Importance Of Cognitive Dissonance

This essays seeks to discuss and explore the importance of cognitive dissonance on understanding choices. Peoples personal choices in life can often be difficult to understand. Leading economic theories state that choices merely reflect an individual's preferences, however the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance puts forward that in fact the choices people make create these preferences.Festinger's work on cognitive dissonance allows us to examine the choices people make and develop rationalisations as to why they chose to act in this way. In this essay I will examine Festinger's ideas and theories on cognitive dissonance and use social psychology experiments to explore them in regards to choice; specifically by examining how

When one chooses between two alternatives of similar value, people often immediately experience a state of post decisional dissonance. If one must choose to eat an ice cream or a bar of chocolate; post decision, the unchosen option immediately becomes more prevalent in the mind. As people wonder if the right choice has been made. To remove this feeling of dissonance the value of the ice cream and the chocolate bar are reevaluated. The chosen element either becomes more attractive in the mind or the other unchosen element is devalued . This comes about as a result of the effort justification paradigm. This describes the tendency of people to give a higher valuation to an action that involved putting some form of effort into achieving a

This idea is seen most clearly in Cooper and Axiom's 1982 study using an assisted weight loss program (Axsom & Cooper, 1985). Two groups of women looking to lose weight were studied. The high effort group was on the first meeting give a challenge of completing difficult and tedious tasks such as reading tongue twisters aloud for 45 minutes and other actions requiring large amounts of psychological effort. The low effort group were by comparison given simple tasks that were shorter and easier. The control group were simply weighed and given no tasks to complete. The women completed the experiment five times over a course of three weeks and were weighed on completion of the experiment, It was found that those who had partaken in the high effort group lost more weight than those in the other two groups. The women were then weighed again in 6 months after the experiment to ensure accurate results. 9% of the high effort group had lost more weight while only 39% of the low effort group had done the same. They concluded that the women in the high effort group achieved their goals due to the need to reduce dissonace about the amount of effort