Hurting People's Feelings: Dealing with Cognitive Dissonance

19 Year Old Shrink

In this episode I discuss the role that cognitive dissonance has when hurting other people. This state is the feeling of discomfort that we have when our actions or decisions aren’t in line with our beliefs and values. I experienced this recently this last week, and learned in class that there are three ways to reduce dissonance.
The first way to reduce dissonance is to change the behavior, the second being changing the cognition, and the third is adding a new cognition. I use an example of smoking to help solidify this idea and then apply it to how we can hurt other people. These three methods can be productive and also destructive and throughout this episode I emphasize how to reduce dissonance in the most productive way possible.