Being aware of this can help us avoid falling foul of the most dangerous consequences of cognitive dissonance: believing our own lies.

* When trying to join a group, the harder they make the barriers to entry, the more you value your membership. To resolve the dissonance between the hoops you were forced to jump through, and the reality of what turns out to be a pretty average club, we convince ourselves the club is, in fact, fantastic.
* People will interpret the same information [like the Bible, or religion] in radically different ways to support their own views of the world. When deciding our view on a contentious point, we conveniently forget what jars with our own theory and remember everything that fits.
* People quickly adjust their values to fit their behaviour, even when it is clearly immoral. Those stealing from their employer will claim that "Everyone does it" so they would be losing out if they didn't, or alternatively that "I'm underpaid so I deserve a little extra on the side."
Once you start to think about it, the list of situations in which people resolve cognitive dissonance through rationalisations becomes ever longer and longer. If you're honest with yourself, I'm sure you can think of many times when you've done it yourself. I know I can.

SHOOT: This is very relevant during a time when we have become experts at lying to others and ourselves.

clipped from www.spring.org.uk The ground-breaking social psychological experiment of Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) provides a central insight into the stories we tell ourselves about why we think and behave the way we do. The set-up Once in the lab you are told the experiment is about how your expectations affect the actual experience of a task. At the end of the tasks the experimenter thanks you for taking part, then tells you that many other people find the task pretty interesting. This is a little confusing - the task was very boring. Whatever. You let it pass. What you've just experienced is the power of cognitive dissonance. Social psychologists studying cognitive dissonance are interested in the way we deal with two thoughts that contradict each other - and how we deal with this contradiction. So how can you resolve your view of yourself as an honest person with lying to the next participant? Your mind resolves this conundrum by deciding that actually the study was pretty interesting after all.