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The Claim

Leon Festinger's 1957 cognitive dissonance theory predicts that when a person's behavior conflicts with their attitudes, the person often changes their attitudes to reduce psychological discomfort.

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The Short Version

The claim accurately states a central prediction of Festinger’s 1957 cognitive dissonance theory. When behavior and attitudes conflict, the resulting discomfort can lead people to adjust their attitudes to restore consistency. Although attitude change is not the only possible response, describing it as something people often do is well supported.

Caveats

  • Attitude change is one dissonance-reduction strategy, not the only one; people may also change behavior, rationalize, or trivialize the inconsistency.
  • The classic attitude-change effect is strongest when the behavior was freely chosen and not strongly justified by external rewards or pressure.
  • Later versions of dissonance theory refine the mechanism, but they do not overturn the core idea stated in the claim.

The Receipts

  1. A General Model of Dissonance Reduction: Unifying Past Accounts and Integrating New Conceptions of Dissonance

    PubMed Central

  2. Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology

    Annual Review of Psychology

  3. Cognitive Dissonance Theory Requires Conceptualization in Terms of Motivational Conflict of Action Control

    Frontiers in Psychology (via PubMed Central)

  4. Why are attitude–behaviour inconsistencies uncomfortable? Using action-based model of cognitive dissonance to understand the role of motivation and self-regulation in the experience of dissonance

    Motivation and Emotion (Springer) via SelfDeterminationTheory.org

  5. Cognitive Dissonance Theory

    ScienceDirect Topics

  6. Attitude Change as a Function of Dissonance

    American Psychological Association (PsycNet)

  7. Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology (introductory chapter sample)

    American Psychological Association

  8. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

    Stanford University Press / Google Books

  9. A theory of cognitive dissonance (book record)

    American Psychological Association (PsycNet)

  10. Cognitive consequences of forced compliance

    JSTOR (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology)

+ 15 more sources — see the full list on Lenz

Filed Under

A Theory Of Cognitive DissonanceCognitive Dissonance TheoryLeon Festinger