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When running any type of campaign, a public relations person is trying to cause a change in behavior, but before they can even do that they must know whom they are selling to. If a public relations person is good at their job, then they should be able to get their audience to choose their product over another one and will use cognitive dissonance to do this. By providing the audience with persuasive and extensive information that the public relations professional researched in-depth, then the change in behavior should be easy for whatever target audience they are selling to. The Free Killer Tan campaign done by the Mollie Biggane Fund used cognitive dissonance to get its audience to stop using tanning beds. Mollie was a college sophomore that died from skin cancer at the age of 20, and this organization was created in memory of her.

• While some degree of fear was understandable, there was no rational explanation for the intense levels of trepidation that gripped these villagers since they had only experienced minor tremors.
• However, Festinger was convinced that once dissonance exists, there would be attempts to reduce it.
• He ended up choosing the offer from the prestigious university.
• This advocate should be viewed as likely to provide inadequate support to one’s views and would make the proposed positive outcomes seem relatively unlikely to happen.

This advocate should be viewed as likely to provide inadequate support to one’s views and would make the proposed positive outcomes seem relatively unlikely to happen. Because of these shortcomings, recipients’ motivation to bolster their position may be substantial. They may be motivated to carefully attend to the message as a means to ensure that their own views are indeed “correct” and/or that the https://ecosoberhouse.com/ outcomes they prefer are still likely to occur. The arrows indicate the expected belief strength of the information group before tasting the coffee. To summarize, many situational variables determine how people defend BJW when confronted with a threatening injustice. These variables likely have their influence through general principles affecting preferences for alternative ways to manage threat.

Consumer behavior

Imagine that you see yourself as a fun person who everyone at work likes to be around. You then find out that your co-workers recently had a party and deliberately chose not to invite you. Cognitive dissonance is everywhere, and we all experience some form of cognitive dissonance once in a while. Cognitive dissonance isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it enables us to adjust our opinions and beliefs according to lived experiences.

Sometimes you might find yourself engaging in behaviors that are opposed to your own beliefs due to external expectations at work, school, or in a social situation. Another way to make sense of what happened is to maintain the same belief about being taken away in a flying saucer but just change the date. This would justify the sacrifices that were made by increasing the value of their original belief. To strengthen the belief, new converts would be needed, which requires proselytizing. Indeed, this also occurred, with some group members proselytizing their beliefs after the disconfirmation. Notably, this proselytizing solution reflects not only effort justification but also the motivation to create a shared reality with others that their beliefs are true.

How Cognitive Dissonance Feels

Cognitive dissonance is not a mental health condition, and a person does not necessarily need treatment for it. The internal discomfort and tension of cognitive dissonance could contribute to stress or unhappiness. Cognitive dissonance can affect people in a wide range of ways. The effects may relate to the discomfort of the dissonance itself or the defense mechanisms a person adopts to deal with it. cognitive dissonance theory If that same person believed the COVID-19 pandemic was real but refused to wear a mask, their values and behaviors would contradict each other. Researchers believe the amount paid influenced how people came to see the peg-turning task. People who were paid a large sum could justify their lie to the other student about how fun the task was; after all, it was a pretty minor lie, and they got $20.