The secret to making better decisions
The secret to making better decisions
How cognitive dissonance shapes everything from parenting to recycling
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Summary for busy sapiens
Cognitive dissonance is the bad feeling we get when our beliefs, actions, or attitudes contradict one another.
We try to get rid of this feeling by adjusting our beliefs or rationalizing our behavior
Cognitive dissonance is more relevant than ever, with justifications and personalized information a quick Google (or TikTok scroll) away
Being aware of cognitive dissonance can improve our relationships, work, and overall well-being
8 min read
Let’s imagine it’s 1959. You’re a student at Stanford, and you’re participating in a psychology experiment. You sit down at a small table, and an experimenter sits across from you, holding a stopwatch. He explains that the study aims to measure human performance. Then, he describes what you’ll be doing for the next hour.
Immediately, you realize signing up for the study was a mistake.
The experiment will involve doing the most mind-numbingly boring tasks you can imagine. You’ll have, for example, a board with 48 square pegs. One by one, you’ll be asked to turn them clockwise 90 degrees1. Then you’ll do it again. And again.
When the hour mercilessly comes to an end, the experimenter stands up, lights a cigarette2, and gives you one final task: tell the next student that the experiment was fun. Convince them that it was enjoyable, interesting, exciting even. You’ll get a reward for lying to the student, but the amount—either $1 or $20—will depend on the condition to which you’ve been randomly assigned.
Later, when you’re back in your dorm room, you’re reflecting on the experiment. How much did you actually enjoy that peg board activity? Imagine how you’d feel if you’d been given $1. How about $20? Would the amount you got paid make a difference?
It turns out, it would. In this classic 1959 experiment by psychologists Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith, subjects who were given only $1 to lie about the experiment ultimately came to believe that it was more enjoyable, exciting, and interesting than those paid $20.
The reason? A phenomenon called cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance? Sounds fancy.
Cognitive dissonance refers to the “unpleasant psychological state resulting from inconsistency between two or more elements in a cognitive system.” In other words, it’s that bad feeling we get when our beliefs, actions, or attitudes contradict (i.e., are “dissonant” from) one another.
It turns out, we really don’t like this feeling. And we’ll go to surprisingly great lengths to get rid of it.
In the experiment, subjects experienced cognitive dissonance when their behavior (saying that the peg board activity was interesting) conflicted with their true beliefs (that the peg board activity was boring). With a $20 reward, they could tell themselves they were lying for the money, but for only $1, they didn’t have that excuse. So, to reduce their discomfort, they adjusted their original beliefs. I’m only getting $1 to say I enjoyed the peg board activity, they reasoned, so I must have actually enjoyed it.3
Cognitive dissonance theory, first outlined by Festinger in 1957, has been borne out in thousands of studies since then, but it’s now more relevant to our lives than ever before. It is one of the strongest drivers of how we think, act, parent, and make decisions, and yet, many of us are entirely unaware of it.
A personal example
I love nature. I really do. I love being outside, hiking, gardening4. I spent my college summers leading conservation-focused teen outdoor adventure trips, for God’s sake. So, I like to think I have a belief that recycling is important.
And yet, when I finish a takeout dinner and am faced with ten, tiny half-filled plastic dressing containers, I don’t want to spend the time rinsing them individually to recycle. Sometimes, I just throw them in the trash.
This creates dissonance.
So, what do we do to try to eliminate the discomfort of cognitive dissonance? Of course, we could just change our behavior—suck it up, deal with the dressing-on-hands and accidental spray of water-to-the-face, and just rinse and recycle those things—and sometimes we do. But often, that’s not our approach.
Instead, we rationalize. We change our original beliefs (Maybe recycling doesn’t matter that much after all). We add new, consonant beliefs that are consistent with our behavior (Maybe using all that water to rinse the containers is actually worse for the environment). We adjust the importance of our behaviors (It’s now extremely important to me not to waste time rinsing out dressing containers).
What could possibly go wrong?
Let’s take a look at some other examples5 of cognitive dissonance, and how they might play out in our lives.
#1 Free choice: Decisions, decisions
When we make a decision, we worry that we’ve made the wrong choice. All the good things about the option we turned down suddenly feel contradictory (dissonant) to our decision. So, we tell ourselves the rejected alternative was much worse than it was, and that the chosen alternative was much better.
Example: We’re deciding whether to stay at a current job, or move to a new one. Once we decide to move to the new job, we start fantasizing about all the incredible new perks (Higher salary! Better hours! Cold brew on tap!) and downplaying any reservations we had (Moving across the country won’t be so bad…). Meanwhile, we’re suddenly highly aware of all the things we dislike about the job we’re leaving (I cannot believe Susan sent me that email. And why is the coffee machine broken? I hate it here.)
#2 Effort Justification: This will all be worth it
We engage in an unpleasant activity in order to achieve a certain outcome. Our behavior (doing the activity) contradicts with our belief that the activity is unpleasant. So, we convince ourselves that the outcome is highly desirable.
Example. We are considering two options for preschools for our child. At one preschool, we call, they ask for our name and child’s age, and a week later they offer our child a spot. At the other preschool, there’s an admissions process. There are essays and interviews. There’s a steep application fee. There are visits and testing and, for some parents, private preschool admissions consultants.
As we rework our application essay for the third time, the tiny voice in our head saying this is insane is drowned out only by a newfound, intense conviction that this is the only preschool at which our child will be happy.
#3 Belief Disconfirmation: Digging in our heels
We’re exposed to information that is inconsistent with our prior beliefs. If we don’t change our original beliefs (as we most often do not), we reject or argue against the new information, we surround ourselves with others who agree with us, and we try to convince others that our original beliefs are true.
