Cognitive dissonance
mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly or subconsciously hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions. Being confronted by situations that create this dissonance or highlight these inconsistencies motivates change in their cognitions or actions to reduce this dissonance, maybe by changing a belief, by explaining something away, or by taking actions that reduce perceived inconsistency.
Relevant items of cognition include people's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance exists without outward sign, but surfaces through psychological stress when psychological discomfort is created due to persons participating in an action that creates conflicting beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors, or when new information challenges existing beliefs.
According to this theory, when an action or idea is psychologically inconsistent with the other, people automatically try to resolve the conflict, usually by reframing a side to make the combination congruent. Discomfort is triggered by beliefs clashing with new information or by having to conceptually resolve a matter that involves conflicting sides, whereby the individual tries to find a way to reconcile contradictions to reduce their discomfort. This need to reduce discomfort can be used for applied interventions as a catalyst for attitudinal change, such as in the induced hypocrisy paradigm, shaping pro-social behaviours or disengaging and deradicalising extremists.
In When Prophecy Fails (1956) and A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency to function mentally in the real world. Persons who experience internal inconsistency tend to become psychologically uncomfortable and are motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance. They tend to make changes to justify the stressful behavior, by either adding new parts to the cognition causing the psychological dissonance (rationalization), believing that "people get what they deserve" (just-world fallacy), taking in specific pieces of information while rejecting or ignoring others (selective perception), or avoiding circumstances and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance (confirmation bias).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cognitive dissonance” is mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cognitive, dissonance and mental, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q209722. The Library of Congress control number is sh85027753. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956 and 1957.
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