Cognitive dissonance

Definition

Cognitive dissonance in plain English

Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable, itchy feeling you get when your beliefs and your actions clash — like knowing junk food is bad for you while you're halfway through a bag of chips. Your mind hates that contradiction, so it works to smooth it over: you might change your behavior (stop eating them), change your belief ("eh, one bag won't hurt"), or make an excuse ("I earned it, I had a rough day"). The psychologist Leon Festinger showed we often change our attitude to match what we already did, rather than the other way around. It's basically your brain protecting you from feeling like a hypocrite.

Learn these first

• Demographic transition
• Social institutions

Related MCAT terms

• Absolute threshold
• Big Five personality (OCEAN)
• Classical conditioning
• Demographic transition
• Endocrine hormones (key)
• Erikson's psychosocial stages
• Fundamental attribution error
• Health disparities
• Heuristic
• Independent variable