What is cognitive consistency, and why does it matter?

In the spring 2015, the first author of this chapter attended a small group conference where he had the opportunity to chat with one of the most distinguished senior researchers in the area of cognitive dissonance. Puzzled by the increasingly narrow focus of dissonance research since the publication of Festinger’s (1957) seminal book, the said author asked this eminent scholar about his views on exposure to beliefconflicting information as a source of dissonance. Causing even more puzzlement, the scholar replied that such mental conflicts do not involve any dissonance. He further stated that dissonance is exclusively caused by discrepancies between attitudes and behavior and occurs only for behaviors with aversive consequences for which the actor takes personal responsibility (cf. Cooper & Fazio, 1984). After a short back-and-forth, the two researchers ended the conversation by agreeing to disagree. Yet, one of them was left with an unpleasant feeling caused by the conflict between his belief that dissonance is a much broader phenomenon and the views of the eminent scholar he had just been exposed to. One potential interpretation of the two conflicting views is that they reflect different empirical assumptions that could be tested in a carefully designed study. For example, one could design an experiment in which participants are presented with information that conflicts with their personal beliefs and measure whether exposure to this information elicits unpleasant feelings. Yet, another potential interpretation is that the two conflicting views are rooted in different definitions of theoretical concepts. In the latter case, it would be very difficult (if not impossible) to resolve the disagreement on the basis of empirical data (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2015). For example, even if participants experienced unpleasant feelings in response to information that conflicts with their beliefs, a skeptic might argue that these feelings are distinct from dissonance, because dissonance is (by definition) limited to by discrepancies between attitudes and behavior.1 Expanding on the second interpretation, the current chapter aims to make a theoretical case for broader conceptualizations of cognitive consistency and dissonance that go beyond the relation between attitudes and behavior. In line with earlier concerns