In everyday life, people often find themselves facing difficult decisions between options that are equally attractive. Cognitive dissonance theory states that after making a difficult choice between 2 equally preferred options, individuals no longer find the alternatives similarly desirable. Rather, they often change their existing preferences to align more closely with the choice they have jus...

This paper looks at the various approaches as taken in order to understand the phenomenon of consonance/dissonance. While an early understanding of consonance/dissonance was based upon number ratios (Pythagoras), it became a question of resonance for Descartes. Subsequently, Euler attempted to formalize the ratio approach by classifying intervals into consonance/dissonance classes according to ...

Models of opinion formation are used to investigate many collective phenomena. While social influence often constitutes a basic mechanism, its implementation differs between the models. In this paper, we provide a general framework of social influence inspired by the social psychological concept of cognitive dissonance. We only premise that individuals strive to minimize dissonance resulting fr...

37 such situations the immediate desire to indulge in the pleasant behaviour like eating the cake can interfere with our longterm goals (e.g., be healthy or lose weight). According to Muraven and Baumeister (2000) humans strive to achieve· an ideal balance between the completion of their desires and the pursuit of their own goals. This search of the ideal balance between maximum pleasure and mi...