Do you ever feel a nagging sense of discomfort when your actions don't match your beliefs? For example, you might tell a small white lie even though you value honesty. That uneasy feeling is known as ...

Cognitive dissonance isn’t something we talk about a lot, but we experience examples of it happening all the time. Cognitive dissonance, in psychological terms, describes the discomfort felt when your ...

The notes used in Western music—or, more accurately, the relationships between the notes used in Western music—have a strange power. Bobby McFerrin demonstrated this dramatically by showing that an ...

Most of the time, cognitive dissonance seems like an internal battle: You believe one thing but act in opposition to that belief, or you believe two contradictory things and are forced to reconcile ...

Clay Halton was a Business Editor at Investopedia and has been working in the finance publishing field for more than five years. He also writes and edits personal finance content, with a focus on ...

Cognitive dissonance happens when you hold two conflicting thoughts in your mind at the same time — like loving both hamburgers and cows. Cognitive dissonance is a theory in social psychology first ...

Members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth in 1997, a spaceship would be traveling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several ...

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term that describes the discomfort you feel when your beliefs don’t line up with your actions. Or it could refer to the tension of holding two conflicting ...