A Cultural History of Dissonance Theory

Summary

‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’ is certainly at the top of the list of loanwords that have been borrowed from the technical vocabulary of psychology and applied to virtually every situation imaginable. Perhaps no other phrase from psychology has been more greatly misused and misunderstood. But popular culture is as passionate in its indiscriminate embrace of ‘cognitive dissonance’ as it has been ill-informed about dissonance theory as a whole. Little sense of its origins and significance for experimental social psychology in America attends its everyday use.

On the other hand, the protean nature of Leon Festinger's most successful psychological theory, the theory of cognitive dissonance, is also easily observed: it seems to mean something slightly different and nuanced for each experimental psychologist that sets out to confirm or refute the hypothesis. The theory itself can be easily described, and its basic characteristics have appeared throughout the history of social psychology in various forms, none of which ever reached the acme of success attained by Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive consistency theories in the 1940s, such as Fritz Heider's balance theory, had earlier pointed to the need for internal consistency among beliefs, behaviors and attitudes.