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Cognitive Dissonance and Persuasion | Online Behavior

Cognitive Dissonance and Persuasion | Online Behavior



When there’s a mismatch between our beliefs and behavior we experience what Leon Festinger calls a ‘cognitive dissonance’. And we have a strong motivational drive to reduce this dissonance.
We can’t change the displayed behavior anymore, but we can change our beliefs and cognitions. In order to reduce dissonance we simply alter our beliefs, which we actually do a lot. There are 3 ways to do so:
  • We lower the importance of the dissonant elements,
  • we add new consonant beliefs to create a consistent belief system, or
  • we change an existing cognition.
Cognitive Dissonance is strongly related to ‘self-consistency‘ and is sometimes referred to as “adaptive preference formation”.

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