People want to perceive consistency among the specific things they believe, say, and do—what we’ll call the micro level of day-to-day experience. But it’s virtually impossible to be consistent all the time. For example, you probably believe in the value of energy and water conservation, but have you ever taken a long, hot shower? Have you ever had a professor urge you to do the assigned readings prior to each lecture, agree this is a good idea, and still not do it? Cognitive dissonance theory explains how people react to these micro-level inconsistencies in their thoughts and behavior. We begin this section by outlining the theory and research supporting it. Afterward we’ll consider people’s motivation to maintain consistency at the macro level of their lives as a whole.

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According to Leon Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory, people have such distaste for perceiving inconsistencies in their beliefs, attitudes, and behavior that they will bias their own attitudes and beliefs to try to deny those inconsistencies. The basic idea is that when two cognitions (e.g., beliefs, attitudes, or perceived actions) are inconsistent or contradict one another, people experience an uncomfortable psychological tension known as dissonance. The more important the inconsistent cognitions are to the person, the more intense the feeling of dissonance and the stronger the motivation to get rid of that feeling. There are three primary ways to reduce dissonance:

Let’s consider, as Festinger did back in the 1950s, the example of a cigarette smoker. Sally the smoker has two cognitions: (1) she knows cigarettes are bad for her health; and (2) she knows that she smokes cigarettes. From the cognition “Smoking is bad for me” follows the opposite cognition “I smoke.” As a result, Sally often feels tense and conflicted about her smoking—that is, she experiences dissonance. To reduce the dissonance, Sally could change one of the two dissonant cognitions. However, cognitions can be difficult to change. For Sally to decide that smoking is not bad for her, she would have to call into question the judgment of the entire medical community, and this would likely conflict with a host of other beliefs she has, such as the trustworthiness of cultural authorities. Alternatively, Sally could change the cognition “I smoke” by quitting. Most smokers do in fact try to quit, and many eventually succeed, but behaviors are often hard to change once they become habits (Wood & Neal, 2007), particularly if engaging in them creates positive feelings (e.g., a nicotine high) and giving them up creates negative feelings (e.g., withdrawal symptoms).

A third way to reduce dissonance is to trivialize one of the inconsistent cognitions (Simon et al., 1995). Let’s illustrate this with an example. Suppose you buy a plasma TV, knowing that they use more energy than LED TVs. If you were to reduce dissonance by trivializing one of the cognitions, you could think to yourself, “With all the energy use in the United States, the extra electricity my new TV will use is a tiny drop in the bucket.”

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To understand more about the conditions that arouse dissonance and the ways people reduce it, researchers have come up with a number of laboratory situations, or dissonance paradigms. Two such situations are the free choice paradigm and the induced compliance paradigm.

The Free Choice Paradigm

The free choice paradigm (Brehm, 1956) is based on the idea that any time people make a choice between two alternatives, there is likely to be some dissonance. This is because all of the bad aspects of the alternative people chose, and all of the good aspects of the alternative they rejected, are inconsistent with their choice. The harder the choice, the more of these inconsistent elements there will be, and so the more dissonance there will be after the choice is made.

How do people cope with this dissonance? They do so by spreading the alternatives: After the choice is made, people generally place more emphasis on the positive characteristics of the chosen alternative and the negative aspects of the rejected alternative. For example, if you chose a fuel-efficient small car over a gas-guzzling luxury car, you could spread the alternatives by focusing on the value of being green as well as the extravagance and repair costs of the luxury car. But if you had instead chosen the luxury car, you might spread the alternatives by focusing on its comfort and the small car’s lousy sound system.

