rise to the idea that the pain of dissonance is best relieved through changing an opinion of an opinion instead of actually changing the behaviour itself. Using the smoking example (Colman, 2009), it would be much easier for a smoker to change their opinion about how bad smoking is for your health than to actually give up smoking. This could be a large part of why attitude change occurs as opposed to behaviour change; it's a far easier concept for people to take on board.
However, these researchers do not delve very deeply into the actual processes which result in attitude change. Moreover, Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones (2007) point out that Festinger doesn't explain in his original theory why cognitive dissonance results in psychological discomfort and consequent attitude change. The action based model which was put forward by Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones (1999, 2000; as cited in Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones 2007) describes how cognitions can serve as "action tendencies". This model proposes that dissonance induces an uncomfortable feeling due to the fact that it could potentially hinder any "unconflicted" action. Therefore, reducing dissonance by changing an attitude serves the function of "facilitating the execution of effective and unconflicted action" (Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2007). This means that our cognitions serve as the potential for an action, but when two of these "action tendencies" contradict each other we feel discomfort as these conflicting actions interfere with one another. To reduce this feeling, we change one of the action tendencies which aids us in carrying out the action uninterrupted. Starzyk, Fabrigar, Soryal & Fanning (2009) claim that people are more likely to change their attitude when the importance of this attitude was not salient, in this case they changed their attitudes regardless of how important this attitude was to them. However, when the salience of the attitude was greater, the participants were far less likely to change their attitude. This shows that despite the discomforting dissonance if the attitude in question is of great importance and highly salient, the participant is less likely to alter it.
However, attitude change is not the only way to relieve cognitive dissonance. Other methods include trivialisation and adding further cognitions which justify the behaviour (Colman, 2009; and Taylor, Peplau & Sears, 2006). Trivialisation is as it suggests, decreasing how important the cognitions are perceived to be (Colman, 2009). These methods are used far less than attitude change, but it is not clearly understood why. Further research should be carried out in this area.
Work has been done to investigate any biological changes which occur during the attitude change process. Van Veen, Krug, Schooler & Carter (2009) conducted research into the neural basis behind the change in attitude following the uncomfortable feeling resulting from cognitive dissonance. Van Venn et al used an fMRI to find that the activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula predicted with a certain level of accuracy the participants subsequent change in attitude. This suggests that there are chemical reactions in the brain to the feeling of psychological discomfort, causing participants to change their attitudes about a behaviour. This could mean that the decision to change the attitude is not an entirely conscious one, but rather an automatic chemical reaction. The implications of this research are such that attitude change is the most likely way to relieve the dissonance despite the fact that there are other strategies such as trivialisation or changing act
