“I’m really looking forward to the film.” “The party will probably be boring.” But the film turns out to be dull and we have a great time at the party – contrary to what we initially expected. In an overview, researchers come to the conclusion that such discrepancies between cognitions can trigger much more than previously thought, namely a whole range of emotions: fear, anger, guilt, joy or sadness. Which feelings they are depends on the context in which the discrepancy arose.
The American Leon Festinger (1919 to 1989) was one of the first social psychologists to deal with these discrepancies between an expectation and what we then experience in his theory of cognitive dissonance.
At the time, he came to the conclusion that the perceived dissonance is accompanied by inner tension and that we therefore try to resolve this discomfort quickly, for example by reassessing the unexpected situation.
Festinger got the idea for his research from a report that the members of a small sect in the USA had announced the end of the world in the form of a great flood for a certain near day. He asked himself: How would the group’s followers deal with it if the flood didn’t come? Festinger sent some of his employees to the meeting point where the cult was waiting for the end of the world. Its members solved the problem very elegantly by reassessing the situation: they themselves were the ones who prevented the flood through their conscientious precautions.
source
Harmon-Jones, E. et al. (2025). Discrete emotions of dissonance. Motivation Science. DOI: 10.1037/mot0000389
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