To test this idea, Brehm (1956) asked one group of participants to choose between two consumer items (e.g., a stop watch, a portable radio) that they liked a lot (FIGURE 6.2). This was a difficult decision. The other group was asked to choose between an item they liked a lot and one that they didn’t like, which is an easy decision. After participants chose the item they wanted, they were again asked to rate how much they liked them. Brehm reasoned that when the choice was easy, participants would not feel much dissonance, and so they would rate the items pretty much as they had before their decision. But the participants who made a difficult decision would feel dissonance because their cognition “I made the right choice” is inconsistent with their cognition “The item I chose has some negative aspects, and the one I didn’t choose has some attractive aspects.” Brehm expected these participants to spread the alternatives on their second rating, exaggerating their chosen item’s attractiveness and downplaying the other item’s value. This is exactly what he found. Related research shows that people also spread the alternatives following a difficult choice by searching for information that supports their choice and avoiding information that calls their choice into question (e.g., Frey, 1982).

The Induced Compliance Paradigm

Dissonance is aroused whenever people make difficult choices. And many of our difficult choices result from our being pulled in opposite directions, as when we’re induced to say something we don’t truly believe. For example, when your professor asks you whether you liked today’s sleep-inducing lecture, you are likely to say, “Oh, it was very interesting.” Could the dissonance aroused in these situations change our beliefs? Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) endeavored to find out. They had participants engage in an hour of boring tasks, such as turning wooden square pegs one quarter turn at a time. One third of the participants, those in the control condition, were then simply asked how much they liked the tasks. As FIGURE 6.3 indicates, these participants rated the tasks negatively. The other two thirds were told that the purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of expectations on performance and that they had been given no prior expectations because they were in the control condition. They were also told that the next participant was supposed to be given the expectation that the tasks would be very interesting, but the assistant who usually tells this to the next participant was running late. So the real participants were asked if they would go in the waiting room and tell the waiting participant (actually an experimental confederate) that the tasks were very interesting. Half of these participants were offered $1.00 to say the boring tasks were interesting; the other half were offered $20.00 to do so. All of these participants agreed. Participants in these two conditions had the potential to experience dissonance, because they told the confederate something that was inconsistent with their attitude about the tasks. However, receiving $20.00 provided an added cognition that justified the action and thereby reduced the overall level of dissonance. Therefore, when later asked about their true attitudes, these participants saw the tasks for what they really were—a boring waste of time. In contrast, $1.00 is not sufficient to justify saying that a boring task is interesting and so does not reduce the dissonance. How, then, did the people in this condition reduce the dissonance they felt? They actually changed their attitude to bring it in line with their statement, rating the tasks more positively than did the participants in the other conditions.

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The situation that Festinger and Carlsmith created to arouse dissonance in the lab has become known as the induced compliance paradigm. This is because the participants are induced to comply with a request to engage in a behavior that runs counter to their true attitudes.

Factors That Affect the Magnitude of Dissonance

Will people always experience dissonance when their behavior is inconsistent? Festinger argued that virtually any action a person engages in will be inconsistent with some cognition the person holds, but he did not think actions will always lead to strong feelings of dissonance. Much of the time people think or act in inconsistent ways without even being aware that they’re doing so. Research shows that people feel dissonance primarily when the inconsistent cognitions are salient or highly accessible to consciousness (Newby-Clark et al., 2002; Swann & Pittman, 1975; Zanna et al., 1973). The level of dissonance that is aroused when inconsistent cognitions are salient or accessible depends on a number of factors.

Weak External Justification

Dissonance will be high if you act in a way that is counter to your attitudes with only weak external justification to do so. On the other hand, if the external justification is very strong, dissonance will be low. As we saw in the Festinger and Carlsmith study, $1.00 was a weak justification, so participants changed their attitude to reduce dissonance; $20.00 was a strong external justification, so participants maintained their original attitude. External justification doesn’t have to come in the form of money; it can also be praise, grades, a promotion, or pressure from loved ones or authority figures. All of these can provide added cognitions that reduce overall dissonance.

