Motivation
Mohamed Ahmed Abd El-Hay in Understanding Psychology for Medicine and Nursing, 2019
Cognitive dissonance theory is a phenomenon in which people experience psychological distress when they have contradictory attitudes or when their behavior contradicts their stated attitudes. That is, people have a need for consistency in their thoughts, perceptions, and images of their selves (Cooper, Mirabile, Scher, Brock, & Green, 2005; Festinger, 1957). Leon Festinger proposed that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance in their cognitions by either changing or justifying their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, e.g., smokers who are told that cigarettes increase the risk of cancer, may resolve the tension between this information and their actions, by deciding to quit smoking. However, it is usually easier for smokers to reject the causal link between cigarettes and cancer, and convince themselves that smoking is not really so dangerous. To do this, smokers seek examples of heavy smokers who have lived long happy lives. Sometimes, a smoker may reduce the tension between information and their actions by making excuses for themselves, such as “I am going to die anyway, so it does not matter.” The number of dissonant beliefs, and the importance attached to each belief affect the strength of the dissonance. Dissonance theory is especially relevant to decision-making and problem-solving, but it applies to all situations involving attitude formation and change (Wicklund & Brehm, 1976).
MRCPsych Paper A1 Mock Examination 3: Questions
Melvyn WB Zhang, Cyrus SH Ho, Roger Ho, Ian H Treasaden, Basant K Puri in Get Through, 2016
Individuals usually tend to feel uneasy when cognitive dissonance occurs and this might lead to increased anxiety. There is always a motivation to achieve internal cognitive consistency. All of the following help with the reduction of anxiety associated with cognitive dissonance, except Changing one or more of the thought processes involved in the dissonant relationshipChanging the behaviour that is considered inconsistent with the cognitionAddition of new thoughts that are consistent with pre-existing thought processesAltering attitudeChallenging negative automatic thoughts
Ethics, philosophy and evidence-based medicine
Tony Lockett in Evidence-based and Cost-effective Medicine for the Uninitiated, 2018
Returning to the problems faced by changing behaviour in relation to presented evidence, it is apparent that the causes of a change in behaviour are poorly understood. Degrees of what is known as cognitive dissonance are present among doctors and other health care professionals. Cognitive dissonance is the act of clinging to a belief when the evidence suggests that the belief is false. Medical training can result in a lot of the dissonance perceived. As health professionals, we are taught to believe our own interpretations, and that patients can be misleading. However, there is more to dissonance among doctors than this, as medical behaviour can be changed – the rising sales on new drugs are a testimony to this. Therefore, more work is needed on medical values in order to make change more likely.
A conceptual framework for planning and assessing learning in continuing education activities designed for clinicians in one profession and/or clinical teams
Published in Medical Teacher, 2018
Donald E. Moore, Kathy Chappell, Lawrence Sherman, Mathena Vinayaga-Pavan
Creating or reinforcing teachable moments is one way to motivate potential learners to enroll in a formal learning activity. The theory behind a teachable moment is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is defined as the mental discomfort experienced by an individual who believes that he or she is correctly doing something but is confronted with new information that contradicts that belief. Because a person who experiences cognitive dissonance tends to become psychologically uncomfortable, he or she is motivated to try to reduce the discomfort (Festinger 1957). Enrolling in a formal learning activity is a start. To encourage participation in a learning activity and engagement in learning, learners should be regularly reminded about the PPG that created the cognitive dissonance that initiated learning and the progress that they are making in reducing or eliminating the PPG.
The perceptions of older adults living with chronic musculoskeletal pain about participating in an intervention based on a behavioral medicine approach to physical therapy
Published in Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 2020
Sara Cederbom, Line Nortvedt, Daniela Lillekroken
To check adherence and promote self-monitoring, as well as behavior changes, exercise diaries are tools typically used in similar studies (Cederbom et al, 2014c). The use of exercise diaries in interventions for older people can be a challenge (Cederbom et al, 2014c). However, even if there were some struggle for the participants in this study with writing in the diaries, they continued to do so and for most of them, the diary notes was a reminder and motivated them to continue. To do something that can be experienced as a challenge, but still choosing to do it, can be associated with the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. This phenomenon can be explained in the terms of that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony or dissonance (Festinger, 1957). Moreover, these findings are also in line with the results from a previous study, where older adults expressed their experience that the exercise diary reinforced their motivation to perform the exercises (Arkkukangas et al., 2017).
Elizabeth Usher Memorial Lecture: How do we change our profession? Using the lens of behavioural economics to improve evidence-based practice in speech-language pathology
Published in International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2018
The guilt that SLPs may feel around client care and EBP, sometimes as an outcome of such external factors as resource limitations or time, is probably better described as cognitive dissonance (Stice, 1992). Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we all experience when we simultaneously hold two or more contradictory beliefs, or when we realise that our behaviour is incongruent with our beliefs. It also occurs when we are confronted with new information that contradicts our beliefs, ideals, or values. Guilt can be compounded by feeling responsible for our own actions or the care of another (Prawat, Byers, & Anderson, 1983). This concept of responsibility for our actions is enculturated into health professionals from very early in our training (Godsey, 2011). Bringing these two ideas of guilt together, i.e. at not doing what I believe I should do and responsibility for others, the cognitive dissonance I experience as a clinician is between knowing that I should be providing, for example, a more intensive treatment as per EBP and being unable to do so due to service constraints (e.g. being only able to offer one session per week). This contradicts my ethically appropriate sense of responsibility for the care of my clients, a phenomenon also reported in the literature (e.g. Foster, Worrall, Rose, & O'Halloran, 2015; Lankshear, 2002).
Related Knowledge Centers
- Aggression
- Confirmation Bias
- Psychological Stress
- Psychology
- Idea
- Belief
- Value
- Rationalization
- Curiosity
- Fear