Revolutionary Psychology Experiments That Are As Crazy As Their Results

10. Cognitive Dissonance – Do You Mean What You Say

Cognitive dissonance is the fancy word used by psychologists to explain the mental process that contradicts one’s own convictions.

Say you made a decision to buy expensive shoes which turned out to be quite useless. But you will convince yourself it was worthy. Humans will always try to convince their decisions were right.

In 1956, Jack Brehm, a psychology student demonstrated this by bringing in a few gifts to class and asked everyone to rate it. He then asked students to choose two items that were equally attractive. This made everyone rate their desired items higher than their original rating and their second choice received lower ratings.