Cognitive Dissonance is a psychological theory that describes the feeling of psychic discomfort created when an individual holds two contradictory thoughts or beliefs that are incompatible with one another. Dissonance theory holds that the greater the inconsistency between the two ideas, the greater the discomfort and desire to reduce the dissonance between the two. As such, a person experiencing cognitive dissonance will typically change their beliefs to conform to their actions, or vice versa, in an effort to reduce their psychic discomfort.

This term was coined by the social psychologist Leon Festinger in his 1956 classic, When Prophecy Fails. Festinger observed a doomsday cult, lead by Chicago housewife Marion Keech, which believed that the earth was going to be destroyed by a flood. Ms. Keech claimed that she had been communicating with aliens from the planet Clarion and that she had been warned that a ‘great flood’ would destroy the earth on December 21 of that year. Many of Keech’s followers demonstrated a passionate commitment to this belief, leaving jobs, school and sometimes even spouses and families in preparation for their departure to the planet Clarion via flying saucer (an escape route only open to the “true believers”).

Festinger found that when the “great flood” failed to materialize, Keech’s fringe followers were more likely to acknowledge that their doomsday belief had been and chalk the experience up to a ‘lesson learned.’ However, the ‘true believers’ were inclined to re-interpret the evidence, convincing themselves that they had been right all along (i.e. the earth had been saved by the piety of the cult members). Thus, the anxiety that was produced in the ‘true believers’ after the great flood failed to materialize led them to go to great lengths to rationalize their actions. While psychologists have generally viewed cognitive dissonance as an irrational and harmful behavior, some evolutionary psychologists are now questioning this assumption, positing the theory that cognitive dissonance may be a survival mechanism that operates to limit time and energy wasting second-guessing, so that we can better focus on present challenges.

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