Choice

As the work on the free choice paradigm might suggest, a key factor in creating dissonance in the induced compliance paradigm is perceived choice (Brehm & Cohen, 1962). Just as $20.00 is an added cognition that reduces the overall dissonance, so too is a lack of choice. If some twisted character held a gun to your head and told you to say your mom is an evil person, you’d probably do it and not feel too much dissonance about it. But neither would you feel you had much choice in the matter, because although the statement would be inconsistent with your love for your mom, it is quite consistent with wanting to stay alive. To study the role of perceived choice, Brehm and Cohen (1962) developed what has become the most common method for creating dissonance through induced compliance. It involves asking participants to write a counterattitudinal essay, that is, an essay that is inconsistent with their beliefs. One study using this method (Linder et al., 1967) showed that when an experimenter simply ordered students to write an essay in favor of an unpopular position—banning controversial speakers from campus—the cognition “I didn’t have a choice; I was just doing what I was told” kept the dissonance low. This is known as a low choice condition. On the other hand, when the experimenter asked students to write the counterattitudinal essay to help the experiment but emphasized that it was up to them whether or not to do so, the students were no longer able to justify their behavior by saying, “I didn’t have a choice.” In this high choice condition, the students experienced dissonance and actually shifted their attitude toward supporting the ban on speakers.

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Commitment

When people’s freely chosen behavior conflicts with their attitudes, the more committed they are to the action, the more dissonance they experience. If the action can be taken back or changed easily, that reduces the extent to which the action is dissonant with one’s attitude. After all, if you can just take it back, why change your attitude? A study by Davis and Jones (1960) illustrates this point. They induced participants to help the experimenter by insulting another person, and either gave participants a sense of choice in doing so (high choice condition) or did not (low choice condition). In addition, half of the participants thought they would be able to talk to the person later and explain that they didn’t really mean what they said and were just helping the experimenter (low commitment—the behavior could be taken back). The other half thought they would not be able to explain themselves later to the other person (high commitment to the behavior).

If you’re having a rough day and happen to treat someone badly and can’t take it back, you might reduce your dissonance by deciding the person deserves the insult. And this is just what happened in the high choice, high commitment condition: The participants rated the person they insulted negatively. This did not occur in the low choice condition, and it also didn’t occur in the high choice condition if the insult could be taken back. A clever field experiment at the track by Knox and Inkster (1968) also supported the role of commitment. They showed that horse-race bettors are more confident their horse will win after they have placed their bets than they are just before doing so. The higher the commitment to a chosen course of action, the more dissonance, and consequently, the more one’s beliefs and attitudes are likely to change to justify the actions.

Foreseeable Aversive Consequences

The more aversive the foreseeable consequences of an action are, the more important the inconsistent cognitions are, and thus, the more dissonance. Imagine you wrote an essay arguing that smoking cigarettes is a good thing to do (it’s a legal way to get a buzz, it makes you look cool) and either: (a) threw it away; or (b) read it to your 10-year-old cousin. In which case do you think you would experience more dissonance? The cognition “I wrote an essay in favor of smoking that no one read” is inconsistent with your beliefs about smoking, but it has no unwanted consequences and so arouses minimal dissonance. But encouraging a 10-year-old to smoke has foreseeable bad consequences indeed, so more dissonance will be aroused. In fact, research shows that action b would lead to a more positive view of smoking than would action a (Cooper & Fazio, 1984).

Cultural Influences

Although a consistent sense of self is an important aspect of being human, different situations may arouse dissonance for people who are from different cultures. For East Asians and people from other collectivistic cultures that value interdependence, public displays of inconsistency should arouse more dissonance, because harmonious connections with others are so important to them. To test this idea, Kitayama and colleagues (2004) had Western and East Asian students engage in a free-choice task either in private or with a reminder that others could see them. Whereas Westerners displayed the most spreading of alternatives (emphasizing the positive aspects of the chosen alternative and the negative aspects of the rejected alternative) when they completed the task in private, East Asians displayed the most spreading of alternatives when they thought about how others could be watching them. Note that both groups of participants were motivated to reduce dissonance, but they differed in which situations kicked that motivation into gear.

