BY. E H A B E L B A Z

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE AND BYSTANDER EFFECT IN POLITICS

• proposed by Festinger , the theory seeks to explain how people reduce psychological discomfort and achieve emotional equilibrium in the face of inconsistent beliefs or behaviors.• It rests on the premise that people desire to view

themselves as rational and uniform in both thought and action; therefore, they consciously choose how they respond to information or behaviors that challenge their way of thinking

• Cognitive Dissonance Theory contains two basic hypotheses.

• The first one states that people who experience psychological discomfort arising from cognitive conflict will attempt to reduce the discomfort and achieve consonance, or inner harmony.

• Festinger proposed three ways humans do this:1. minimize the importance of the dissonant thought2. outweigh the dissonant thought with consonant

thoughts,3. incorporate the dissonant thought into one’s current

belief system.

• The second hypothesis says that people who experience dissonance will try to avoid it in the future by shunning challenging situations and limiting information to that which affirms their current beliefs.• This hypothesis explains, in part, why many

national news outlets frame events along a political view. • People want to see reality in a way that supports

their cognitions, and many organizations have found ways to capitalize on this desire.

• the richer a society becomes in knowledge, the more people limit their sources of information. Scientists refer to this phenomenon as “selective exposure.”• So why do politicians, try to create, rather than

help people avoid, cognitive dissonance? It’s because cognitive dissonance has the potential to change people’s behavior and attitudes.

• The power of cognitive dissonance:• Belief Disconfirmation – dissonance that fails to

change a person’s belief causes that person to spread her belief to others to gain support for her position.

• Induced Compliance – behaviors that offer little or no reward for compliance cause people to seek internal justification for their participation, which makes them more likely to permanently adopt said behaviors.

• Effort Justification – people who are persuaded to put more effort toward achieving a goal exaggerate the attractiveness of the goal to justify their effort.

• Cognitive dissonance is a large part of why hazing builds loyalty - if you go through a rough initiation to get into a cult, you'll go to great lengths to convince yourself that the organization is awesome enough to have been worth it.

• Similarly, end of the world cultists often give away everything they own shortly before the appointed date, and will go to great lengths to avoid thinking that it was for nothing.

• changing political attitudes can be understood in the context of "cognitive dissonance," that asserts that people experience uneasiness after acting in a way that appears to conflict with their beliefs and preferences about themselves or others.

• To minimize that mental discomfort, the theory posits, a person will adapt his or her attitude to better fit with or justify previous actions.

THE BYSTANDER EFFECT

• posits that a significant number of individuals will display a diffusion of responsibility in emergency situations when there are other individuals present. • diffusion of responsibility derives from the

bystander’s response to other observers’ indifference to an emergency situation.• Similarly, political disengagement, that is,

lack of participation in political or civic responsibilities, when due to perceived indifference in others may also be seen as diffusion of responsibility.

• In fact, the emergency situation experienced at the individual level is similar to the experience of a political atmosphere in crisis at the national level.

• Therefore, a diffusion of political responsibility will generally include abstention from activities such as voting, becoming politically active in one’s community, and becoming educated on civil rights, political systems, and government functionality .

factors contribute to political disengagement: • individual factors may include personal apathy,

political frustration, or a parroting of a collective political indifference • societal factors include: a nation’s overall

political structure , the historical models of education within the nation , and the general economic state of the nation .

• The Political Bystander Effect• Although there are several different reasons why an individual or group would diffuse any form of responsibility, based on the results of studies conducted concerning the bystander effect, it is reasonable to understand tendencies to diffuse responsibility in emergency situations in response to others’ indifference.