What Is Incoordination?

A social cognitive theory proposed by American social psychologist L. Festinger in 1957. The premise is that everyone strives to keep their inner world free of contradictions, but all people cannot make themselves reach a state of contradiction. Festinger replaced "contradiction" and "no contradiction" with "non-coordination" and "coordination", and analyzed the cognitive phenomena accordingly.

Cognitive dissonance theory

The theory of cognitive dissonance contains two cognitive elements: one is knowledge about one's own characteristics and behavior; the other is knowledge about the surrounding environment. There are three kinds of relationships between cognitive factors: no relationship, coordinated relationship, and uncoordinated relationship.

When a kind of non-X knowledge is derived from Y, the two kinds of knowledge of X and Y are not compatible. For example, a person always borrows money from others and buys a new car at the same time; on the one hand, he knows that his friends are around, and at the same time he is afraid. These are manifestations of cognitive dissonance.

The causes of two kinds of cognitive dissonance are: contradiction. For example, if we believe that humans can reach the moon in the near future, we also believe that humans cannot make devices that can escape the earth's atmosphere. Different cultural habits. For example, at a formal dinner, the habit of grabbing and eating with hands is incompatible with the knowledge of formal dinner etiquette. Special and general conflicts. For example, a Democrat likes a Republican candidate in an election. Existing experience makes trouble. For example, if a person stands in a rainy place and says that he is not wet, this is not compatible with people who have experience with rain. The degree of cognitive dissonance depends on the importance of the dissonance element to the subject and the amount of this element.

The main ways to change cognitive incoordination are: change the knowledge related to the behavior of the cognitive person to change the behavior; change the knowledge related to the environment of the cognitive person to change the relationship with the environment; add new knowledge and make full contact new information.

Changing cognitive dissonance will bring psychological resistance, which is specifically manifested as follows: Changing the knowledge of behaviors will be painful. The degree of resistance to changing behaviors depends on the degree of pain or loss that the cognitive person must suffer; To enable the actor to obtain some satisfaction, the degree of resistance to change is a function of satisfaction from the new behavior. Resistance to changing environmental knowledge depends on how sensitive the actors are to new situations and new perspectives. The resistance to the increase of new knowledge depends on the degree of cognitive dissonance. On occasions where there is little or no dissonance, the motivation to seek new knowledge is also minimal or scarce; dissonance is medium, and the search for new knowledge and Avoidance of causing inconsistent information is the most active; when the degree of inconsistency is great, the motivation to seek new knowledge decreases significantly, and the avoidance line rises, Festinger believes this is a curvilinear relationship (see figure). Social recognition and social support have a great impact on changing cognitive dissonance. If appropriate rewards or penalties are beneficial to cognitive change;

(1) This discordant state is often used by fraudsters, because individuals are now in a state of eagerness to resolve this contradiction, and fraudsters put the wrong method in front of individuals to trap them in traps.

(2) In business negotiations, we can also transfer information that individuals do not understand and that are inconsistent with individual cognition. At this time, it is beneficial for us to guide the individual in our direction.

The above two uses are essentially persuasion. Festinger advocates using a moderate restraint method in the process of persuasion, combined with reality, and mastering the dimensions, not too heavy or too light.