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Applications of Dissonance Theory

Induced Hypocrisy

To achieve this goal, in the early 1990s, Elliot Aronson, Jeff Stone, and their colleagues came up with an induced hypocrisy paradigm. In this situation, people are asked to publicly advocate a position they already believe in but, to arouse dissonance, the experimenters remind them of a time when their actions ran counter to that position. In one study the researchers asked one group of sexually active students to make a short, videotaped speech for high-school students about the importance of using condoms to prevent AIDS (Stone et al., 1994). Another group was asked to think about such a speech but did not actually prepare one. Then, some participants from both groups were asked to think about times they failed to use condoms. Those participants who both advocated the use of condoms and who were reminded of times they didn’t use them were in the induced hypocrisy condition and therefore were expected to experience dissonance. The researchers predicted that, to reduce this dissonance, these participants would be motivated to engage in behaviors consistent with the belief they had just advocated. After receiving $4.00 for taking part in the study, participants were told that the campus health center had made it possible for them to purchase condoms. As the experimenters predicted, 83% of the induced hypocrisy participants purchased at least one condom, whereas participants who either didn’t make a pro-condom speech or didn’t think about prior failures to use condoms purchased condoms less than 50% of the time. The participants who made a very public declaration of their beliefs but then were reminded of times when they had failed to live up to them felt more dissonance, which they then reduced by reasserting their commitment to safe-sex behaviors. Inducing hypocrisy has also been shown to promote conservation of water and electricity, safe driving, exercising, and volunteering (Dickerson et al., 1992; Fointiat, 2004; Fried & Aronson, 1995; Kantola et al., 1984, Stone & Fernandez, 2008).

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Effort Justification: Loving What We Suffer For

One implication Festinger drew from dissonance theory is that “people come to believe in and to love the things they suffer for.” In other words, when people choose a course of action that involves unpleasant effort, suffering, and pain, they experience dissonance because of the costs of that choice. Because they usually can’t go back and change their behavior, they reduce dissonance by convincing themselves that what they suffered for is actually quite valuable; this phenomenon is known as effort justification.

Elliot Aronson and Jud Mills (1959) tested this idea in a study that was inspired by fraternity initiation practices. They proposed that people who go through these initiations reduce their dissonance in the face of the effort and humiliation that is sometimes involved by becoming fonder of and more committed to those organizations. If this is true, then all other things being equal, the more severe the initiation to gain inclusion in the group, the more the group should be liked.

To test this hypothesis, they asked female students if they wanted to join a group that met regularly to discuss sexual matters. But depending on what condition the students were assigned to, gaining entry into the group required different levels of severity of initiation. In a control condition, the young women were immediately added to the group. In the mild initiation condition, participants had to read some mildly sexual words, such as virgin, in front of the male experimenter to join the group. In the severe initiation condition, they had to read some sexually explicit terms and then read a passage of explicit pornography in front of the experimenter. Imagine how difficult and embarrassing that would have been to young female college students back in 1959.

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Once accepted into the group, participants were told that the group discussion was about to start but that as new members getting acclimated, they would just listen in. The women were ushered to private rooms and given headphones, then listened to what turned out to be a dreadfully boring discussion of the sex habits of insects. The women were then asked how much they liked the group discussion and how committed they were to the discussion group. As the graph in FIGURE 6.4 shows, the women who had to go through nothing or only a mild initiation were not impressed with the discussion and also were not highly committed to the group. In contrast, the severe initiation group, who had to go through a lot to get accepted, justified their effort by rating the discussion and their commitment to the group much more positively. These findings and others like them have clear implications for organizational practices and group loyalty. Could this be why so many organizations go out of their way to put new recruits through the wringer?

