the rating period. The existing attitudes of the participant were reinforced during the rating period and the participants experienced cognitive dissonance when confronted by a liked-name paired with a disliked-painting. In the study, Does effort increase or decrease reward validation? Considerations from cognitive dissonance theory (2024), the authors discovered that effort justification and effort discounting may determine the amount of reward valuation a person feels after completing a task. Effort justification is the term used for high efforts leading to high rewards. Effort discounting is the term used for high efforts leading to low rewards. These terms relate to Cognitive Dissonance because humans enjoy controlling the efforts that may lead to rewards. This study determined that having high control can lead to higher efforts, leading to higher rewards. Similarly, having low control can lead to higher efforts yet lower rewards. These results indicate that humans seek highly controllable situations and actions to receive rewards for their efforts. The ability to control one's actions is crucial for eliminating the effects of Cognitive Dissonance. It is also essential in the process of decision-making without any influence, whether positive or negative, from others.
Examples
Meat-eating Meat-eating can involve discrepancies between the behavior of eating meat and various ideals that the person holds. Some researchers call this form of moral conflict the meat paradox. Hank Rothgerber posited that meat eaters may encounter a conflict between their eating behavior and their affections toward animals. This occurs when the dissonant state involves recognition of one's behavior as a meat eater and a belief, attitude, or value that this behavior contradicts. The person with this state may attempt to employ various methods, including avoidance, willful ignorance, dissociation, perceived behavioral change, and do-gooder derogation to prevent this form of dissonance from occurring. Once it has occurred, they may reduce it in the form of motivated cognitions, such as denigrating animals, offering pro-meat justifications, or denying responsibility for eating meat. The presence, or extent, of cognitive dissonance with regard to meat eating can vary depending on the attitudes and values of the individual involved because these can affect whether or not they see any moral conflict with their values and what they eat. For example, individuals who are more dominance-minded and who value having a masculine identity are less likely to experience cognitive dissonance because they are less likely to believe eating meat is morally wrong. Others cope with this cognitive dissonance through ignorance (ignoring the known realities of their food source) or explanations loosely tied to taste. The psychological phenomenon intensifies if the mind or human-like qualities of animals are explicitly mentioned.
Smoking The study Patterns of Cognitive Dissonance-reducing Beliefs Among Smokers: A Longitudinal Analysis from the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Four Country Survey (2012) indicated that smokers use justification beliefs to reduce their cognitive dissonance about smoking tobacco and the negative consequences of smoking it.
Continuing smokers (Smoking and no attempt to quit since the previous round of study) Successful quitters (Quit during the study and did not use tobacco from the time of the previous round of study) Failed quitters (Quit during the study, but relapsed to smoking at the time of the study) To reduce cognitive dissonance, the participant smokers adjusted their beliefs to correspond with their actions:
Functional beliefs ("Smoking calms me down when I am stressed or upset."; "Smoking helps me concentrate better."; "Smoking is an important part of my life."; and "Smoking makes it easier for me to socialize.") Risk-minimizing beliefs ("The medical evidence that smoking is harmful is exaggerated."; "One has to die of something, so why not enjoy yourself and smoke?"; and "Smoking is no more risky than many other things people do.")
Littering Disposing of trash outside, even when knowing this is against the law, wrong, and is harmful for the environment, is a prominent example of cognitive dissonance, especially if the person feels bad after littering but continues to do so. Between November 2015 and March 2016, a study by Xitou Nature Education Area in Taiwan examined littering of tourists. Researchers analyzed the relationships between tourists' environmental attitudes, cognitive dissonance, and vandalism. In this study, 500 questionnaires were distributed and 499 questionnaires were returned. The results of this study indicate that older tourists had better attitudes towards the environment and cared more. The tourists who were older and cared more for outdoor activities were less likely to litter. On the other hand, the younger tourists littered more and experienced more cognitive dissonance. This study showed that younger tourists littered more as a whole and regretted or thought about it after. A study from Kari Marie Norgaard looked at cognitive dissonance in the attitudes of Norwegians towards climate change and sustainability actions related to littering and environmental justice. According to Norgaard, these Norwegians had access to a types of dissonance that both reaffirmed order within their lives and denied any personal involvement in the matter of climate change and their responsibility to do anything about it. Some Norwegians had the privilege of "tools of order" and of "innocence" to remove themselves from their impact on their environment and assert cognitive dissonance. The study found that most of the Norwegians were engaging in this type of behavior to remove themselves from their situation.
Unpleasant medical screenings In a study titled Cognitive Dissonance and Attitudes Toward Unpleasant Medical Screenings (2016), researchers Michael R. Ent and Mary A. Gerend informed the study participants about a discomforting test for a specific (fictitious) virus called the "human respiratory virus-27". The study used a fake virus to prevent participants from having thoughts, opinions, and feeling about the virus that would interfere with the experiment. The study participants were in two groups; one group was told that they were actual candidates for the virus-27 test, and the second group were told they were not candidates for the test. The researchers reported, "We predicted that [study] participants who thought that they were candidates for the unpleasant test would experience dissonance associated with knowing that the test was both unpleasant and in their best interest—this dissonance was predicted to result in unfavorable attitudes toward the test."
