#leon festinger

The presence of dissonance gives rise to pressures to reduce or eliminate the dissonance. The strength of the pressures to reduce the dissonance is a function of the magnitude of the dissonance. In other words, dissonance acts in the same way as a state of drive or need or tension. The presence of dissonance leads to action to reduce it just as, for example, the presence of hunger leads to action to reduce the hunger. Also, similar to the action of a drive, the greater the dissonance, the greater will be the intensity of the action to reduce the dissonance and the greater the avoidance of situations that would increase the dissonance.

Imagine, for a moment, that a group of people are convinced that in a few months a cataclysmic flood will destroy the North American continent. They also believe that, minutes before the catastrophe, a vehicle will arrive from outer space, swoop up this small band of believers, and carry them to safety on a distant planet. Suppose that these people are not wild-eyed kooks wearing white robes and carrying signs saying “REPENT!” but are intelligent, sensible people with nice homes, loving families, and good jobs. In accordance with their belief, they have quit their jobs and given away their money and possessions (who needs money and possessions on a far-off planet?). Now they are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the spaceship and the beginning of their adventure, which will take place precisely at midnight on December 21. How will these people feel and what will they do on December 22, assuming of course that North America still exists and the spaceship did not arrive? This question would be interesting to just about anyone. In 1954, though, it was particularly interesting to Leon Festinger, a brilliant young experimental social psychologist who was in the process of inventing a new theory of human behavior—the theory of cognitive dissonance—which was soon to emerge as the most exciting theory in social psychology. Essentially, the theory defined dissonance as the mental turmoil that is produced when a person holds two ideas that are incompatible: for example, the cognition “I know smoking can kill me” and the cognition “I’m smoking two packs a day.” Because dissonance is uncomfortable, people will try to reduce it by changing one or both cognitions to make them more consonant with each other. In this case, smokers could either give up cigarettes or justify smoking on some other grounds (“smoking reduces my anxiety”; “it keeps me from overeating”). The more important the issue and the greater the degree of a person’s commitment to it, the greater the dissonance—and the greater the need to reduce it. When Festinger learned of this doomsday group, by reading an account of “Mrs. Keech” and her predictions in a local newspaper, he saw a made-to-order way of putting his theory to the test. The members of her group had put themselves in a classic dissonance condition: They had made a specific prediction; they had publicly committed themselves to it; and they had taken actions in support of that belief that were virtually irrevocable. As one member of the group, a physician, put it: “I’ve given up just about everything. I’ve cut every tie: I’ve burned every bridge. I’ve turned my back on the world. I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe.”

💭 Cognitive Dissonance and Social Comparison 🧠

The reader experiences the effects of what Leon Festinger (1919-1989) calls Cognitive Dissonance; that is, negative emotional states such as anxiety that are created by a person having to encounter two contradictory ideas (cognitions) that relate to the same phenomenon at the same time. We might say that the unease caused by this Cognitive Dissonance epitomizes the experience of the ‘Gothic of the Normal’ for the reader.