It comes as no surprise then that cognitive dissonance creeps into our relationships, too. “It impacts relationships in every way possible, both positively and negatively,” says Paraskevi Noulas, PsyD, a clinical associate professor at NYU Langone Health in New York City. No relationship is off-limits — cognitive dissonance can be found in all of our social ties, from friendship to marriage. Here are some examples.
How Cognitive Dissonance Affects Friendships
Think of a friend you’ve known for many years. If you were to trace your friendship back to the very beginning, you’ll likely realize you bonded over a shared interest or circumstance. Maybe you attended junior high together or met in a theater group in college. Decades later, you probably aren’t the same people you were back then. “Oftentimes our beliefs and values will change as we grow up, and we may encounter new differences between ourselves and old friends,” says Corrine Leikam, PsyD, an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University who is based in Woodland Hills, California. But that doesn’t mean you need to break up with your friend because you don’t have as many things in common. Instead, you may adjust your values and beliefs so they are in sync with that of your friend. RELATED: We Experience Cognitive Dissonance in Real Life All the Time For example, if you stop liking acting that doesn’t mean you won’t support your friend’s pursuits as an actor — though it may require some personal reconciling to accept that this interest is still important to your friend despite it not being important to you anymore. Cognitive dissonance also comes up in everyday friend situations. Let’s say your friend was supposed to meet you at the movie theater. “I arrive and she’s already in the theater, and now I have to stand in a long line by myself and might not even get a ticket because it’s almost sold out,” Dr. Noulas says. Why didn’t she buy you a ticket and wait for you? You’ll then face the dissonance: Do you stay? Or do you go? Your mind naturally will start filling with examples of other situations when your friend wasn’t super helpful. You experience dissonance because you like your friend and you’re typically happy to spend time with her, but you’re also angry with her for this time and potentially others when she acted in a way that frustrates you or makes extra work for you. “You either decide that yes, she’s a great friend and this isn’t important, it’s no big deal to wait in line,” Noulas says. Or ultimately you decide, no, she’s constantly doing inconsiderate things like this and you’re tired of it, so you leave or start to invest less energy in that friendship.
How Cognitive Dissonance Affects Dating
Similar situations occur within romantic relationships, but it can become a bit more complicated if and when the person involved is someone you see as a potential life-long partner. Many women and men have a checklist of what they may be looking for in a partner — they should come from a good family, should be well-educated, should be kind. “Obviously, it will be very rare to find someone with every single characteristic on your list or exactly matching goals,” Dr. Leikam says. So you compromise in order for the relationship to work. Let’s say you fall in love with a man or woman from a different religion, for example. “Your family is against the marriage, and you also never thought you’d marry someone outside of your religion,” Noulas says. You’re left with a choice: You can magnify the importance of religion and break up with him or her, justifying your decision by saying it never would have worked out. Or you can choose to stay with him or her and tell yourself religion actually isn’t all that important to you. You’ll rationalize that choice by saying you don’t practice your religion much anyway or that it’s more important to find someone who is kind and faithful than someone who comes from the same religious background, Noulas says. To make the relationship work, “we may rationalize the negative characteristics in order to align with our vision of what the relationship should be,” Leikam says. It can be positive if you decide to drop unrealistic expectations. Or it can be negative if you end up minimizing concerning personality traits (“red flags”), Leikam says.
How Cognitive Dissonance Affects Marriages
Similar to friendships, in marriage “you will grow and change and make an effort to keep the relationship alive and thriving,” Leikam says. Cognitive dissonance can result when you and your husband or wife have different views, attitudes, or behaviors. Sometimes, you’ll just let your partner’s behavior slide, and other times you’ll adjust your own beliefs to be consistent with theirs, such as when you start rooting for a sports team or following a particular type of music because your partner is into that and you want to share that activity. But things get sticky if you end up compromising your values for the sake of the marriage. For example, if you stop volunteering for an organization you’ve always cared about or stop a hobby because your partner doesn’t support it or isn’t interested. How severe the dissonance is depends on the behavior and how big of a gap there is between the behavior and your beliefs, Leikam says. Let’s say you stop playing in a ping-pong league you used to be part of with some coworkers because after you get married you realize it’s cutting into a night you and your spouse have together. Though you used to enjoy the ping-pong league, you realize you’d rather devote that time to your marriage, ping-pong is not a passion of yours, and you see your coworkers at the office anyway. The dissonance or discomfort you feel is likely not that great. Let’s say your spouse gets transferred to a different state for work. The conflict you feel having to leave behind friends, family, and your old routines to be with your spouse is probably greater. And sometimes dealing with and accepting a bit of dissonance helps marriages last. According to an article from the American Psychological Association, people in happy marriages tend to give their partner the benefit of the doubt and focus on the things that make their spouse wonderful rather than dwelling on his or her shortcomings. (2) RELATED: What You Should Know About How Stress Affects Relationships For instance, if one person comes home cranky one night, someone in a happy marriage would chalk it up to a bad day at work rather than deciding their partner is a jerk and the marriage is doomed. In these cases, accepting that there will be some conflicts and disagreements — such as over a paint color for a bedroom or who’s turn it is to fold the laundry — allows happy couples to focus on the more significant things keeping them together, like family values, honesty, and genuine care for one another.
The Role Cognitive Dissonance Plays in Abusive Relationships
It’s important to note that too much dissonance can enable abuse in relationships, too. Oftentimes the abused partner is motivated to make the relationship work, Leikam explains. In abusive relationships, the abused partner may justify the abuser’s behavior and downplay what happened and how it made them feel to reduce the dissonance, Noulas says. Abused partners in these types of relationships may have trouble deciding whether to stay or leave since they may minimize the violence as an exception that doesn’t represent the person’s past behavior. (3) So a woman might say it’s okay that her boyfriend hit her because it was a one-time thing and usually he is more loving. Or she may come up with reasons it was her fault, not his.
