What drives a person to change his attitude and potentially, his intention to follow through with a specific behavior? One theory called the cognitive dissonance theory argues that when a person does something that is not in line with his existing attitude toward the object in question, a negative experience results.
Now this negative experience is quite relevant because negative experiences bring a concatenation of negative emotions. As human beings we have a natural aversion to negative emotions because naturally, we want to feel whole, happy and positive all the time.
Positive feelings lead to positive actions, which in turn satisfy our psychological, social and physical needs. Negative feelings on the other hand usually lead to inaction or negative actions, which directly contradict our various individual needs.
Here’s a good example of how cognitive dissonance can work in a person’s life. Let’s say that Person W has been a vegetarian for a few years now. Now because of a special event, this person was forced to eat chicken meat in the presence of many other friends who were not vegetarians at all.
The vegetarian eats the food, but later on, he feels guilty and unhappy because he went against his own beliefs regarding the consumption of meat. Here’s another example: let’s say that Person X is an avowed supporter of Person C, a candidate for mayor. Person C is actually Person X’s good friend for over twenty years.
However, Person X decides to vote for Person Y because Person Y had a better plan for the city. Though Person X’s friend was not aware of who Person X actually voted for, Person X felt terrible because Person C was a very good friend in the past and has been very helpful on many occasions.
It is normal for human beings to sometimes engage in behavior that is not completely in line or congruent to our attitudes. This happens for a variety of reasons. As we have discussed before, people have to take into consideration the things that they discover or learn as they become either privately self-aware or publicly self-aware.
There are always expectations, norms, mores and standards that we have to think about because in the end, humans are social beings that want to be part of a winning social group. Unless a conscious choice is made to exclude oneself from any social group, we can safely assume that people behave in accordance to the standards of the group that they belong to.
So if you want predict the behavior and attitudes of a person, being fully aware of his social group would help immensely in the process of analyzing what you have to do to communicate with the other person effectively. What do we do when our behavior does not satisfy our present attitudes?
Do we just ignore the negative experience associated with dissonant behaviors? Or do we do something about it? According to the theory of cognitive dissonance, people care deeply when their actions do not reflect their attitudes. Now we know for a fact that attitude strength is a strong determinant when it comes to the actual implementation or execution of a behavior.
We can infer from this other theory that negative experiences associated with dissonant behavior also has varying degrees. If you have a weak conviction about a certain attitude, then you won’t care as much when your behavior does not really reflect the attitude.
But when you do something that completely ignores an attitude that you hold with strong conviction, then you can be sure that you will feel quite awful afterward.
Naturally, if a person feels negatively about a behavior because of the discrepancy between the behavior and the actual attitude, then that person will mostly likely be motivated to remedy the discrepancy or difference. This can be done in two ways:
Through rationalization or explaining to themselves why it was necessary to act that way in that specific situation.
Changing the behavior partially or completely so that it will now be congruent with the existing attitude toward the target object.