Cognitive Dissonance

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Cognitive Dissonance

 

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to

the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know

or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore

occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be

necessary for it to develop so that we become "open" to them.

Neighbour (1992) makes the generation of appropriate dissonance into

a major feature of tutorial (and other) teaching: he shows how to

drive this kind of intellectual wedge between learners' current

beliefs and "reality".

 

 

Beyond this benign if uncomfortable aspect, however, dissonance can

go "over the top", leading to two interesting side-effects for

learning:

 

if someone is called upon to learn something which contradicts what

they already think they know — particularly if they are committed to

that prior knowledge — they are likely to resist the new learning.

Even Carl Rogers recognised this. Accommodation is more difficult

than Assimilation, in Piaget's terms.

and—counter-intuitively, perhaps—if learning something has been

difficult, uncomfortable, or even humiliating enough, people are

less likely to concede that the content of what has been learned is

useless, pointless or valueless. To do so would be to admit that one

has been "had", or "conned".

On cognitive dissonance and sour grapes

 

A more formal account

 

Cognitive dissonance was first investigated by Leon Festinger and

associates, arising out of a participant observation study of a cult

which believed that the earth was going to be destroyed by a flood,

and what happened to its members — particularly the really committed

ones who had given up their homes and jobs to work for the cult —

when the flood did not happen. While fringe members were more

inclined to recognise that they had made fools of themselves and

to "put it down to experience", committed members were more likely

to re-interpret the evidence to show that they were right all along

(the earth was not destroyed because of the faithfulness of the cult

members).