Example6: As a parent, we’ve become convinced that bowl cuts are good for our kids. They’re the most stylish of children’s haircuts, they’re easy, and we’re pretty sure they are associated with lower risk of the flu. Our own parents gave us bowl cuts, and we turned out great.
Then one day, we come across a randomized controlled trial providing evidence that bowl cuts actually have no discernible impact on children’s style or well-being. Rather than change our beliefs, we argue against the study (their definition of bowl cut was far too broad! And how did they control for prior haircuts?), we increase the fervor with which we proselytize on the benefits of bowl cuts, and we join a Facebook group called Parents for Haircut Freedom.
#4 Behavioral Inconsistency: I do, therefore I am
We act in ways that are inconsistent with our morals or values. Then, we justify our behavior by changing or adjusting our beliefs.
Example: Our spouse does something that annoys us—say (totally hypothetically), leaving all the kitchen cabinets open after making themselves a snack. We snap at them. Being rude to our spouse is dissonant with our value of being a nice, caring partner who doesn’t lose their minds over kitchen cabinets.
So, we justify the behavior. We add new beliefs (Open cabinets are a safety hazard!). We adjust the importance of our beliefs (I will never be happy unless I live in a house with closed cabinets). We change our original beliefs (It’s actually okay for me to be rude to my partner when it comes to life-or-death issues, like cabinets).
Those examples sound…familiar. But why does this matter?
Cognitive dissonance, on its own, serves an important function. It reminds us of what matters to us. That nagging feeling tells us when something’s not quite right—when our thinking on an issue needs to change, or when we’re acting in ways that don’t align with our values. We need cognitive dissonance. Without it, we’d be paralyzed by indecision and second-guessing. We’d have no sense of who we are, what we believe, or what’s important to us.
And yet, it’s easy to see where cognitive dissonance can go wrong. We justify behaviors. We rationalize beliefs. We dig in our heels in the face of contradictory evidence. In all the rationalizing, we lose sight of what mattered to us in the first place.
The risks of cognitive dissonance have always been there, but now, in an age of smartphones and social media, they’re more present than ever. Suddenly, the entirety of the world’s information, tailored to our interests and preferences, is available in our pockets.
New beliefs and justifications are a quick Google away, with queries we craft—How much water is wasted when washing out plastic dressing containers? What are the benefits of bowl cuts for children?—to give us the answers we’re looking for. Social media algorithms are primed to feed us what we want to see: opinions that align with ours, people who agree with us. And those pesky, conflicting facts? The ones that might cause some dissonance? We scroll right by; that is, if we ever see them at all.
It’s never been so easy to talk ourselves out of—or into—exactly what we want to believe.
But if our actions shape our beliefs in this way, if what we do informs who we are, maybe we can use cognitive dissonance for good. Maybe we can invest time, money, or effort into the things we care about, so that we’re more likely to continue doing things to justify that effort. Maybe we can act in ways that are kind and generous, so that we come to believe kindness and generosity are important.
Maybe if we stop scrolling for just a moment, and we listen to that nagging feeling of dissonance, we can remember what really matters to us.
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In case you missed it
This peg board activity sounds surprisingly similar in both design and boredom-inducing qualities to a toy my son has called Spike the Fine Motor Hedgehog. It’s a plastic hedgehog with little, colored pegs that stick into its back. The entire purpose of the toy is to pull out, and then put back, the pegs. My son loves it.
Sometimes it’s worth reading through the original text of studies like this one, if only for gems like this: “After the half hour on the second task was over, the [experimenter] conspicuously set the stop watch back to zero, put it away, pushed his chair back, lit a cigarette, and said Okay. Well that’s all we have in the experiment itself…” (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959; p. 203).
The Festinger experiment is an example of a specific type of cognitive dissonance called induced compliance—when we’re given a small (versus large) reward for doing something that contradicts our beliefs, we change our beliefs to justify the behavior. An interesting real-world example of this is blood donation. Should we pay people to donate blood? It turns out, for many reasons, the answer is probably no. Though we might assume that monetary rewards for blood donation will increase the number of donors and consistency with which they donate, the opposite turns out to be true. Donating blood is unpleasant for many people (contradicting beliefs like I don’t like needles). If we get paid for donating, we tell ourselves that the money was the reason for donating, and we’re less likely to do it in the future. If we don’t get paid, we change our beliefs (I can handle needles if it means helping those in need), and we’re more likely to do it again.
Okay, so my interest in gardening is more theoretical than actual. I have yet to plant a single shrub at our house, despite a very ambitious horticultural New Years resolution. Luckily, I’ve managed to resolve the resulting cognitive dissonance by telling myself I’m too busy, gardening is too expensive, the weather hasn’t been good enough, the baby might accidentally eat the plants (?), etc.
These types of cognitive dissonance actually map onto various research paradigms that have been studied over the past 50 years. For those interested, I highly recommend this chapter for a good overview: Harmon-Jones, E., & Mills, J. (2019). An introduction to cognitive dissonance theory and an overview of current perspectives on the theory. In E. Harmon-Jones (Ed.), Cognitive dissonance: Reexamining a pivotal theory in psychology (pp. 3–24). American Psychological Association
It is shockingly difficult to come up with non-controversial examples of strongly held parenting beliefs, hence the (obviously made-up) bowl cut example. I did Google this to ensure that there’s not actually a contingent of parents with strongly held bowl cut beliefs. In the process, I (of course) discovered a passionate online community who celebrates Bowl Cut Day every January 21.