What is cognitive dissonance?

• Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling we experience when confronted with two conflicting beliefs or behaviours.

What happens when we experience this?

• We may distort the evidence when our beliefs are contradicted or challenged, ignoring or rejecting the contradictory information altogether.
• We might also try to reduce the uncomfortable feeling by changing one or both beliefs to make them more similar or compatible (Aronson, 2018; Johnson, 2020).