What is Cognitive Dissonance and How Do You Reduce it?

The wife was involved in therapy, to support his abstinence and help him engage in alternate activities. Rajiv’s problem is an illustration of how various psychological, environmental and situational factors are involved in the acquisition and maintenance of substance use. Cognitive dissonance suggests that addicts may modify their reasoning processes to support the satisfaction of impulses. For an addict, while craving, the world is experienced in a very different way compared to the way when the craving is satisfied. Craving distorts addicts’ ability to process information in a manner that promotes drug use.

But that is difficult, so most smokers convince themselves that the links between smoking and lung cancer are not quite as strong as doctors claim (modify belief, or avoid the information). In the context of dieting, a person who intends to lose https://ecosoberhouse.com/ weight has dissonance because of his conflicting strong desires for fattening foods and to lose weight. After an overindulging evening in a special event, he may experience an intense feeling of discomfort (regret and guilt) for his behavior.

DRUGS OF ABUSE AND THE DEVELOPING BRAIN

To reduce discomfort, they may quit smoking or find rationales to justify their behavior, such as believing the negative effects are exaggerated. The relapse prevention programme combines a variety of cognitive behavioural strategies33. It skills training such as behavioural rehearsal, assertiveness training, communication skills to cope with social pressures and interpersonal problem solving to reduce impact of conflicts, arousal reduction strategies such as relaxation training to manage pain or anxiety as risk for relapse.

Indeed, the riveted attention to drug-related cue may occur even when successful task performance instead depends on a flexible shift of attention away from drug images18,22. As previously detailed, these tasks typically instruct deliberate, explicit, conscious attempts to inhibit a “pre-potent” (whether motor or drug – related) response. However, the “pre-potency” of the responses to be inhibited depends on their ‘near-automatic’ cognitive dissonance and addiction nature. For example, motor pre-potency results from a rapid series of button presses to a “Go” signal, and a pre-potent approach to drug stimuli is the ‘near-automatic’ result of much prior learning. In the domain of working memory, an individual’s ability to maintain and update information, to allocate cognitive resources, generally happens implicitly, from moment-to-moment, without a conscious focus.

LEARNING IN THE MIND AND BRAIN

In that case, it can be declared that it has a significant level within a certain error, and the critical value is usually 1.96 (5% significance level), 2.57 (1% significance level), and 3.29 (0.1% significance level). This study calculated the path coefficient and T value through bootstrapping with a sample of 5000 bootstrap cases. The results of the structural model’s path coefficients are shown in Table 6 and Figure 2. In “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance,” Leon Festinger (the psychologist who first described this phenomenon) gives an example of how a person might deal with dissonance related to a health behavior by discussing individuals who continue to smoke, even though they know it is harmful to their health.

  • Even in recovery, individuals may still battle cognitive dissonance and justify relapses.
  • The results show that self-efficacy plays a negative role in regulating the impact of cognitive dissonance on discontinuous usage intentions, which is important for the design and development of pan-entertainment mobile live broadcast platforms.
  • The factor loading ranges from −1 to 1, and its square represents the percentage of variation that the factor can explain.
  • These factors could include the quality of content, the reliability of the platform, and the level of user engagement.
  • For example, the idea that smoking is a cognitive enhancer is well accepted by researchers and the general public.

The individual heterogeneous cognitive structure and negative effects of user addiction can also trigger cognitive dissonance, which can be alleviated by the behavioral intention of stopping use or uninstalling it. The current body of literature indicates a growing trend of discontinuous usage intentions among users of social media platforms. While several factors affecting discontinuous usage intentions have been explored in previous research, the specific factors and mechanisms impacting discontinuous usage intentions among users of pan-entertainment mobile live broadcast platforms remain undefined. This study aims to clarify these factors and mechanisms and to provide both theoretical and practical guidance to users to encourage rational usage of the platform, as well as support the optimization of innovative services offered by the platform’s operator. This study, which is grounded in the theoretical framework of “Cognition-Emotion-Behavior intention,” develops an influencing mechanism model based on cognitive dissonance and self-efficacy. A total of 340 valid samples were collected through questionnaires and analyzed using a structural equation model, which revealed that information overload, service overload, and user addiction had a positive impact on cognitive dissonance, which was moderated by self-efficacy.