The One About Cognitive Dissonance, Decision-Making, and Colleges

Walking through life, I have had to make many decisions. Some of them were very tough, or at least they felt so at the time. The toughest decisions to make were usually the ones that had choices that were equally appealing. These decisions have ranged from ‘what college to go to’ to ‘which candy to choice from at the store’. The cognitive dissonance experienced when having to make these tough choices is what I most related to while reading this chapter.


To elaborate further, Cognitive Dissonance Theory is the idea that people experience tension and discomfort when holding inconsistent cognitions, and therefore become motivated to reduce the inconsistencies and establish consistency (Festinger, 1957). Another way of looking at it is if a person’s behaviors go against, or are inconsistent with, their attitudes or beliefs, they become driven to find a way to make their behaviors consistent with their attitudes. Furthermore, since by this time they have already committed the behavior, and cannot change that, the only choice left is to change their attitudes. One of the ways this cognitive dissonance can be experienced is after making a difficult decision between equally desirable alternatives, or Post-decision Dissonance. Most people’s attitude would be to want both alternatives, yet their behavior would be to choose only one, which makes their attitude and behavior inconsistent. In order to remedy this and reduce dissonance, they would exaggerate the positives of the chosen alternative, and focus on the negatives of the not chosen alternative. In other words, they would change their attitudes to be consistent with their behavior, which results in them feeling as if the not chosen alternative is undesirable and they never wanted it to begin with.

An example of this is an experiment conducted by Jack Brehm (1956), in which he asked female participants to rate consumer products, and afterwards were offered a choice between two products to take home as a gift. Unbeknownst to them, the participants were divided into and high-dissonance group and a low-dissonance group. Specifically, this meant that the high-dissonance group had to choose between to equally desirable products, while the low-dissonance group chose between one desirable and one undesirable product. After making their decision, the participants then went back a reevaluated the products. With the low-dissonance group, their ratings remained about the same, but, in the high-dissonance group, ratings for the chosen product increased and the ratings for the not chosen product decreased, though they had originally found the two products to be equally desirable. In other words, they reduced their dissonance over picking one product (behavior) though they really wanted both (attitude) by focusing on the positives of the chosen product and on the negatives of the not chosen product, which then made their attitudes change, so that they didn’t really want the other product anyway.

This type of experience with cognitive dissonance happens to me all the time, as I’m sure it happens to many others as well. Whenever I have to make a choice between two equally wanted possibilities, I feel high anxiety and discomfort. Yet, once I finally make a decision, the choice then seems so simple, and I wonder why I ever stressed at all. This was particularly the case when deciding where to go to college. I was trying to decide between two possible colleges, each of which were equally desirable, and had their own positives. Specifically, one college was offering a full ride, was closer, and I knew people who were going there. Yet, the other college was better rated, smaller, and was closer to Austin. I wanted both, yet I could only attend one college. For a couple days I went back and forth over which one to choose, all the while experiencing a good amount of stress and anxiety. After all that deliberation, I decided on the smaller, better rated college (whoo SU!), and, shortly after my decision, couldn’t see why it had been such a hard decision to make. The choice seemed clear now, as I began to focus on all the positives of SU, and all the negatives of the now unwanted college. In short, SU became the greatest college ever, while the other college became completely undesirable. In other words, thanks to cognitive dissonance and my need to reduce it, I am completely in love with Southwestern  (most of the time).

Brehm, J.W. (1956). Post-decision changes in desirability of alternatives. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52, 384-389.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.