Understanding: I Opine On Leon Festinger’s Conjectures On Cognitive Dissonance

I Am Not Sure That Festinger Got It Right, And I Am Perplexed That So Many Feel That His Ideas Are Sound Enough To Be Invoked At The Drop Of A Hat To Explain Behaviour.

I Am Not Sure That Festinger Got It Right, And I Am Perplexed That So Many Feel That His Ideas Are Sound Enough To Be Invoked At The Drop Of A Hat To Explain Behaviour. This Does Not Conform To My Understanding Of How Things Work.

When I was studying psychology in the 1970s, Leon Festinger and his theory of cognitive dissonance were mentioned. I don't know that I read him directly; I read a synopsis of his views, as far as I can remember. In my recollection, he was not held as having more credible ideas than the next fellow. Decades later, I did attempt to read him: a bunch of boring little experiments. He called his own views a theory. But Festinger was not held in special regard as having the greatest explanatory power of all. It was just another group of ideas in the 1970s. I'm sure he had his adherents. I'm sure he had his detractors. But there was, I think, nothing regarded as remarkable about his views. They were just another set of opinions.

Festinger's speculations—they don't deserve to be called a theory—took over pop psychology and dominated the popular discourse over the intervening decades, in North America, as a sound explanation for belief. Curious, that. Parts of Festinger's theory make an intuitive sort of sense, as long as you don't push it too far. But that's true of almost all psychological assertions. However, I would like to see a more nuanced use of Festinger's views, which I would prefer to call Festinger's conjecture, not his theory.

Festinger’s ideas seem to have very marginal predictive value (like much of psychology). At best, they are vaguely probabilistic, not deterministic. There's nothing in human behavior that's deterministic, or even so reliable as to be called a theory. Speculations, I'd argue, are more appropriate as a descriptor of most of the vast bulk of psychology. Human behavior is far too complex. Nothing in modern psychology has great explanatory value, neither descriptive nor predictive. People seem to assume it's better than it is, at least some do.

In my university days, I formed the impression that the engineers and hard scientists thought psychologists were a bunch of flakes, and they could have been right. My defence was those folks had it easy. They dealt with a very deterministic material world. Over here in psychology, there was no such luxury. So, back at cha, Engineers. There are no psychological theories, if you will, that conform to the theories of chemistry or material science, so perhaps applying those criteria to psychological views is to make a category mistake in the use of the word theory, and that there's multiple meanings for theory that are not explicitly recognized in the literature.

None of this material of Festinger’s can be quantified. One has to be perfectly vague and say there's a tendency. You could, I suppose, say things like more likely or less likely, but there's no way to know. On an individual basis, there's no way at all to know, and on a group basis, there may be some tendencies. More or less likely don't imply measurable stuff at all. They are the subjective qualifications of judgement, of psychology, not measurement.

The biggest problem I have is that people in the pop psychology world have spread the idea that Festinger was making some very strong statements about psychological operations when such is not the case. As I said, I tried to read Festinger and found it really quite boring, a bunch of very hard-to-interpret and rather odd experiments in social psychology. I don’t remember the part where he came up with a theory of cognitive dissonance. Did I say read? I really should have said “skimmed without due consideration.” Shame on me.

It's hard to understand how cognitive dissonance took over the popular imagination the way it did, and passed from mouth to mouth, and in the process I think people distorted the meaning of what Festinger even said. Not that it was even clear exactly what he said. So, there is one book, The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, which attempts to lay out his ideas.

Now, in the year 2025 and in the years leading up to this year, folks often parrot bastardized interpretations of works by Festinger. These ideas have become a meme, not in the internet visual sense, but in the sense of ideas transmitted organically by osmosis. See, for clarification, Susan Blackmore and The Meme Machine—that’s no internet meme. This is quite inexplicable, since, as I said, when I studied psychology in the 1970s, although Leon Festinger was discussed as one theory among many for how people behaved, it was not a major topic for discussion (as I remember, at least not in my classes). The idea was just presented as one of many competing views. Somehow or other, it's become, in pop psychology, quite a dominant position and cited in any number of articles attempting to explain why things have happened in the world of men. This is very puzzling.

