Cognitive Dissonance and Purchase Involvement in the Consumer Behavior Context

The paper begins with an examination of how the degree of personal involvement in a purchase decision affects the information needed to reduce cognitive dissonance associated with that purchase. The authors argue that, highly involved individuals, because of their high involvement in purchase decisions, are rigid in their preconceived cognitions that led to the purchase. Consequently, they tend to downplay the new cognition and actively look out for purchase supportive information, rather than changing the old cognition that led to the purchase decision. Also, it is proposed that, to overcome the cognitive dissonance associated with a high involvement purchase, more supportive information is needed to overcome the cognitive dissonance associated with a low involvement purchase. Yet another finding of the study is that the willingness of a dissonant individual to accept the new cognition increases with the elapse of time from the time of occurrence of the cognitive dissonance. The study also unveils that, for a typical purchase, the degree of cognitive dissonance felt by more involved purchasers is less than that felt by less involved purchasers. Thus, interestingly, even though the degree of cognitive dissonance felt by highly involved purchasers is lower, the difficulty for them to grapple with it is higher. An associated finding is that more planned and less spontaneous buying behavior is associated with a higher degree of cognitive dissonance