Might effort justification also play a role in the outcome of psychotherapy? Joel Cooper (1980) investigated whether a sense of choice would make an effortful therapy more effective. He gave participants with a severe snake phobia either a real form of therapy or a bogus one involving exercise, and he gave them either a high or low sense of choice. Compared with those who were not given a choice, participants who felt they freely chose the effortful therapy actually showed reduced phobia: They were able to move 10 feet closer to a snake than those who had the therapy without a sense of having chosen to participate in it. And the bogus therapy worked just as well as the real one; the only thing that mattered was the participants’ sense of having chosen to go through the effort. In a sense, to justify the effort, the participants made themselves improve.

Although neither Cooper nor we are suggesting that dissonance reduction is the only reason that psychotherapy can work, it may be one way patients can help themselves. The practical implication is that the client’s choice in participating in the therapy may help motivate positive change. This may explain why court-ordered programs to address such problems as drug addiction and anger management often don’t work.

Minimal Deterrence: Advice for Parenting

In the course of raising children, parents inevitably have to stop them from acting on many of their natural impulses, usually to deter them from doing things that are harmful or socially inappropriate. (“Don’t put that in your mouth!” “Stop sitting on your sister!”) A typical strategy that parents use to deter a child from misbehaving is to threaten with negative consequences such as spanking and grounding from video games. In these cases the child has a strong external justification for not doing the behavior (“I don’t want to get spanked!”), but this doesn’t mean that the child loses the desire to do the behavior. A better way to deter the behavior would be to use the minimal level of external justification necessary—that is, to use just enough inducement or threat of punishment to prevent the behavior, while allowing the child to feel that she or he freely chose not to do that behavior. In these cases the child has the dissonant cognitions “I’m not doing what I enjoy” and “The punishment for doing it is pretty mild.” To reduce this dissonance, the child may change his attitudes, coming to believe that he is not doing the behavior because he didn’t really enjoy it in the first place.

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To test this idea, Aronson and Carlsmith (1963) developed a way to study the effects of minimal deterrence. They had four-year-olds at the Harvard Preschool play with five toys and rank them in order of liking. Each child’s second-favorite toy was then placed on a table. In the no-threat condition, the experimenter told the kids he had to leave for a while, picked up the second favorite toy to take with him, and told them they could play with any of the remaining toys while he was gone. In the mild-threat condition, the experimenter said that while he was gone, they could play with any toy except the one on the table: “I don’t want you to play with the [toy on the table]. If you played with it, I would be annoyed.” In the severe-threat condition, he said: “I don’t want you to play with the [toy on the table]. If you play with it, I would be very angry. I would have to take all of my toys and go home. . . .”

During this temptation period, the children were watched through a one-way mirror. None of the children in the mild- and severe-threat conditions played with the forbidden toy. In the no-threat condition, they couldn’t, because the experimenter took it with him. When the experimenter returned (with the second-favorite toy in the no-threat condition), he asked the children to re-rank their liking for the five toys. As dissonance theory predicts, the children in the mild-threat condition now liked their formerly second favorite toy less than did the children in the no-threat and severe-threat conditions. Because the mild threat of annoying the experimenter was only a minimal deterrent to not playing with the attractive forbidden toy, the children in the mild-threat condition reduced their liking for that toy to justify not playing with it. The kids in the severe-threat condition also refrained from playing with the toy when forbidden to do so. But they had plenty of external justification—the threats of anger and of having all the toys taken away, so they didn’t change their attitudes toward the toy. A later study (Freedman, 1965) showed that this effect was still present 40 days later! So the message for parenting is clear: Using the minimal deterrence necessary to stop a child from engaging in a behavior will make it most likely that the child will internalize that she doesn’t want to engage in that behavior anyway.

