Cognitive dissonance

What it is

The discomfort of holding conflicting beliefs or acting against our beliefs, which we reduce by changing the belief, the behaviour or the interpretation, usually the easiest of the three.

Related

• Confirmation bias bias
  We seek confirming information partly to avoid the discomfort of dissonance.
• Motivated reasoning bias
  Reducing dissonance is the motive that makes reasoning motivated.
• Sunk-cost fallacy bias
  Admitting that past effort was wasted is dissonant, so we justify it by continuing.
• Commitment and consistency bias
  A public commitment creates dissonance when we act against it.
• Moving the goalposts fallacy
  Raising the bar after being proved wrong is a common way of reducing the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.
• Effort justification bias
  Effort that would otherwise seem wasted is justified by valuing the outcome more.
• Inconsistency-avoidance tendency bias
  Munger's inconsistency-avoidance tendency is the same pressure to keep beliefs and actions consistent.
• Simple, pain-avoiding psychological denial bias
  Denial is one way to reduce dissonance when facts hurt.
• Choice-supportive bias bias
  We remember our choices as better to avoid regretting them.
• Introspection illusion bias
  We build reasons for our actions after the fact to reduce dissonance and then trust them.

Appears in

• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly#50: Cognitive dissonance

References

• Wikipedia: Cognitive dissonance en.wikipedia.org
• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: Cognitive bias codex en.wikipedia.org

More in “Deciding and acting: incentives, loss and commitment”