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Self-justification describes how, when a person encounters cognitive dissonance, or a situation in which a person's behavior is inconsistent with their beliefs (hypocrisy), that person tends to justify the behavior and deny any negative feedback associated with the behavior.
The need to justify our actions and decisions, especially the ones inconsistent with our beliefs, comes from the unpleasant feeling called cognitive dissonance. [1] Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two inconsistent cognitions. For example, "Smoking will shorten my life, and I wish to live for as long as possible," and yet "I smoke three packs a day."
Dissonance is bothersome in any circumstance but it is especially painful when an important element of self-concept is threatened. For instance, if the smoker considered himself a healthy person, this would cause a greater deal of dissonance than if he considered himself an unhealthy person because the dissonant action is in direct conflict with an image of himself. In this case, people who tried to stop smoking but failed start to think that smoking is not as harmful as they thought. [2]
Dissonance can result from an action dissonant with either a negative or positive concept. For example, Aronson [3] showed that students who failed numerous times at a task showed evidence of dissonance when they later succeeded at the same task. Some even changed correct answers to present a consistent image.
Steele [4] argues that the main cause of dissonance is not necessarily the difference between actions and beliefs, but the resulting degradation of self-image. By not behaving in line with their beliefs, a person may threaten their integrity. One method of reducing dissonance would then be to reaffirm their ‘goodness’. Researchers have shown that this reaffirmation is actually better at reducing dissonant feelings if it is in an unrelated area than a related one. For example, if a smoker is experiencing dissonance because she knows that smoking is bad for her health, she could reduce this dissonance by reminding herself that she is an environmentally friendly person and does a lot of good in reducing her carbon footprint. However, a reminder that she is a healthy person who exercises regularly is actually more likely to increase feelings of dissonance.[ failed verification ] [5] In support of this idea, research shows that in low-threat situations, people with high self-esteem are less likely to engage in self-justification strategies than those with low self-esteem. It is possible that people with high self-esteem have more accessible positive thoughts about themselves that can successfully reduce dissonance. However, in high-threat situations, these positive thoughts are not enough, and high self-esteem people do engage in self-justification strategies. [6]
There are two self-justification strategies: internal self-justification (IS) and external self-justification (ES). [6]
Internal self-justification refers to a change in the way people perceive their actions. It may be an attitude change, trivialization of the negative consequences or denial of the negative consequences. Internal self-justification helps make the negative outcomes more tolerable and is usually elicited by hedonistic dissonance. For example, the smoker may tell himself that smoking is not really that bad for his health.
External self-justification refers to the use of external excuses to justify one's actions. The excuses can be a displacement of personal responsibility, lack of self-control or social pressures. External self-justification aims to diminish one's responsibility for a behavior and is usually elicited by moral dissonance. For example, the smoker might say that he only smokes socially and because other people expect him to.
If people have too much external justification for their actions, cognitive dissonance does not occur, and thus, attitude change is unlikely to occur. On the other hand, when people cannot find external justification for their behavior, they must attempt to find internal justification—they reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes or behaviors.
The theory of insufficient justification has many applications in education and child rearing. A study by Aronson & Carlsmith illustrates the results of external rewards in the classroom. They told a classroom full of preschoolers not to play with an attractive toy, threatening half with a mild punishment and half with a severe punishment if they did play with it, and then left the room. None of the children played with the toy. When the researchers came back, they asked the children to rate the attractiveness of the toy. Those who had been threatened with severe punishment still rated it as very attractive; these children had large external justification for not playing with the toy, and so their attitudes had not changed. However, those who had only been threatened with a mild punishment rated the toy as significantly less attractive; without much external justification for not playing with the toy, they had to create internal justifications to reduce their dissonance. [7]
This study can be very useful to parents who use punishment to help teach their children good values. The milder the punishment, the more children must develop internal justification for behaving well. Similarly, if educators want children to internalize their lessons and develop a love of learning, they must help the children find internal justifications for their schoolwork, and minimize external rewards.
