What does cognitive dissonance mean?

Definitions for cognitive dissonance
cog·ni·tive dis·so·nance

This dictionary definitions page includes all the possible meanings, example usage and translations of the word cognitive dissonance.

Wiktionary

  1. cognitive dissonancenoun

    a conflict or anxiety resulting from inconsistencies between one's beliefs and one's actions or other beliefs.

Wikipedia

  1. Cognitive dissonance

    In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information, and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.In When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (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. A person who experiences internal inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable and is motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance. They tend to make changes to justify the stressful behavior, either by adding new parts to the cognition causing the psychological dissonance (rationalization) or by avoiding circumstances and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance (confirmation bias).Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true. Festinger argued that some people would inevitably resolve the dissonance by blindly believing whatever they wanted to believe.

Wikidata

  1. Cognitive dissonance

    In modern psychology, cognitive dissonance is the discomfort experienced when simultaneously holding two or more conflicting cognitions: ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions. In a state of dissonance, people may sometimes feel "disequilibrium": frustration, hunger, dread, guilt, anger, embarrassment, anxiety, etc. The phrase was coined by Leon Festinger in his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, which chronicled the followers of a UFO cult as reality clashed with their fervent belief in an impending apocalypse. Festinger subsequently published a book called A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance in which he outlines the theory. Cognitive dissonance is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology. The theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions, adding new ones to create a consistent belief system, or alternatively by reducing the importance of any one of the dissonant elements. It is the distressing mental state that people feel when they "find themselves doing things that don't fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold." A key assumption is that people want their expectations to meet reality, creating a sense of equilibrium. Likewise, another assumption is that a person will avoid situations or information sources that give rise to feelings of uneasiness, or dissonance.

U.S. National Library of Medicine

  1. Cognitive Dissonance

    Motivational state produced by inconsistencies between simultaneously held cognitions or between a cognition and behavior; e.g., smoking enjoyment and believing smoking is harmful are dissonant.

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Numerology

  1. Chaldean Numerology

    The numerical value of cognitive dissonance in Chaldean Numerology is: 9

  2. Pythagorean Numerology

    The numerical value of cognitive dissonance in Pythagorean Numerology is: 9

Examples of cognitive dissonance in a Sentence

  1. Parker Conrad:

    I think [ADP has] always had a bit of cognitive dissonance about Zenefits. On the one hand, we don’t do payroll—we’re a sales channel for them for payroll. On the other hand, although people think of ADP as a payroll company, they make a lot of money by taking that core payroll business and upselling clients on all of this other stuff, i think what happened for ADP is that at a certain point, their view of us flipped from uncertainty to a decision that they absolutely didn’t like us. Who knows? They might decide in six months to a year, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a mistake, we’d much rather partner with Zenefits—they have a lot of customers in the market, and we don’t want to block ourselves out of all of those customers.’.

  2. Eric Garcetti:

    CORONAVIRUS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW We outweigh the risks of our situation for other goals, health benefits of connection, and normal routine. It can make people vulnerable to suggestions to bend COVID-19 safety guidelines, she said. We initially may have been fearful, but as we start to gain control we become more confident to confront situations that may have scared us. As a result, as the pandemic continues, some of us have adjusted and started to underestimate the actual threat, ignore situational hazards, and dont take COVID-19 risks as seriously. Speaking to Fox News, Dr. Collin Reiff, a psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, likened caution fatigue to swimming in the ocean. People go swimming in the ocean, a potentially dangerous place, and dont take flotation devices with them. If you dont see anyone drown, you feel fine doing it, he said. But if we hear that 100,000 people died [while swimming in the ocean], and 180,000 could drown by October, you would see more people wearing a flotation device, he said, referringto a recent report that U.S. coronavirus deaths are projected to reach 180,000 by the beginning of October unless the majority of people start wearing face masks. Reiff also hypothesized that cognitive dissonance might play a part in those who find themselves having a more lax attitude toward recommended safety precautions. Experts still recommend safety precautions such as practicing social distancing, frequent hand washing and wearing a face covering while in public. (iStock) I think some of it is fatigue, but I think another part of it is that a lot of people havent been [as directly] impacted by the novel coronavirus, he said, noting that the virus had a more direct impact on those living in cities that were hit hard at the start of the pandemic, such as New York City and Philadelphia. CORONAVIRUS INFECTS 60 UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS STUDENTS ON SPRING BREAK TRIP TO MEXICO It may not be so much fatigue but their experience with COVID [the precautions] are not convenient for me any longer.

  3. Marina Ovsyannikova:

    I have been feeling a cognitive dissonance, more and more, between my beliefs and what we say on air, the war was the point of no return, when it was simply impossible to stay silent.

  4. Jim Vlahos:

    The cognitive dissonance between the minister of education insisting schools are safe and then shutting playgrounds down boggles the mind, there's no rhyme or reason to the outdoor closures.

  5. Chuck Schumer:

    Let there be no doubt, these disasters are magnified precisely because of climate change, i can not fathom the level of cognitive dissonance required to schedule these votes one right after the other.


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"cognitive dissonance." Definitions.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 5 Nov. 2024. <https://www.definitions.net/definition/cognitive+dissonance>.

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