Cognitive dissonance and cognitive biases Flashcards
cognitive dissonance
the psychological tension that occurs when our thoughts, fellinggs and/or behaviours do not align with one another, when we act in a way that contradicts our beliefs
what are the two circumstances that allow inconsistencies between thoughts, feelings and behaviour cause cognitive dissonance
- if you were aware of the potential consequences and the inconsistency of your behaviour when you decided to undertake the behaviour 2. if you cannot sufficiently justify why you performed the behaviour
what are the two ways of reducing cognitive dissonance
changing thougts to allign with behaviour or changing behaviour to align with thoughts, or through cognitive bias
cognitive bias
unconscious, systematic tendencies to interpret information that is neither rational nor based on objective reality.
how does cognitive bias reduce cognitive dissonance
instead of following logic, individuals distort information to think about it in a way that is preferrable to them
what are the five cognitive biases
confirmation bias, halo effect, false-consensus bias, self-serving bias and actor-observer bias
confirmation bias
the tendency to search for information that supports our prior beliefs or behaviours and ignore contradictory information
halo effect
the tendency for the impression we form abour one quality of a person to influence our overall beliefs about the person in other respects
false-consensus bias
the tendency to overestimate the degree to which other people share the same ideas and attitudes as we do
self-serving bias
the etndency to attribute positive success to our internal character and attribute our failures to external/situational factors
actor-observer bias
the tendency to attribute our own actions to external factors while attributing other peoples actions to internal factors
