In 1950, Festinger summarized its basic principle this way: “If you change a person’s behavior, his thoughts and feelings will change to minimize the dissonance.”84 What did Festinger mean by “dissonance?” In basic terms, he was referring to the conflict that occurs when a thought, a feeling or a behavior is altered in contradiction to the other two. A person can tolerate only a certain amount of discrepancy between his thoughts, feelings and actions, which after all make up the different components of his identity. Festinger’s theory states—and a great deal of later research has
...more
