Sigmund Freud: Theory & Contribution to Psychology

In 1886, Freud returned to Vienna, married Martha Bernays, and set up a private practice to treat nervous disorders. His work during this time led to his revolutionary concepts of the human mind and the development of the psychoanalytic method. Thus, when we explain our behavior to ourselves or others (conscious mental activity), we rarely give a true account of our motivation. While human beings are great deceivers of others; they are even more adept at self-deception. We can all engage in habits that cause harm to ourselves or the world, and that can cause cognitive dissonance. This article provides some examples of cognitive dissonance, discusses the signs, and offers some suggestions on how to cope with it.

Sigmund Freud’s Theories & Contribution to Psychology

The magnitude of dissonance depends on the number and importance of cognitions that the person experiences a consonance or dissonance with. Its calculation is summarised in the mathematical expression below (Festinger, 1962). The total tension of a dissonance is the proportion of the inconsistent cognitions to the consistent cognitions that one has, each weighted by its importance. In the New Look perspective, the arousal state is not caused by inconsistency, but rather by the perception of having been responsible for bringing about an aversive event (Scher & Cooper, 1989). Cognitive inconsistency is relevant because having inconsistent representations often produces unwanted consequences – but not always. Scher & Cooper (1989) compared the role of consistency between cognitions with the role of consequences.

International Review of Social Psychology

Moreover, the state of dissonance has drive-like properties, motivating people to seek its reduction. That relatively straightforward description of the relationship among cognitions led to decades of research that supported, contradicted and modified the theory. It led to innovations in understanding people’s motivations for the attitudes they hold, the behaviors they engage in and the preferences they express. It also led to innovations in leveraging the dissonance process to help people with important practical considerations such as improving their mental and physical health. In this paper, I will examine some of the initial controversies that propelled dissonance theory toward a decades-long journey as an important and controversial theoretical construct and offer a view of the current state of dissonance in the field of social psychology.

Reducing the Importance of the Conflicting Belief

• In one experiment, we artificially decreased participants’ arousal level by administering a mild sedative.
• The person may make a commitment to engage in the campaigning despite having previously not liked the candidate that much.

An individual may fail to restore a consonance, if there is a lack of social support and new harmonious elements, or the existing problematic element is too satisfying (Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2007). In contrast to our SD orientation, which acts to reduce the perceived cognitive abilities of animals, mechanisms of TM aid dissonance reduction by elevating humans compared with other animals. This elevation of own cognitive capacities can be seen in our consistent segregation of humans at the top of mental ability scales 22,30 (for a notable exception, see 34). By bringing attention to the inconsistencies in our minds, cognitive dissonance may present an opportunity for growth. People who feel it could realize, for example, that they need to update their beliefs to reflect the truth, or change their behavior to better match the person they want to be.

Social Psychology, Theories of

• Notably, van Veen found reliable anterior insula activations, but relatively small DPLFC activations.
• Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes.
• Consistency between cognitions and actions is most common, but it is easy to find examples of inconsistent cognitions (Festinger, 1957).
• Some individuals hold power by virtue of expertise or information (French and Raven), evoking internalization (privately held beliefs; Kelman) in those they influence.
• They suggest that there were no aversive consequences, yet dissonance was aroused.

One answer to that question is provided by the Action-Orientation Model (Harmon-Jones, 1999). Harmon-Jones suggests that people’s stance toward events in the world is adaptively better without ambivalence and conflict. Inconsistent cognitions interfere with our action tendencies and create a negative emotion, motivating us to rid ourselves of the inconsistency. We are not driven to reduce inconsistency per se, but rather driven to have an unambivalent stance toward the world to prepare us for effective action. Just as theories describe how familiar others are liked, perhaps because easily understood, other theories emphasize dislike of dissimilar others, as in theories of stigma offered separately by Goffman, Jones, and Katz.

Forced Compliance Behavior

From this came Schachter’s subsequent arousal-cognition theory of emotion, positing that unexplained physiological arousal elicits cognitive labels from the social context. Since factors such as level of perceived expertise of a therapist generally are believed to be critical variables in the outcome of psychotherapy (Strupp, 1981), the elaboration likelihood model is quite relevant to the therapy process. If the person’s motivation and ability to think are very low, then increasing the therapist’s expertise should enhance compliance with the therapy by serving as a peripheral cue.

• To restore equilibrium between conflicting beliefs, people often introduce new, reinforced concepts that strike a balance between comfort and discomfort in their decision-making.
• Scher & Cooper (1989) compared the role of consistency between cognitions with the role of consequences.
• More specifically, the theory explains how rewards affect attitudes and behaviours and how behaviours and motivations affect cognitions and perceptions (Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2007).
• Most of us remained wedded to our laboratories while practitioners were either unaware of the studies or unconvinced of their usefulness.

Vicarious Dissonance and the Social Group: Dissonance Moves Into the 21st Century

• Hypocrisy involves a contradiction between a person’s supposed principles, beliefs, or character and who they really are or how they behave.
• For this reason, Freud’s theory is unfalsifiable – it can neither be proved true or refuted.
• Heider’s Balance Theory, on the other hand, emphasizes the desire for balanced relations among triads of entities (like people and attitudes), with imbalances prompting changes in attitudes to restore balance.
• In ethical therapy, the client is always encouraged to develop an internal locus of control within their authentic — or autonomous — personality.

Theoretically, dissonance may contribute to a variety of changes in behavior or beliefs. Vicarious hypocrisy has the potential to be a magnifier; to spread the motivation efficiently to an entire group of people simultaneously. In principle, the vicarious hypocrisy procedure can be adapted for an entire social group. All of the members of a group can witness one of its members admit to hypocrisy.

Cognitive dissonance theory began by postulating that pairs of cognitions can be either relevant or irrelevant to one another. However, if two cognitions are relevant, but conflicting, the existence of dissonance would cause psychological discomfort and motivate the individual to act upon this. The greater the cognitive dissonance and addiction magnitude of dissonance, the greater the pressure for the individual to reduce the dissonance (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019). The existence of dissonance and the mechanisms that humans used to cope with it captured Festinger’s interest in developing cognitive dissonance theory. Cognitive dissonance theory proposes that situations involving conflicting behaviors, beliefs or attitudes produce a state of mental discomfort (Festinger, 1957).

The Drive Properties of Dissonance: Reality or Metaphor?

As people learn by doing, they are socially influenced by self-consistency and commitment, according to another of Cialdini’s compliance principles. Members are also taught emotion-stopping techniques — especially to block feelings of homesickness, frustration towards leadership, illness, distress, and doubts. Whenever a person is feeling depressed, or anxious or fearful, they are exhorted to believe and surrender more to the leader or group. Whenever there is a problem, the group and the leader are always right, and it is always the member’s fault. If they feel normal emotions, for instance, sexual attraction, they are made to feel evil and sinful, or led to believe that Satan is tempting them.

Consumer decision-making

First, participants volunteer to participate in the program and keep an open mind regarding topics discussed. Next, participants define and label the thin ideal, and discuss the origins of the thin ideal and other standards of beauty that have been held through history, and how messages of the thin ideal are conveyed (e.g., through the media) and maintained. Each DBI may include several combinations of these activities performed over one or more sessions. When one learns new information that challenges a deeply held belief, for example, or acts in a way that seems to undercut a favorable self-image, that person may feel motivated to somehow resolve the negative feeling that results—to restore cognitive consonance. Though a person may not always resolve cognitive dissonance, the response to it may range from ignoring the source of it to changing one’s beliefs or behavior to eliminate the conflict.