Relatedly, the hypocrisy induction – a form of strong internal justification for changing attitudes and behaviors - has been used in recent decades to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. The hypocrisy induction is the arousal of dissonance by having individuals make statements that do not align with their own beliefs, and then drawing attention to the inconsistencies between what they advocated and their own behaviors, with the overall goal of leading individuals to more responsible behaviors. In 1991, Aronson and colleagues asked two groups of college students to compose a speech describing the dangers of HIV/AIDS and advocating the use of condoms during every sexual encounter.
One group just composed the arguments; the other also recorded their arguments in front of a video camera that they were told would be seen by an auditorium of high school students. Additionally, half the students in each group were made mindful of their own failings to use condoms. The researchers found that the students who had made the video and thought about their own behaviors – they had the highest level of internal justification and thus the highest dissonance condition – were far more likely to buy condoms afterwards than the students in any other group. Those who only performed a single action, like composing the written arguments, were much more easily able to attribute what they were doing to external justification (i.e.- I’m doing this because the researcher told me to.) Furthermore, they found these results were steady, even several months after the study concluded. [8]
Self-justification often comes into play when discussing why individuals make “immoral” decisions. To keep viewing themselves in a positive light, individuals may rationalize unethical or corrupt decision-making using the aforementioned self-justification strategies.
In a 1958 study on cheating, Mills administered a test to a sixth grade class that was impossible to pass without cheating. Before the test, he measured each student’s attitudes toward cheating. He then gave the 6th graders the test without supervision but with a hidden camera in the classroom. Half of the class cheated and half didn’t. Mills then measured each student’s attitude towards cheating after the test. He found that the students who did cheat developed a more lenient attitude towards cheating while the students who did not cheat developed stronger attitudes against cheating. [9]
In Mills’ study, self-justification occurred. After each student decided whether or not to cheat, they justified this decision to make themselves feel good. To reduce their cognitive dissonance, students who did cheat altered their thoughts on cheating: e.g., “Cheating isn’t that bad,” or “I had to cheat to win the prize,” to justify their actions. On the other hand, students who did not cheat may have justified a lack of success on the test, too: “My morals don't allow me to cheat,” or “Cheating is never right.” In both instances, the student is trying to justify their actions and retain their self-concept.
This experiment shows potential dangers of self-justification. It seems that people who partake in unethical behavior may become slightly more accepting and comfortable with their actions. [10]
One major claim of social psychology is that we experience cognitive dissonance every time we make a decision; in an attempt to alleviate this, we then submit to a largely unconscious reduction of dissonance by creating new motives of our decision-making that more positively reflect on our self-concept. This process of reducing cognitive dissonance regarding decision-making relates back to the problem of individual becoming stagnant in a course of action. Furthermore, once an individual makes a decision dissonance has begun. To alleviate this dissonance, they rationalize their actions by either changing them—or in this case, continuing in their course of action, perpetuating their qualifying beliefs. In this case, the question concerns the source of the breakdown of rationale that causes the continuation of such disadvantageous behavior. [11]
Prior studies have shown that individuals tend to become locked into a particular course of action, by means of sequential and escalating commitments, resulting in detrimental personal decisions and many other evitable disastrous events. After acknowledging this fundamental attribute of human behavior, it is necessary to understand if these situations arise from concrete decisional errors or are just simply how the events panned out. [11]
There is a large pool of data concerning the justification of behavior in much of the social psychological studies on forced compliance. In these studies the expected result is that individuals bias their attitudes on the experimental task in a positive direction so as to justify previous behavior. In one such study Staw et al. investigated whether decision-makers could become over-committed to a course of action- as is typical following decision related dissonance. The assumption in this particular study was that individuals would go beyond “the passive distortion of adverse consequences in an effort to rationalize a behavioral error.” The consensus among the researchers was also that certain individuals who had experienced setbacks might attempt to “turn the situation around” or in other words display some kind of “ultimate rationality to his or her original course of action.” In the study, the researchers implemented a simulated business case design, in which an administrator could regain loses by committing to new resources. Business school students were asked to fill the role of corporate financial officer and allocate research and development funds to either one of two divisions of a company. In the end, the “findings supported the predication that administrators may seek to justify an ineffective course of action by escalating their commitment of resources to it.” Upon interpreting the findings Staw claims that this, along with several other studies exploring the role of justification in decision-making, subtly highlighted an internal justification process, or in other words an intra-individual process in which people tend to act in ways to protect their own self-image. [11]
Being mindful of escalating commitment to a particular course of action, especially when said actions are failing or having some kind of negative effect on others is very important. This carefulness to avoid the aforementioned behavior can be applied to many aspects of our lives-both in the business world and in more unconventional every day situations. For example, in the Staw study mentioned above, the effects of a growing need for justification was seen in a business workplace setting. In this type of environment it is ideal to make sure that none is continuing on with unfavorable ideas simply because they have rationalized that somehow everything will be successful in the end. Likewise in personal situations involving stocks and investment issues, recognizing when one is only continuing investments out of desperate and misguided hope that things will improve is essential to personal finance and well being. This understanding is not only essential to matters involving finances, but can also be applicable in any situation where a disadvantageous behavior is being perpetuated when clearly it has no merit.
Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.
Leon Festinger was an American social psychologist who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. The rejection of the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior is largely attributed to his theories and research. Festinger is also credited with advancing the use of laboratory experimentation in social psychology, although he simultaneously stressed the importance of studying real-life situations, a principle he practiced when personally infiltrating a doomsday cult. He is also known in social network theory for the proximity effect.
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.
In psychology, attitude is a psychological construct that is a mental and emotional entity that inheres or characterizes a person, their attitude to approach to something, or their personal view on it. Attitude involves their mindset, outlook and feelings. Attitudes are complex and are an acquired state through life experience. Attitude is an individual's predisposed state of mind regarding a value and it is precipitated through a responsive expression towards oneself, a person, place, thing, or event which in turn influences the individual's thought and action.
Self-perception theory (SPT) is an account of attitude formation developed by psychologist Daryl Bem. It asserts that people develop their attitudes by observing their own behavior and concluding what attitudes must have caused it. The theory is counterintuitive in nature, as the conventional wisdom is that attitudes determine behaviors. Furthermore, the theory suggests that people induce attitudes without accessing internal cognition and mood states. The person interprets their own overt behaviors rationally in the same way they attempt to explain others' behaviors.
In psychology, the false consensus effect, also known as consensus bias, is a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to "see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances". In other words, they assume that their personal qualities, characteristics, beliefs, and actions are relatively widespread through the general population.
Elliot Aronson is an American psychologist who has carried out experiments on the theory of cognitive dissonance and invented the Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative teaching technique that facilitates learning while reducing interethnic hostility and prejudice. In his 1972 social psychology textbook, The Social Animal, he stated Aronson's First Law: "People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy", thus asserting the importance of situational factors in bizarre behavior. He is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to have won all three of its major awards: for writing, for teaching, and for research. In 2007, he received the William James Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science, in which he was cited as the scientist who "fundamentally changed the way we look at everyday life". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Aronson as the 78th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He officially retired in 1994 but continues to teach and write.
Escalation of commitment is a human behavior pattern in which an individual or group facing increasingly negative outcomes from a decision, action, or investment nevertheless continue the behavior instead of altering course. The actor maintains behaviors that are irrational, but align with previous decisions and actions.
Attitudes are associated beliefs and behaviors towards some object. They are not stable, and because of the communication and behavior of other people, are subject to change by social influences, as well as by the individual's motivation to maintain cognitive consistency when cognitive dissonance occurs—when two attitudes or attitude and behavior conflict. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of affective and cognitive components. It has been suggested that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node. Thus, by activating an affective or emotional node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined.
System justification theory (SJT) is a theory within social psychology that system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function. It proposes that people have several underlying needs, which vary from individual to individual, that can be satisfied by the defense and justification of the status quo, even when the system may be disadvantageous to certain people. People have epistemic, existential, and relational needs that are met by and manifest as ideological support for the prevailing structure of social, economic, and political norms. Need for order and stability, and thus resistance to change or alternatives, for example, can be a motivator for individuals to see the status quo as good, legitimate, and even desirable.
