Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the uneasy tension we feel when our beliefs and actions don't line up — "I smoke" versus "smoking kills." The discomfort pushes us to reduce it, and the honest fix is to change the behaviour. But it's often easier to change the belief: downplay the risk, tell yourself you'll quit soon, decide the studies are overblown.^[1] That quiet rationalising is a major engine of confirmation bias and of how people talk themselves into positions. Festinger's classic finding captures the twist: people paid just $1 to tell a lie later believed it more than those paid $20 — with no big reward to justify the lie, they resolved the dissonance by deciding it was half true.^[2]