DECISION MAKING AND COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Decision Making and Cognitive Dissonance

Decision Making and Cognitive Dissonance

Introduction

When making decisions humans normally fall victim to mistakes in logic and reasoning. Since the inception of the research of the mind, psychologists have endeavored to isolate the characteristics and causes of mistakes in human thinking.

In 1957, Festinger identified a phenomenon in human cognition, cognitive dissonance. Festinger theorized that humans experience negative emotions as shortly as performing behaviors that are contrary to their attitudes. These negative emotions, collectively called "cognitive dissonance," have been shown to influence people's attitudes and behaviors in myriad situations. Is it possible that cognitive dissonance plays an important role in directing the illogical or irrational decisions that citizens frequently make? More specifically, can cognitive dissonance be partially responsible for the many frequent flaws in human thinking? As evidenced via his research, Festinger found that cognitive dissonance can provide a serious hindrance to proper decision making, and reducing dissonance may significantly improve decision making skills.

Cognitive dissonance as a cause of common errors in human thinking

It may be reasonable to attribute many mistakes in human thinking to cognitive dissonance. I will discuss, in purely theoretical terms, three frequent mistakes in decision making that can be directly or indirectly caused via cognitive dissonance. First, the representativeness heuristic is defined as the mistake in which citizens conjure upward generalizations about a population or about the consequence of a scenario based on a small "representative" sample or stimulus (Plous, 1993). People devise attitudes about other communities of citizens based on individual meets with membership of that group. These attitudes are frequently difficult to change as shortly as negative or emotionally charged. The representativeness heuristic can aid citizens avoid encountering situations that cause cognitive dissonance, and, therefore, this "error" in human thinking persists.

Positive uses of cognitive dissonance

As was hypothesized concerning the representativeness heuristic, availability heuristic, and memory and hindsight biases, cognitive dissonance may prove to be the real culprit of many more frequent flaws in decision making. Although cognitive dissonance may be implicated in human mistakes in reasoning, there are several positive employs of dissonance. Since it is such a potent coerce in attitude formation, dissonance can be accustomed in therapy to induce an attitude change in clients (Wright, et al., 1992; Axsom & Lawless, 1992). Mwamwenda (1992) intends a novel exert of cognitive dissonance to foster "higher moral reasoning" in juvenile delinquents. Bohner & Schwarz (1993) found that dissonance can increase creativity in extemporaneous speaking, depending on the mood of the speaker.

Improving decision making through dissonance reduction

As mentioned earlier, citizens exert three procedures of dissonance reduction: changing one of the dissonant elements, adding consonant cognitions, and decreasing the importance of the dissonant cognitive elements (Festinger, 1957). The first, and majority frequent, usually involves a change of one of the conflicting attitudes or behaviors.

An example of a dissonance-reducing attitude change can be perceived in the case of my role as parent (guardian and protector) to pair teenage sons. Parents are sometimes perceived via teenagers as police officers or even prison ...