Have you ever felt the feeling of thinking one thing and doing another, without realizing that two incompatible ideas are coming out, do these situations hurt you or make you tense?This is called cognitive dissonance.
Psychology means cognitive dissonance the stress or discomfort we perceive when we have two contradictory or incompatible ideas, or when our beliefs are not in harmony with what we practice.
- When we experience stress or discomfort from the manifestation of two incompatible ideas.
- We will try to eliminate them or avoid the situation and the information that can feed them.
- That is.
- We will try to minimize dissonance.
- To minimize this.
- We can use different ways.
- Such as changing attitudes.
- Changing the environment.
- Or adding new information and knowledge.
In this way, we can discover that almost everyone experiences cognitive dissonance, for example, when we do not go to the gym, even if it is our weekly goal, when we eat chocolate on a diet, when we want something and we cannot satisfy ourselves. that desire, and then we criticize it or worth it, we smoke a cigarette when the doctor forbids it, or when what we have acquired does not meet our expectations, if you do not go to the gym, will that go against our beliefs about losing a few kilos or about “living a healthy life”. And we end up not going to the gym, so what’s easier to change, something we’ve done in the past, a habit or our beliefs?
The simplest option is usually the second. When we need to add new beliefs, or change the ones we already have or give importance to incompatible ones, to eliminate inconsistencies. “Going to the gym is something you see in the long run, nothing happens when I stop going,” “One day it won’t make a difference,” “I’ll try to go next week. “We can change our beliefs in different ways, but maintaining our ultimate goal, which will be to further value the chosen option and give weight to the unselected alternative. And the same goes for other examples.
As you can see, cognitive dissonance explains our tendency to self-justification, anxiety or stress, which involves making a bad decision or doing something wrong, can lead us to invent new justifications or explanations that support our decision or act. We do not support two contradictory or incompatible thoughts, and we justify such contradiction, albeit with new absurd ideas.
It is important to note that cognitive dissonance only occurs when individuals have the freedom to choose when driving, if we are forced to do something against our desire, stress does not occur, even if we are convinced that we are obligated, it can also serve as justification for minimizing discomfort.
Not at first, because it is a mechanism that we use for our well-being, what matters is to be aware that when this happens we must avoid falling into self-deception, for example, at the end of a relationship, or in the face of unrequited love, we usually justify the fact using a phrase like “Did you already know that it would not work ?, wasn’t it worth it? , Wasn’t that what you expected?; even if we suffer, it’s hard to admit.
Even with people with low self-esteem, it is possible to observe it, because they are people who expect little of themselves and try to lie to hide what they consider weaknesses, creating armor and masks, that hide their true feelings What happens?For people treat them as they suppose they are, that is, according to the face they expose, and on the contrary internally they feel misunderstood, however this is very important, we must know that we treat the mechanism of cognitive dissonance to avoid falling into self-deception, criticism and lying.