What is cognitive dissonance and how to avoid it?

Decisions are an integral part of an organization, and making the right decisions at the right time every time plays a vital role in the success of an organization. Making the right decision every time requires clarity of mind and freedom from all kinds of cognitive biases. In the process, you may have to make a decision that goes against your beliefs or you may have conflicting beliefs. Making decisions in these complexities can be difficult, as these situations can cause discomfort and impair your judgment due to cognitive dissonance.

1. What is cognitive dissonance?

The human mind is extremely complex, a person's thought process is not necessarily predictable, and decisions are made by considering various factors. Sometimes, what needs to be done may not align with what people think is right. In this case, it is possible to make bad decisions, do the wrong thing, or believe the wrong thing to cause discomfort. Because of this complexity, the human brain can come up with coping mechanisms, such as cognitive dissonance. Psychologist Leon Festinger proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance in 1957.

Cognitive Dissonance Definition: Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort caused by holding two conflicting beliefs or values at the same time.

2. Examples of cognitive dissonance at work

Cognitive dissonance can affect decision-making in organizations in a variety of ways, and it can have far-reaching effects that remain undetectable to those suffering from it. Here are some examples of how cognitive dissonance can affect your work:

1. When conducting employee performance reviews, you may need to give positive comments and raises to your least favorite team members based on their performance. You can avoid doing this and prove to yourself that the person is not worthy of a good evaluation, recalling events that have nothing to do with employee performance. In this case, it's a bad decision, and you have reason to back up your beliefs.

2. When the team sets goals, you may disagree with the team, abandon team decisions based on insights and discussions, and focus on the priorities that you think are right. Here, you stubbornly act according to your beliefs and produce results that are inconsistent with the team, which is cognitive dissonance.

3. If you have a systemic problem in your organization – such as a lack of alignment with goals – it indicates a failure in implementing a goal-setting framework or internal communication. If managers start blaming individuals, it means that cognitive dissonance leads them to believe that individuals are causing problems, even though the evidence will point to problems across the organization. Instead of solving a bigger problem, they will grasp at the straw, which will not only lead to failure of the entire organization, but also employee dissatisfaction and employee turnover.

4. When employees come up with excellent ideas that bring about some organizational change, such as energy saving by introducing green building concepts. The conventional wisdom of leaders may lead them to believe that investing in green building concepts will be expensive and may not bring a return on investment, and that introducing power-saving targets can hurt productivity because they equate effort/power consumption with quality. As a result, they may shelve the idea and stifle innovation in the workplace. In addition to this, it may make employees feel safer to follow the opinions of the company's leaders than to come up with ideas and suggestions. This can hurt the company in the long run.

5. When you work hard to make a product, you tend to believe in its potential, so you choose a pricing strategy that asks customers to pay a premium for the features they pioneer. You're delaying your product launch due to some issues. Assuming a competitor launches a similar product before you can launch it, you may need to look into the pricing strategy again and modify it to avoid overpricing. Cognitive dissonance can make you confident that your product will be successful, even if you don't lower the price of your competing product, just because of the effort you put into making it. Market conditions have changed and you haven't changed your beliefs based on the facts, which can lead to failure and leave customers with a bad impression of your product.

6. After you've taken a training course on new best practices at work, or after your organization has adopted a new business system or framework that you need to work on in your daily life, cognitive dissonance can lead to the belief that existing practices, systems, and frameworks are much better and that you can do better without changing them. This can lead to a lack of consistency, stagnant productivity, an inability to adapt to what is learned, and an inability to adapt to changing conditions in the organization.

3. What causes cognitive dissonance?

Many psychological factors can lead to cognitive dissonance, and here are the key factors to look out for.

1. Consistency of thought and action

As logical, rational beings, we don't like it when our beliefs and actions differ, and this quest for consistency makes us rationalize against inconsistency. As a result, you tend to deny evidence that contradicts your beliefs.

2. Justify your beliefs

When you have to take an action that is inconsistent with your beliefs but cannot be avoided, you can justify doing so in such a way that your behavior is acceptable. For example, when a suggestion comes from someone lower in the organizational hierarchy, you may reject it because it contradicts your beliefs. If your team leader forces you to do this, you can justify implementing it this time as the right thing to do, rather than when you rejected it in the past, and this justification can ease your discomfort.