Dissonance as Motivation

The preceding sections showcase some of the many ways that cognitive dissonance can impact our thoughts and behavior as we strive for self-consistency. But how do we know that inconsistency truly produces negative feelings that motivate these changes in attitude and behavior? Engaging in counterattitudinal actions under high choice conditions elevates participants’ ratings of discomfort, their levels of physiological arousal, and their neurological signs of motivation to exert control (Elliot & Devine, 1994; Harmon-Jones et al., 1996; Harmon-Jones et al., 2012). These indices of discomfort also predict how much people change their attitudes. Other research applies the phenomenon of misattribution of arousal we described in chapter 5 to support the role of negative affect as the motivator of attitude change. When participants are given an alternative explanation for why they might be experiencing tension and discomfort, they no longer adjust their attitudes after engaging in inconsistent behavior (e.g., Zanna & Cooper, 1974; Higgins et al., 1979). Taken together, this evidence provides strong support for the idea that perceived inconsistency arouses negative affect (dissonance), which then motivates attitude change (dissonance reduction). These findings support Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory, and they also provided the first compelling laboratory evidence for a more general idea introduced by Freud at the dawn of the 20th century: that psychological defenses, in this case the defense against cognitive inconsistencies, substantially influence people’s thoughts and behavior.

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The picture on the left (FIGURE 6.5a) is a rendition of Dorothea Lange’s classic photograph Migrant Mother, Nipomo, Calif. If we squint our eyes or look at the picture from a distance, we can make out a young mother with an expression of deep concern as her children huddle around her. And when we learn that this picture was taken during the Great Depression, we can imagine this woman’s life struggle to care for herself and her family. But looking closer, we discover that the image is made up of hundreds of tiny photographs of assorted aspects of this woman’s surroundings, such as a door and a weather vane (FIGURE 6.5b). Although these tiny images make up the broader image, none of them captures the emotional significance of this woman’s life as clearly as the broader perspective does.

In a similar sense, the question of identity—Who am I?—is easy to answer from a distance. We can step back and describe ourselves with broad generalizations such as family oriented, outgoing, ambitious, and so on. But up close we see that our lives are made up of thousands of separate memories, behaviors, and other elements of experience that have little meaning of their own. How do we integrate these lived experiences to establish consistency at the macro level of our overall self-concept?

Self-consistency Across Situations

If you were to describe yourself in a personal ad right now, you might use characteristics like ambitious, cooperative, and shy. But do you always think and act in line with these broad traits? For example, you may think of yourself as introverted. But if you dredge up a different set of experiences—such as karaoke nights when you’ve been known to belt out “Sweet Home Alabama” in front of total strangers—you might come to a very different conclusion about what characteristics define you.

Despite such inconsistencies, most people prefer self-concept clarity, a clearly defined, internally consistent, and temporally stable self-concept (Campbell, 1990). In fact, individuals with high self-concept clarity may be happier and better equipped to cope with life’s challenges. Why? Individuals with high self-concept clarity are less sensitive to the feedback they receive from others, such as insults or nasty looks on the street. In contrast, individuals with low self-concept clarity tend to look to other people’s feedback to understand who they are. Their attitudes toward themselves are therefore more likely to fluctuate, depending on whether they perceive that others view them positively or negatively. Studies suggest that people high in social status have greater self-concept clarity than those low in social status, perhaps because they are less dependent on the social context around them (Kraus et al., 2012).

One way people sustain a clear self-concept is by seeking out diagnostic information about themselves. People often search for ways to assess their traits and abilities to have an accurate view of themselves (e.g., Sedikides & Strube, 1997; Trope, 1986). They gather others’ opinions of them, take personality and ability tests, see how they do on challenging tasks, and compare themselves with others.

People also tend to seek out others and social situations that confirm the way they view themselves, a phenomenon known as self-verification. People have a propensity to seek out others who corroborate their self-image, even when that means affiliating with people who don’t think all that highly of them (Swann, 1983). Most people report thinking positively of themselves and prefer others who bolster their self-esteem. However, those with negative self-views (e.g., more depressed people) choose to interact with people who have a more negative impression of them (Swann et al., 1992). Although this preference for self-verification can help to solidify a clear and consistent sense of self, the unfortunate cost is that those with low self-esteem might avoid people who would actually help bolster and reinforce a more positive self-view.

