Cognitive Discomfort

 This Can Backfire

This strategy centres on the theory of cognitive dissonance. This is a big concept, but we will have just a short look at it here.

Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling induced by holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. The “ideas” or “cognitions” at issue may include attitudes and beliefs, the cognizance of one’s behaviour, and facts.

The hypothesis of cognitive dissonance suggests that individuals have a motivational drive to cut down dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours. Cognitive dissonance hypothesis is among the most influential and extensively studied hypotheses in social psychology.

Dissonance generally occurs when an individual perceives a logical incompatibility among his or her cognitions. This happens when one thought implies the opposite of some other.

For instance, a notion in animal rights could be translated as inconsistent with eating meat or wearing fur. Acknowledging the contradiction would lead to dissonance, which may be experienced as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other damaging emotional states.

When people’s thoughts are consistent with one another, they’re in a state of harmony, or consonance. If cognitions are unrelated, they’re categorized as irrelevant to one another and don’t lead to dissonance.

By getting me to agree to the first request when the telemarketer called in the previous chapter, they were hoping I had assembled a mental image of myself as a friend, a client, or a supporter. Cognitive dissonance – discomfort – comes about when we take actions that are incongruent with this mental image. And if I agreed to the increasing requests, they were building up my mental image – at the same time making it harder and harder to go against it, to say no to the following request.

Experimenters have also discovered that individuals would often change their positions towards something to match their behaviours to avoid the discomfort that dissonance induces. For example, after having spent 5 minutes on a survey I didn’t initially want to do, I may change my attitude towards the survey – ―it wasn’t that bad, as a matter of fact, it was quite fun to do.‖

Regrettable, then, that the company didn’t recognize they had gotten on my nerves with their first telephone call. I had developed a mental image of myself as somebody who had been strong-armed and lied to by their company – and cognitive dissonance worked against them.

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