Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Enhanced Views, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Reviews

Cognitive dissonance has become one of those scientific terms that everyone knows and uses so freely and loosely that its original meaning has been obscured. We speak of cognitive dissonance when we find our glasses in the kitchen instead of the bedroom, when oestrogen replacement turns out to be unhealthy rather than healthy, whenever we are less than pleasantly surprised. In Leon Festinger's original theory, cognitive dissonance arises when a person is forced to entertain two mutually inconsistent ideas, which creates an unpleasant tension that motivates the person to engage in various mental gymnastics to minimize the dissonance, usually by …