Cognitive dissonance describes a situation in which a person's attitudes, beliefs or behaviors produce a feeling of discomfort that leads to an alteration in them to reduce discomfort and restore balance.
For example, when a person smokes (behavior) and knows that smoking causes cancer (cognition), but he fools himself by saying to himself, "well, something has to die."
For psychology, cognitive dissonance is known as the tension or discomfort that we perceive when we hold two contradictory or incompatible ideas, or when our beliefs are not in harmony with what we do. Leon Festinger (1957) proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance, which states that a powerful reason for maintaining cognitive consistency can lead to irrational behavior and sometimes poor adaptation.
According to Festinger, we have a lot of knowledge about the world and about ourselves; But when they collide, a discrepancy appears that produces a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. Since the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it as soon as possible, thereby restoring consonance (i.e., agreement). These cognitive elements can be related in three ways: dissonant, consonant, or irrelevant.
Another example: when we go to buy a pair of shoes. We like a pair, but when we look at the price we're giving up, it's not in our budget to spend that much on a pair of shoes when we have other, more basic priorities. The salesperson tells us that "sometimes he has to indulge himself, especially when we don't do it often" and that argument resolves the internal conflict, resolves the contradiction, the dissonance, because that argument remains.
Cognitive dissonance can also occur when some other behavior of another nature contradicts a belief. For example, if a person argues with his brother and the belief transmitted through the family is that with siblings you never have to argue because "within the family there is no discussion." The feeling produced by the discussion is contradictory to the learned belief. To resolve the tension, the person may renounce their point of view and apologize to their brother. Or perhaps you dare to question the belief and recreate or reshape it. "There is always a first time".
The theory of cognitive dissonance is recognized in the therapeutic field, which is often intentionally provoked, so that the person abandons a very limiting or strict belief and can see a broader perspective.
