Cognitive Dissonance - how & why we lie to ourselves

we all do it, some of us better than others. This article explains the reasons why?

clipped from www.spring.org.uk How and Why We Lie to Ourselves: Cognitive Dissonance A classic 1959 social psychology experiment demonstrates how and why we lie to ourselves. Understanding this experiment sheds a brilliant light on the dark world of our inner motivations. As part of your course you agree to take part in an experiment on 'measures of performance'. You are told the experiment will take two hours. As you are required to act as an experimental subject for a certain number of hours in a year - this will be two more of them out of the way. 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 experiment is filled with ingenious deception so the best way to understand it is to imagine you are taking part. So sit back, relax and travel back. The time is 1959 and you are an undergraduate student at Stanford University...