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The theory of cognitive dissonance was first introduced to the world of social psychology
when Leon Festinger started studying rumor transmission after an earthquake devastated
India. Festinger noticed that people living outside the area where the earthquake
occurred, spread rumors about even greater earthquakes that had destroyed outlaying
regions, thus making people very anxious and worried. Although there was no coherent
truth to the rumors, Festinger hypothesized that the rumors were created to justify the
feelings of unease that individuals felt after the initial earthquake. “What Festinger
decided was that that the phenomenon of generating self-justifying cognitions was part of
a more general process of making cognitions fit and that if two cognitions do not fit, there
is pressure to make them correspond” .
Soon after these observations took place, Festinger introduced A Theory of Cognitive
Dissonance in 1957. In it, he postulated that individuals reach psychological stability only
when they have regularly consistent thoughts and attitudes. Although the theory appears
to be inherently broad, it is extremely important to the field of social psychology simply
because it is not limited to one specific topic, but instead can be applied to all cognitions,
be they personal or group-related. Festinger goes on to discuss that at times, due to the
introduction of new information, contradictions in the thought process can occur. When
the mind receives these unbalanced messages, dissonance develops, and the individual
strives to reduce this inconsistency. In order to combat this dissonance, Festinger
proposed three methods of reduction, while a fourth was later added by Harmon-Jones
and Mills (1999, 4).
Festinger first explained these four reduction methods by examining the thought process
of a smoker who recently found out that cigarettes are harmful to his/her health (Festinger
1957, 5). By applying a similar example that is currently appropriate, Festinger’s
hypothesis can be revealed. This example focuses on an individual who eats fast food
five times a week, but later finds out that fast food can be unhealthy when consumed in
large quantities and can produce sufficient weight gain.
Method 1. Remove dissonant cognitions: The individual chooses denial and believes that
eating fast food does not cause weight gain.
Method 2. Add new consonant cognitions – The individual decides that fast food is cheap
and it tastes good, thus negating it’s damaging attributes.
Method 3. Reduce the importance of dissonant cognitions – The individual reasons that
eating fast food isn’t as bad for his/her health as smoking cigarettes or drinking liquor.
Method 4. Increase the importance of consonant cognitions – The individual replaces the
negative cognitions with thoughts that reinforce the idea that the satisfaction and
enjoyment from eating fast food is an important part of his/her life.
As Festinger concluded through his research, the importance of his theory is not just to
reduce dissonance, but also to examine the behaviors that individuals use to combat this
dissonance, thereby confirming their original behavior.
There are four accepted paradigms, or models, used to further the research and
understanding of dissonance reduction (Harmon-Jones & Mills 1999, 5).
In order to view the chosen item as desirable, dissonance has to be reduced by viewing
the cognitions in a biased way. Employing one of Festinger’s four reduction methods
listed on the background page can do this (Harmon-Jones & Mills 1999, 5).
Example
J.W. Brehm was first to conduct experiments using the free-choice paradigm. In order to
produce valid market research, Brehm employed the help of women to test eight products
and rate them on their level of desirability. He then had one group make a difficult
decision, choosing between two products that they rated as similarly desirable and the
other group make an easy decision, choosing between two products that differed greatly
in desirability. Afterwards, he had the women re-rate the desirability of the products, and
remarkably, when it came to the difficult decision, women lowered the desirability of the
product that they rejected and increased the desirability of the product that they chose,
thus confirming the idea of the free-choice paradigm. Women who were asked to make
the easy decision, made little or no change in terms of their rankings (Harmon-Jones &
Mills 1999, 6).
These findings indicated what is now called the negative-incentive effect, in that the less
reward a person receives for doing a task, the more favorably they will look upon it,
because there is a greater amount of freedom associated with the task at hand (Harmon-
Jones & Mills 1999, 9).
Although Brehm and Wicklund state in their book Perspectives on Cognitive Dissonance
that “the most thoroughgoing applied extensions of the theory [of cognitive dissonance]
have been in the area of marketing research (288)," I believe that the theory has a solid
and direct application to the field of advertising. Consumers receive more information
about products than anything else in their daily lives, and generally these pieces of
information are not consistent with one another. Because of this, dissonance exists in
people's everyday lives and individuals are consistently trying to reduce these
inconsistencies, especially after a purchase has been made (Holloway 1967, 39). By these
terms, the basis for advertising is cognitive dissonance, i.e. making people question their
original thoughts by using a bombardment of messages to create dissonance, ultimately
ending in the consumption of products to curb such dissonance.
While there are two main instances wherein advertisers use cognitive dissonance, pre-
purchase and post-purchase, I have chosen to examine four recognized applications of
cognitive dissonance in advertising. The first three of these applications are used prior to
a purchase, while the last is actually used to combat cognitive dissonance after a purchase
has been made.
a. Paradox: Advertising can employ the use of seemingly different messages or images
within one advertisement in order to produce dissonance and thus curiosity, prompting
product/idea acceptance.
Example: The Altoids print campaign uses this type of advertising quite ingeniously,
making potential customers look twice at their ads. In one ad, the copy, “Share them with
a Fiend” is used. This play on words causes relatively harmless cognitive dissonance, but
just enough to make the ad memorable so that the next time the individual is in line at the
grocery store, perhaps they will pick up a tin of altoids due to the dissonance they
remember from the campaign.
b. Guilt: Advertisements in general are based on the assumption that individuals will feel
incomplete because they do not have the certain product that is being advertised.
i. Example: Recognition dissonance can be clearly seen in the most recent anti-drug
campaigns through the use of compelling and distressing storylines; people are prompted
to realize that marijuana is more dangerous than we all thought.
It reads: "On Saturday I watched my little brother, rehearse with the band, and helped
bribe a judge to release a man nicknamed 'The Butcher.'"