Dissonance due to inadequate justification occurs when we invest a significant amount of time, energy, money, or effort, but we receive little or nothing in return on the investment. We may feel as if the effort was a waste or that we were cheated out of our payoff. By Ashley Olivine, Ph.D., MPH

Dr. Ashley Olivine is a health psychologist and public health professional with over a decade of experience serving clients in the Expressive Arts Therapy: 15 Creative Activities and Techniques clinical setting and private practice. She has also researched a wide variety psychology and public health topics such as the management of health risk factors, chronic illness, maternal and child wellbeing, and child development. In today’s world, people do things or have beliefs and opinions that sometimes leave us questioning humanity. Maybe they do not make much sense to you or other people, but everyone is different.

The distinction between explicit and implicit dissonance reduction needs to be further elaborated. For instance, engaging strategies (e.g., attitude change, spreading of alternatives, effort justification) might not be particularly conscious. That is, although attitude change is an approach-related action (Harmon-Jones et al., 2011) which leads to more positive emotions (Cancino-Montecinos https://g-markets.net/sober-living/man-serving-sentence-for-attacking-parents-fails/ et al., 2018), the individual might not be aware of the chosen strategy. Furthermore, given the dynamic nature of the human mind, any excessive use of an explicit reduction strategy might render it more implicit over time. Thus, much of people’s everyday dissonance reduction could be occurring via implicit adaptation rather than conscious effortful evaluations.

The psychology of mental stress

When they are just left to simmer, we are left feeling false, helpless, and insecure. When we develop integrity, we are simply lining up our actions with our beliefs and consistently https://trading-market.org/a-timeline-for-the-restoration-of-cognitive/ acting on them. The take-home lesson is that our reasoning is biased by our desires and motivations. To damage control, we come up with excuses to justify our desired choices.

Throughout this paper, we make the point that dissonance reduction is a form of emotion regulation. The purpose is to provide an encompassing model that also highlights both the role of specific emotions (or clusters of emotions) and the role of individual differences in emotion regulation in order to predict how people might reduce dissonance. Several theorists have also pointed to motivations other than consonance restoration that may underlie dissonance reduction. Beauvois and Joule (1996, 1999) argue that the reduction process is about rationalizing a prior commitment to a behavior rather than restoring consonance. The self-affirmation viewpoint (Steele and Liu, 1983; Aronson et al., 2019) suggests that dissonance reduction functions as a way of restoring one’s self- image. Finally, the self-consistency model (Aronson, 1969, 1992, 1999) holds, as does the original theory, that people seek consonance, however only when cognitive conflicts threaten self-integrity.