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Although self-concept clarity has benefits, to some degree we’re all aware that we act differently when we find ourselves in different roles or situations. Perhaps you’re laid back and even silly when hanging out with friends, but a couple hours later at the gym you’re ambitious and aggressive. The poet Walt Whitman (1855/2001, p. 113) acknowledged and even celebrated contradictions in his own self-concept:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Research on self-complexity examines the degree to which the self-concept is made up of many distinct aspects, including social roles (e.g., student), relationships (e.g., daughter), and activities (e.g., mountain biking). One benefit of high self-complexity is that the person can cope with difficulties in one area of life by drawing strength from others (Linville, 1985). However, self-complexity contributes to stress if the many facets of the self seem to be forced on the person and cause conflicting demands (e.g., Goode, 1960; McConnell et al., 2005).

My Story: Self-consistency Across Time

To tie together separate pieces of experience over time into a coherent whole, each person constructs a self-narrative, or life story, in which he or she is the protagonist in a continuously unfolding drama of life, complete with characters, setting, plot, motivation, conflicts, and their resolutions (Bruner, 1990; Erickson, 1968; Gergen & Gergen, 1988; McAdams, 1993, 2001). Self-narratives integrate these various aspects of personal history, everyday experience, roles, and envisioned future into a unified, purposeful whole: This is what I was, how I’ve come to be, who I am, and what I am becoming. Why do we need a narrative understanding of ourselves in time?

A clear self-narrative provides a basis for effective action, helping us to gauge what actions we should or should not attempt and what future challenges and obstacles might arise. But making sense of experience does more than facilitate action: It also provides psychological security by connecting separate experiences together into a coherent whole that is more significant and longer lasting than a series of passing moments. For example, you might view the time you overcame a bully in grade school and the time you stood up to an oppressive boss 10 years later as fitting a theme of “standing up for myself” that summarizes an important part of your self-concept.

Research supports the idea that a need for psychological security motivates people to integrate their personal past and present into a coherent story. For example, Landau and colleagues (2009) showed that after a reminder of death, participants attempted to restore psychological security by seeing their past experiences as meaningfully connected to the person they are now, rather than as isolated events. Related studies show that whereas participants typically saw life as less meaningful after being reminded of death, this was not the case for participants who were prompted to think nostalgically about the past (Routledge et al., 2008). These individuals were able to use their perceptions of the past as a psychological shield against mortality, bolstering their conception that their own life has enduring significance.

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Researchers have also found that although nostalgia can be bittersweet, overall it serves a number of positive psychological functions: It generates positive moods, boosts self-esteem, enhances our feelings of being connected to others, and increases a sense of meaning in life (e.g., Routledge et al., 2011; Wildschut et al., 2006). Furthermore, nostalgic memories enable us to feel a greater sense of self-continuity: People who are asked about a nostalgic episode report a stronger connection between who they were in the past and who they are now (Sedikides et al., 2008).

Because self-narratives fit the past, present, and future into a consistent and meaningful structure, they can also help the person to “work through” the emotional pain caused by stressful events and experiences.

Not only do self-narratives create meaning from the past, they also allow people to view their present self as on a stable path to future selves that will make a lasting mark on the world. They may view themselves as literally continuing after their death to eternal life, or they may picture themselves as symbolically immortalized through their identification with enduring entities and causes (e.g., the nation, the corporation), memories, and cultural achievements in the sciences and arts (Greenberg et al., 2009). But a more everyday means of bolstering self-consistency is to connect current events to long-term goals. Whereas perceiving the events scheduled in the coming week (e.g., pick up business cards) as a series of separate activities offers little sense that one’s actions are significant, seeing the same activities as tied to one’s broader, long-term goals (e.g., advance my career) may help to sustain a meaningful conception of one’s life (Landau et al., 2011).

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