Mean Girls: The Cognitive Dissonance Theory

“I didn't want to do it..but then I did it”. A common phrase spoken by many who have experience cognitive dissonance. The Cognitive Dissonance theory deals with small occurrences that happen everyday, but for help with breaking down this theory, extreme examples help to explain the theory in better detail. In the movie Mean Girls, the plastics are evil & but their approval is what Cady desires which define her two conflicting beliefs. When she gets closer to them and acts like them, she tries to justify her action by saying she is just “spying” on them, this is said to reduce her cognitive dissonance, which in fact, she is turning into them. For example, if a person buys a really nice television, even though they can't really afford it ,but

The validity of cognitive dissonance is the fact that we are faced with it everyday, by making a decision or solving a problem using our subjective values which include beliefs, opinions, attitudes, etc. An attitude describes the positive or negative feelings we have toward people, things, or ideas. As humans, what we do to make these decisions and solve these problems don't always line up, causing inconsistency. This means our beliefs go one way, and our behavior goes in the opposite direction. When we decide to change our subjective value, then the dissonance is resolved. Cognitive dissonance is defined simple as a “discomfort feeling resulting from inconsistency with attitude, thoughts, and behaviors” (Griffin, 2015, p. ??), this can be interpreted as an event that is motivational to be in peace. “ The theory claims that a person in a dissonant state will be motivated—as though it were a drive—to alleviate the condition of imbalance” (Norton). Envision a friend of yours is a serious animal activist and cares about the treatment of animals, yet eats food that are made by mistreating that said animal. It is the distressing mental state that people feel

Cognitive dissonance theory follows all but one function strongly, as it applies to real world scenarios and explains why we experience cognitive dissonance. Experimentation is key to begin a good theory, because it provides an explanation that holds true from numerous test and observations done by scientists and researchers. “To support [this] theory, Festinger marshaled data from an impressive variety of field and experimental studies” (Chapanis). The large reward and small reward effects on attitudinal advocacy are testable, as seen by studies such as the one male students from Stanford University. They were brought together for an experiment by Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith. The purpose of the experiment was for the two men to further investigate the theory of Cognitive Dissonance on a large group of people. The men were asked to carry out a series of various repetitive boring and tiring tasks. The participants were then promise to be be paid either one dollar or twenty dollars to lie about how enjoyable the tasks were to the next set of participants. The men that lied for $1 had a lot of cognitive work to do, however the men who lide for $20, the money justified their reasoning for lying. The “dissonance was the result of the [male’s] feeling of personal responsibility for bringing about deceiving a fellow