We need to take a look at, I guess, original sources to find out what Festinger actually said, as opposed to the popular view of what he said, because my dim recollection is that he said certain things that don't really conform to the current understanding. Since I did “skim without due consideration” (because I found the book a boring slog), maybe I didn’t fully grasp the grand theory. Maybe I just didn't read it competently. I only remember a bunch of descriptions of some very boring social psychology experiments (as are all social psychology experiments, quite contrived. I should mention the “replication crisis” at this juncture).

So, if there is a grand theory in those books, I do marvel at that as an interpretation. Now we hear nothing but that human views are all explained by cognitive dissonance, whereas we could probably use a much more worked-out view called disconfirmation-confirmation bias to explain a lot of belief. I would say that Festinger's views at their core are just that we feel discomfort emotionally, psychologically, at conflicting information. We try to minimize the discomfort, and there are various strategies. But this is perhaps a tendency, and it doesn't actually explain how often we'll try to do that, or under what circumstances, or what sorts of views will bring us discomfort. It's just a rather vague claim that we don't like to feel emotional discomfort when ideas conflict, so we work to resolve that. That, as it stands, as I stated, is a rather dubious claim.

Much of what Festinger proposed sounds plausible on the surface—people often do experience discomfort when their beliefs and actions conflict, and they may take steps to resolve that discomfort. But, as with many psychological ideas, the further you push it, the thinner it gets. It’s plausible as a conjecture, not a robust theory.

To recap, in my view, what remains of Festinger’s cognitive dissonance, in its simplest form, is the truism that people don’t like feeling uncomfortable when holding conflicting ideas. But that claim is so broad and context-dependent that it’s almost meaningless without specifics about:
• When discomfort arises
• What kinds of conflicts trigger it
• Which strategies people choose to resolve it
• How often it occurs
• Whether it happens at all in a given situation

Which people?

None of that is nailed down by Festinger—or by the pop versions of his work.
In the end, cognitive dissonance as popularly understood is a vague metaphor, not a theory. Its current dominance seems less a result of Festinger’s arguments and more the meme-like transmission of an appealing, reductive idea in an age hungry for simple explanations. Festinger published A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), but the use of “theory” may have been more aspirational than reflective of its rigor.

---

A Synopsis of Festinger’s Ideas

1. Basic Premise:
   Humans strive for internal consistency. When a person experiences inconsistency between cognitions (thoughts, beliefs, attitudes) or between a cognition and a behavior, this inconsistency creates psychological discomfort—what Festinger called dissonance.

2. Dissonance as Motivation:
   This dissonance is uncomfortable and motivates the person to reduce it. The higher the magnitude of dissonance, the greater the motivation to resolve it.

3. Methods of Reducing Dissonance:
   • Change one or more of the cognitions: Modify beliefs or attitudes to align with behavior.
   • Add new cognitions: Justify the behavior by adding new beliefs that support it.
   • Reduce the importance of the dissonant cognitions: Minimize the significance of the conflict.

4. Conditions that Influence Dissonance Magnitude:
   • The importance of the conflicting beliefs.
   • The proportion of dissonant to consonant elements.
   • The degree to which the dissonance affects self-concept.

5. Predictions (Limited and Probabilistic):
   • People will attempt to avoid situations and information likely to increase dissonance.
   • After making decisions, people will tend to increase their evaluation of the chosen alternative and devalue rejected ones (post-decisional dissonance).
   • When people undergo effort or suffering to achieve something, they will rate it more positively (effort justification).

That’s the core. It’s a conceptual framework that suggests certain patterns, but it lacks precise predictive capacity. It describes tendencies but doesn’t specify who will do what, when, or why in a testable, deterministic way. That’s why conjecture fits better than theory, at least by scientific standards.

---

His key book was A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957). After that, he co-authored other works, like When Prophecy Fails (1956, actually before the main book), and Conflict, Decision, and Dissonance (1964). He later shifted away from cognitive dissonance research altogether, moving into visual perception studies. His final years were spent in research, but he wasn’t publishing on dissonance theory anymore.
You’d probably have to go straight to A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance and perhaps Conflict, Decision, and Dissonance for his clearest statements. But even then, they’re bound to be wrapped in the social psychology jargon of the era and illustrated by contrived experiments that feel thin by today’s standards.

---

Bibliography

1. Blackmore, S. (1999). The meme machine. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-meme-machine-9780192862129

2. Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

3. Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world. Harper-Torchbooks.

4. Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203–210. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0041593

5. Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202