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The theory of Cognitive Dissonance was developed by Leon Fessinger (1957) and relates to the relationship individuals have with knowledge. Cognition from this perspective can be perceived as “a piece of knowledge” rudimentary to changes in emotions, behaviour, attitude, beliefs etc.
Festinger’s theory suggests people like consistency with their beliefs etc and when this is disrupted then something needs to change thereby eliminating the dissonance i.e. disharmony with such consistency.
Social psychologists studying cognitive dissonance are interested in the way we, as individuals, deal with 2 thoughts that contradict each other and how we deal with this contradiction.
There has been a great deal of research into cognitive dissonance providing some interesting and sometimes unexpected findings. It is a theory which has very broad applications, thereby showing that we aim for consistency between such attitudes/behaviours aforementioned and studies in this regard may not use rational methods to achieve the outcome. It does have the advantage that scientific experiments can be conducted, however, the problem facing such scientific experiments arises from the fact that we, as individuals/researchers, cannot physically observe cognitive dissonance. It is because of this problem that research in this field cannot be objectively measured, for example regarding behaviourism. Consequently, therefore, the term cognitive dissonance is somewhat subjective.
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