Religion
Homosexuality In the context of religious practices, specifically those that are Christian or Catholic, the idea of being a homosexual and engaging in those acts while being religious can appear to be contradictory and opposing. Kimberly A. Mahaffy describes how this works in Cognitive Dissonance and Its Resolution: A Study of Lesbian Christians. She described many Christian women who were lesbians to also experience a firm tension because of their opposing identities. Their dissonances were found in a study to be either no dissonance (or perception thereof), internal dissonance (no one on earth can judge me, but I fear that the Creator will), and external dissonance (God is ok with me but people are not). Many people reconciled their tension by reconfiguring Biblical passages to comfort them and emphasizing the impact and expanse of God's love and acceptance. In another study done on homosexual Christians from Martine Gross, 311 men and 84 women were polled in France to determine what their relationship with churches and religion were. Dissonance was found in those who still believed that homosexual acts were wrong according to the church and still attended church. The results found, however, that the main way to deal with this dissonance was to remove oneself from a more "traditional" church that emphasized this dissonance more and move to a less "traditional" church that was more open about accepting those that are homosexual, or at least was less flagrant about emphasizing the differences between religious idelogies and homosexual practices.
Religion and Jesus as God In The Process of Jesus' Deification and Cognitive Dissonance Theory by Fernando Bermejo-Rubio (2017), there was found to be some cognitive dissonance in the way early Jews approached the "deification" and acceptance of Jesus as God. If early Jews were monotheistic and believed in one God, Bermejo-Rubio questioned how these Jews, especially the Nazareans, came to believe in Jesus as a deity since God was already their primary being of worship. Some cognitive dissonance had to have happened to allow them to accept two seeming Gods. If Jesus was wholly Jew and human, how did he become deified? This research claimed that much of this dissonance must have happened in the subsequent Nazarean movement after Jesus' death, not during or before.
Religion and evangelization Evangelists may find a kind of "dissonance" when asked to become missionaries as they may be asked to present their religion in a way that does not conform to the way that they practice. In Symbolic Filtering: Selectively Permeable Evangelical Boundaries in an Age of Religious Pluralism by Jared Bok, this is examined and determined to maybe not be a kind of dissonance but rather an examination of conscious and a willingness to permeate some boundaries while ignoring others to get the message of their religion across to other cultures and do so in a way that is morally befitting to them.
Religion and conversion Cognitive dissonance can also be found in the attitudes of those who are considering a conversion to a new religion. In Implications of Conversion and Magnitude of Cognitive Dissonance by Timothy C. Brock (1962), religious and non-religious men from Yale were polled to examine their dissonances involved in converting to Catholicism. This study was done on men who were perceived to almost be against converting due to their dissonance and it was found that a higher perception of positivity in conversion decreased this dissonance.
Related phenomena Cognitive dissonance may also occur when people seek to explain or justify their beliefs, often without questioning the validity of their claims. After the earthquake of 1934, Bihar, India, irrational rumors based upon fear quickly reached the adjoining communities unaffected by the disaster because those people, although not in physical danger, psychologically justified their anxieties about the earthquake. The same pattern can be observed when one's convictions are met with a contradictory order. In a study conducted among 6th grade students, after being induced to cheat in an academic examination, students judged cheating less harshly. Nonetheless, the confirmation bias identifies how people readily read information that confirms their established opinions and readily avoid reading information that contradicts their opinions. The confirmation bias is apparent when a person confronts deeply held political beliefs, i.e. when a person is greatly committed to their beliefs, values, and ideas. If a contradiction occurs between how a person feels and how a person acts, one's perceptions and emotions align to alleviate stress. The Ben Franklin effect refers to that statesman's observation that the act of performing a favor for a rival leads to increased positive feelings toward that individual. It is also possible that one's emotions be altered to minimize the regret of irrevocable choices. At a hippodrome, bettors had more confidence in their horses after the betting than before.
Applications
Education The management of cognitive dissonance readily influences the apparent motivation of a student to pursue education. The study Turning Play into Work: Effects of Adult Surveillance and Extrinsic Rewards on Children's Intrinsic Motivation (1975) indicated that the application of the effort justification paradigm increased student enthusiasm for education with the offer of an external reward for studying; students in pre-school who completed puzzles based upon an adult promise of reward were later less interested in the puzzles than were students who completed the puzzle-tasks without the promise of a reward. The incorporation of cognitive dissonance into models of basic learning-processes to foster the students' self-awareness of psychological conflicts among their personal beliefs, ideals, and values and the reality of contradictory facts and information, requires the students to defend their personal beliefs. Afterwards, the students are trained to objectively perceive new facts and information to resolve the psychological stress of the conflict between reality and the student's value system. Moreover, educational software that applies the derived principles facilitates the students' ability to successfully handle the questions posed in a complex subject. Meta-analysis of studies indicates that psychological interventions that provoke cognitive dissonance in order to achieve a directed conceptual change do increase students' learning in reading skills and science.
Psychotherapy The general effectiveness of psychotherapy and psychological intervention is partly explained by the theory of cognitive dissonance. In that vein, social psychology proposed that the mental health of the patient is positively influenced by his and her action in freely choosing a specific therapy and in exerting the required, therapeutic effort to overcome cognitive dissonance. That effective phenomenon was indicated in the results of the study Effects of Choice on Behavioral Treatment of Overweight Children (1983), wherein the children's belief that they freely chose the type of therapy received, resulted in each overweight child losing a greater amount of excessive body weight. In the study Reducing Fears and Increasing Attentiveness: The Role of Dissonance Reduction (1980), people with ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) who invested much effort in activities of little therapeutic value for them (experimentally represented as legitimate and relevant) showed improved alleviation of the symptoms of their phobia. Likewise, the results of Cognitive Dissonance and Psychotherapy: The Role of Effort Justification in Inducing Weight Loss (1985) indicated that the patient felt better in justifying their efforts and therapeutic choices towards effectively losing weight. That the therapy of effort expenditure can predict long-term chang