What is Cognitive Dissonance?
In 1957, Leon Festinger constructed a number of brilliant experiments, sparking a revolution in social psychology. The centre piece of his thinking was that when our behaviour is not consistent with our beliefs about how we believe that we should act, we experience cognitive dissonance which we strive to minimize. The important observation was we could minimize dissonance by choosing to discount information which was inconsistent with our current behaviour.
But there is more to cognitive dissonance than this. As Cynthia Crossen writes about cognitive dissonance in the Wall Street Journal here is a typical Festinger observation.
"In the aftermath of a severe earthquake that shook India in 1934. People who lived in a region of the country that had felt the shock but were spared death and destruction began circulating rumors that other terrible disasters were about to befall them -- a cyclone, a flood, another earthquake or "unforeseeable calamities."Why, Mr. Festinger wondered, would rumors arise that provoked rather than allayed anxiety, especially among people who hadn't suffered any immediate loss? And why were the rumors so widely accepted?
His conclusion derailed his analysis of rumors and put him on the track of a milestone in psychological theory: When feelings and facts are in opposition, people will find -- or invent -- a way to reconcile them. The people who had narrowly escaped the earthquake were scared, but their fear seemed largely unjustified. The rumors provided people with information that fit how they already felt, reducing what Mr. Festinger called their "cognitive dissonance."
Festinger was alive to various ways individuals acted to minimize dissonance, but unfortunately for the theory of cognitive dissonance the explanatory model assumed that "cognitions" could be counted and measured. This is a very strong measure theoretic condition; since it is hard to identify equivalent beliefs, it is not surprising that the mathematical models of cognitive dissonance did not prove as fruitful as some of the original intuitions, experiments and thought experiments.
One of the most typical cognitive dissonances I see in distributorships or franchisees is that when sales are not being made, the franchisee or distributor is told that they "aren't following the program". Alternatively, they are told that they aren't applying themselves, are lazy or some other flattering description.
The reason for poor sales never has anything do with a crappy franchise system or lousy distributor products. Why? Because to accept that would also be to reject the reason for being in the system. Even when you are in a crappy system.
