Unraveling the Intricacies of Cognitive Dissonance: Understanding Conflicting Beliefs

To resolve cognitive dissonance, a person can aim to ensure that their actions are consistent with their values or vice versa. For example, a small 2019 study notes that dissonance-based interventions may be helpful for people with eating disorders. This approach works by encouraging people to say things or role-play behaviors that contradict their beliefs about food and body image. It is possible to resolve cognitive dissonance by either changing one’s behavior or changing one’s beliefs so they are consistent with each other. However, Festinger believed that all people are motivated to avoid or resolve cognitive dissonance due to the discomfort it causes. This can prompt people to adopt certain defense mechanisms when they have to confront it.

DRUGS OF ABUSE AND THE DEVELOPING BRAIN

As seen in Rajiv’s case illustration, internal (social anxiety, craving) and external cues (drinking partner, a favourite brand of drink) were identified as triggers for his craving. Subsequently inadequate coping and lack of assertiveness and low self-efficacy maintained cognitive dissonance and addiction his drinking. The following section presents a brief overview of some of the major approaches to managing addictive behaviours. As President and Chairman of the Board, Dan’s mission is to grow the unique Elevate model outside of California and to bring it nationwide.

Emotional Development in Childhood: 3 Theories Explained

By utilizing this theoretical framework, this study will be able to identify the specific factors that influence the behavioral intention to discontinue among users of pan-entertainment mobile live broadcast platforms. This will provide a comprehensive understanding of the psychological process of discontinuing the use of Chinese pan-entertainment mobile live broadcast platform users and help to determine the likelihood of reducing discontinuation. The study aimed to explore the discontinuous usage intentions of pan-entertainment mobile live broadcast users and the role of cognitive dissonance and self-efficacy in this process. The findings of the study extend the traditional “cognition-emotion-behavior intention” framework by incorporating the concepts of cognitive dissonance and self-efficacy and provide a more comprehensive understanding of discontinuous usage intentions. The results of the study offer empirical evidence for the role of cognitive dissonance in discontinuous usage intentions and provide insights into the relationship between information overload, service overload, user addiction, and cognitive dissonance.

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You learn that there have been thousands of bees living in the attic for more than a decade. And a weird smell surfaces in the living room—and you can’t seem to get rid of that smell no matter what! Sure, you could conclude that you made a bad purchase, but, really, who wants to do that?! In such a case, maybe you’d double down—trying to convince others and yourself that the house is just great. Many people in this kind of situation would, in fact, take all kinds of actions and make all kinds of statements that ultimately are acts of doubling down.

Overall, the reliability and validity analysis results for this study are presented in Table 2. Tim is an experienced and talented administrator and director of mental health and addiction treatment facilities. Tim also spent several years as CEO to Eric https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/5-stages-of-alcoholism/ Clapton’s facility in the Caribbean, Crossroads of Antigua. The cognitive dissonance is effectively wiped clean by changing how they feel towards their addiction. This allows the convoluted “logic” of addiction to take hold and become the new norm.

Changing Your Thinking: Examples of Techniques to Combat Cognitive Distortions

• An individual’s genetic makeup can influence the degree to which a drug of abuse alters his or her cognitive processes.
• Still, they find substance abuse a more comfortable path because it blocks unwanted ideas, feelings, and responsibilities.
• The wife was involved in therapy, to support his abstinence and help him engage in alternate activities.
• The heterotrait–monotrait ratio of validity, also known as the ratio of between-trait to within-trait correlations, is used to assess the discriminant validity of different constructs.

A psycho-educational self-management approach is adopted in this program and the client is trained in a variety of coping skills and responses. The model incorporates the stages of change proposed by Procahska, DiClement and Norcross (1992) and treatment principles are based on social-cognitive theories11,29,30. Early learning theories and later social cognitive and cognitive theories have had a significant influence on the formulation CBT for addictive behaviours.

The decisionmaking deficits resembled those observed in individuals with damage – to the prefrontal cortex, suggesting that both drugs alter function in that brain area (Rogers et al., 1999). Drug addiction manifests clinically as compulsive drug seeking, drug use, and cravings that can persist and recur even after extended periods of abstinence. From a psychological and neurological perspective, addiction is a disorder of altered cognition. The brain regions and processes that underlie addiction overlap extensively with those that are involved in essential cognitive functions, including learning, memory, attention, reasoning, and impulse control.

• Prenatal exposures to a number of other drugs have significant deleterious effects on cognition and behavior that may not rise to the level of mental retardation.
• CBT for addictive behaviours can be traced back to the application of learning theories in understanding addiction and subsequently to social cognitive theories.
• The model incorporates the stages of change proposed by Procahska, DiClement and Norcross (1992) and treatment principles are based on social-cognitive theories11,29,30.
• Adolescent exposures to other substances of abuse, such as alcohol, cannabis, and MDMA, also cause persistent disruptions of cognition (Brown et al., 2000; O’Shea, McGregor, and Mallet, 2006; Piper and Meyer, 2004; Stiglick and Kalant, 1982).
• Cocaine produced similar effects in a study of rats that were treated with the drug and then exposed to a sensory stimulus; the animals exhibited enhanced neural activation when later re-exposed to the stimulus (Devonshire, Mayhew, and Overton, 2007).
• In the first stage, the individual’s occasional drug taking becomes increasingly chronic and uncontrolled.

It is a theory with very broad applications, showing that we aim for consistency between attitudes and behaviors and may not use very rational methods to achieve it. In other words, he could tell himself that a short life filled with smoking and sensual pleasures is better than a long life devoid of such joys. In this way, he would be decreasing the importance of dissonant cognition (smoking is bad for one’s health).

A Note on Cognitive Dissonance in Relationships