Construct · 4 names · 5 citations
Different names. Different fields. One construct. One map.
● jangle · the discomfort of inconsistency, several fields Nearest construct by meaningdissonancecompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to cognitive dissonance is dissonance.
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The tension a buyer feels after committing to a purchase, when doubts about the chosen option and the residual appeal of the rejected ones make the decision feel inconsistent with the money and effort spent, popularly called buyer's remorse. It is Festinger's free-choice paradigm relocated to the marketplace: the more attractive the forgone alternatives and the more important the purchase, the greater the post-decisional discomfort, which buyers reduce by seeking confirming information, downplaying rejected options, or reinterpreting the choice. Sweeney, Hausknecht, and Soutar built a multidimensional scale in 2000 to measure this state after purchase, separating emotional, wisdom-of-purchase, and concern-over-the-deal components. The referent is the same aversive inconsistency, now attached to a consumer decision.[3]
The tendency to seek out information that agrees with one's existing attitudes and to avoid information that contradicts them, treated as a way of warding off or reducing dissonance. Festinger predicted that once a decision is made or a belief held, people preferentially expose themselves to consonant messages; in communication and media research this became the selective-exposure hypothesis, a mechanism by which audiences insulate their views. Hart and colleagues' 2009 meta-analysis of nearly a hundred studies found a modest but reliable congeniality bias, stronger when people were committed to a view and weaker when accuracy was at stake. The referent is dissonance again, expressed as which information people choose rather than as how they revise an attitude.[4]
Dissonance deliberately induced as a tool for changing health behavior and attitudes, most often by having people argue for a position or advocate a behavior that clashes with their own past conduct. In eating-disorder prevention, participants voluntarily critique the thin ideal in writing and role-play, and the gap between that advocacy and internalized beliefs pushes the beliefs to shift; in hypocrisy inductions, people who publicly promote a behavior are reminded of their own failures to follow it, which motivates change. Stice, Shaw, Burton, and Wade's 2006 randomized trial found that a dissonance-based program reduced eating-disorder risk factors and onset relative to control conditions. The referent is Festinger's induced-compliance mechanism, harnessed as an intervention.[5]
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Social psychology
the aversive tension of holding inconsistent cognitions, or acting against an attitude, which motivates change to restore consistency.The aversive state of tension that arises when a person holds two or more inconsistent cognitions, or acts in a way that contradicts an attitude, and which motivates change in one of them to restore consistency. Festinger's 1957 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance set out the theory and its two central paradigms: free choice, where selecting one attractive option leads the chooser to devalue the rejected one afterward, and induced compliance, where saying something one disbelieves for too small a reward shifts the private attitude toward the statement. Festinger and Carlsmith demonstrated the second effect in 1959, when participants paid one dollar to call a dull task interesting later rated it as more enjoyable than those paid twenty. This is the origin construct that every other field on this map inherited.[1][2]