3. Social pressure

Conforming to society's beliefs and behaviors has always been a part of human psychology, trying to adapt and adapt, which helps humans avoid criticism and confrontation, especially to those who have power and authority over them. This societal pressure makes it difficult for humans to change their beliefs and behaviors, even in the face of new information or evidence that contradicts them.

4. Inability to accept change

Some habits, beliefs, and behaviors are ingrained in the human way of thinking and are difficult to change. Changing perspectives can cause serious discomfort for some people, and changing thoughts and behaviors may seem like admitting defeat, which can lead to denial and reluctance to accept change.

5. Denial of change can bring comfort

Sometimes, maintaining the status quo is comforting for some. For example, if the scope of a successful business shrinks, it will be difficult for leadership to abandon their current job and diversify their business. Even when sales and profits are declining, cognitive dissonance can convince company leadership that there is still potential in the current business, comforting them simply because they have discovered success in the past and deny the lack of future potential. Investing more in dying businesses is due to a false sense of security and confidence in the market, as denial takes comfort in them.

6. Proof of workload

Cognitive dissonance is also caused by justifying your efforts to do something. Putting into action can make a person overestimate and rationalize it, even if it's not as impactful. This is because we equate effort with quality, believing that anything created through a lot of effort must be proportionately good, consistent with the effort that goes into making it.

4. Why do we need to overcome the 8 causes of cognitive dissonance?

Cognitive dissonance can have serious effects on organizations. When you have cognitive dissonance,

1. You won't be able to reconcile your beliefs, which will cause stress and discomfort.

2. No matter what, you will defend your choice.

3. You will often try to change your beliefs or behaviors by changing them to coordinate with each other to resolve this discomfort.

4. Even if you know that your actions are wrong, even if no one asks you to defend them, you will defend them.

5. You will try to hold on to your conflicting beliefs, ideas, and values by convincing yourself with false ideas.

6. You can make bad decisions and enthusiastically reject any criticism.

7. You will reject ideas and evidence just because they make you uncomfortable, even if they are true.

8. You will try to minimize or ignore the serious impact of your decision.

6. 5 ways to avoid cognitive dissonance

Overcoming cognitive dissonance can be a long process because it can be difficult to recognize it on your own and work on it. Overcoming cognitive dissonance can be beneficial and worth the effort in the long run. Here are some ways you can reduce and overcome cognitive dissonance.

1. Make a decision based on facts

As with cognitive biases and other psychological phenomena that influence decision-making, cognitive dissonance can be avoided if you prevent yourself from acting on instinct and beliefs and start looking for more information and data to support your decisions. Data-driven decision-making is essential for today's organizations. Learning to make decisions based on concrete facts and evidence, in addition to overcoming cognitive dissonance, can help you advance in your career and excel at work.

2. Seek external support

While you can consciously address cognitive dissonance, it can be difficult to detect and understand. As a result, you can opt for expert support, and organizations can also organize consultations and training on decision-making to help employees overcome cognitive dissonance and other biases that prevent them from making the right decisions in their day-to-day work.

3. Look at yourself and make a note of your discomfort

Cognitive dissonance causes discomfort when you go against your beliefs and try to prove your beliefs to align them with actions you don't want to take. You can make a note of these situations, study them later, explore the root causes of these discomforts, and discuss them with trusted friends and colleagues to determine if you can do something different on these occasions.

4. Cultivate acceptance that you can sometimes be wrong

Cognitive dissonance stems from an inability to accept your beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors that may not be correct. Cultivating a receptive mindset is essential to address cognitive dissonance, which can be achieved by being open to changes in perspectives, ideas, and beliefs when you are given new information that contradicts it, and you can also listen to different perspectives, consider multiple opinions, and analyze them objectively.

5. Increase self-awareness and understand the consequences of your actions

It's essential to pay attention to your thoughts and actions, how you feel when making decisions, and what causes the discomfort. It is only when you are self-aware, when you understand your thought process, that you can solve the problems in it, and it is also important to analyze the potential consequences of your decisions. When bad decisions based on stubborn beliefs can have widespread repercussions within an organization, the potential impact of your decisions needs to be scrutinized and objectively analyzed, and cultivating these qualities can help address cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance can severely impair judgment and affect decisions that affect individuals, teams, and organizations, and it can lead to friction, disagreements, and team arguments, affecting alignment and productivity. Some decisions can snowball and have far-reaching repercussions, causing lasting damage.

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