SYNONYMS AND RELATED EXPRESSIONS
cognitive dissonance
noun phrase
Psychological discomfort associated with a perceived inconsistency among beliefs, attitudes, or behavior.
Local English device voice, when available. This is not a recorded dictionary pronunciation.
Discomfort from conflicting beliefs
No close substitute is listed for this sense. The expressions below help explain the idea.
Related words and expressions
These extend or explain the idea and may require a different sentence structure.
Usage distinction
Return to topThese are explanatory paraphrases. The term concerns discomfort from perceived inconsistency, not simply uncertainty.
CHECK THE MEANING IN CONTEXT
See cognitive dissonance in use
A character who values honesty but conceals a mistake may experience cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance troubles a fictional expedition leader who values shared decisions yet chooses the whole route alone and explicitly feels uneasy about that inconsistency.
Compare an alternative with the original word in each passage. Shared meanings do not make every pair interchangeable.
Synonym reference scope and sources
The groups distinguish the senses selected for this study entry. Closest synonyms and broader related expressions have separate labels. The listed sources support lexical selection; not every phrase is a direct quotation from a source.
- Merriam-Webster, Cognitive Dissonance
- Harmon-Jones and Mills, An Introduction to Cognitive Dissonance Theory (APA, 2019)
How the synonym reference was prepared / WordNet 3.0 license