Inconsistency in Cognition: Cognitive Dissonance

In this chapter, the authors focus on the story of cognitive dissonance, from its origin, through its evolution, to its decline in the 1980s, to its resurgence over the last 30 years or so. The induced compliance is perhaps the most well-known of the dissonance paradigms, but Brehm’s study using the free-choice paradigm was actually the first to test dissonance theory under controlled conditions. Ultimately, the research of Festinger and Carlsmith and other early research based on the induced compliance paradigm helped foster the contemporary view regarding the relationship between behavior and attitudes - that they are reciprocally related, always potentially both causes and effects of one another. The basic idea that dissonance is caused by cognitive inconsistency is accurate but inadequate if the theory is to make correct predictions in specific circumstances.