I feel a bit of dissonance over writing this post. My newly edited book on dissonance, Cognitive Dissonance: Re-examining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology, is an update of the book Jud Mills and I ...

Conversation among us is peppered with observations of the division within the American population. The division is revealed in a number of forms. It may be the acknowledgement of the political gap ...

Cognitive dissonance is what happens when a person holds two sets of beliefs at odds with each other. The human brain doesn’t like logical inconsistencies, so someone experiencing cognitive dissonance ...

Philosophy of Science, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Mar., 1972), pp. 32-50 (19 pages) An axiomatization of the theory is presented based on an explication of the 1957 text. Twenty-five theorems are deduced from ...

Do you keep second-guessing your decisions after you’ve made them? Immobilizing yourself? Berating yourself when you finally decide on something? This can be a normal albeit painful way to make ...

In light of the Talbot Boys dispute, I thought a look at the Zimbardo Stanford University prison experiment would be enlightening. Male participants were recruited and told they would participate in a ...

My sophomore year in college (1986-7) I had a RD (resident director of my dorm) who had a significant impact on me. He was a 24-year-old Psychology graduate student. He was tall, Italian and liked to ...