Attribution is a term used in psychology which deals with how individuals perceive the causes of everyday experience, as being either external or internal. Models to explain this process are called Attribution theory. Psychological research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in the early 20th century, and the theory was further advanced by Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner. Heider first introduced the concept of perceived 'locus of causality' to define the perception of one's environment. For instance, an experience may be perceived as being caused by factors outside the person's control (external) or it may be perceived as the person's own doing (internal). These initial perceptions are called attributions. Psychologists use these attributions to better understand an individual's motivation and competence. The theory is of particular interest to employers who use it to increase worker motivation, goal orientation, and productivity.
Selective exposure is a theory within the practice of psychology, often used in media and communication research, that historically refers to individuals' tendency to favor information which reinforces their pre-existing views while avoiding contradictory information. Selective exposure has also been known and defined as "congeniality bias" or "confirmation bias" in various texts throughout the years.
The effort heuristic is a mental rule of thumb in which the quality or worth of an object is determined from the perceived amount of effort that went into producing that object. In brief, the effort heuristic follows a tendency to judge objects that took a longer time to produce to be of higher value. The more effort invested in an object, the better it is deemed to be. This is especially true in situations where value is difficult to assess or the evaluator lacks expertise in the appraisement of an item. People use whatever information is available to them and effort is thought to generally be a reliable indicator of quality.
Moral disengagement is a meaning from social psychology for the process of convincing the self that ethical standards do not apply to oneself in a particular context. This is done by separating moral reactions from inhumane conduct and disabling the mechanism of self-condemnation. Thus, moral disengagement involves a process of cognitive re-construing or re-framing of destructive behavior as being morally acceptable without changing the behavior or the moral standards.
Effort justification is an idea and paradigm in social psychology stemming from Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. Effort justification is a person's tendency to attribute the value of an outcome they put effort into achieving as greater than the objective value of the outcome.
Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) is a 2007 non-fiction book by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. It deals with cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, and other cognitive biases, using these psychological theories to illustrate how the perpetrators (and victims) of hurtful acts justify and rationalize their behavior. It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people's attitudes become polarized.
Insufficient justification is an effect studied in the discipline of social psychology. It states that people are more likely to engage in a behavior that contradicts the beliefs they hold personally when offered a smaller reward compared to a larger reward. The smaller reward minimizes the cognitive dissonance generated by acting in contradiction to one's beliefs because it feels easier to justify. The theory of insufficient justification formally states that when extrinsic motivation is low, people are motivated to reduce cognitive dissonance by generating an intrinsic motivation to explain their behavior, and similarly more likely to decline a desired activity when presented with a mild threat versus a more serious threat. Insufficient justification occurs when the threat or reward is actually sufficient to get the person to engage in or to avoid a behavior, but the threat or reward is insufficient to allow the person to conclude that the situation caused the behavior.
Self-persuasion is used to explain one aspect of social influence. This theory postulates that the receiver takes an active role in persuading himself or herself to change his or her attitude or behavior. Unlike the direct technique of Persuasion, Self-persuasion is indirect and entails placing people in situations where they are motivated to persuade themselves to change. More specifically what characterizes a self-persuasion situation is that no direct attempt is made to convince anyone of anything. Thus, with self-persuasion, people are convinced that the motivation for change has come from within, so the persuasion factors of another person's influence is irrelevant. Therefore, Self-persuasion is almost always a more powerful form of persuasion than the more traditional persuasion techniques. Self-Persuasion, also has an important influence in Social judgment theory, Elaboration Likelihood Model, Cognitive Dissonance and Narrative paradigm.
Vicarious cognitive dissonance is the state of negative arousal in an individual from observing a member of their in-group behave in counterattitudinal ways. The phenomenon is distinguished from the type of cognitive dissonance proposed by Leon Festinger, which can be referred to as personal cognitive dissonance, because the discomfort is experienced vicariously by an observer rather than the actor engaging in inconsistent behavior. Like personal cognitive dissonance, vicarious cognitive dissonance can lead to changes in the observer’s attitudes and behavior to reduce psychological stress.