Immediately, she said, "Oh, I do that all the time."
Lauren occasionally bends the truth when talking to her parents. Usually only about living with her lesbian lover (me). She said that even though she believes that this is her best option, she still feels remorse for lying.
That is, until she talks to our friends about it. Because some of our friends are in the same situation (i.e. not "out" to their parents), they also make the difficult decision to lie to their parents about certain aspects of their lives. This evidence that other people also lie to their parents about their sexuality makes Lauren feel less remorse and anxiety about her lies. And thus, her cognitive dissonance is relieved.
So, like the participants in the study conducted by McKimmie et al. (2003), when Lauren was able to justify her dissonant behavior by concluding that other people are also hypocrites, her anxious and remorseful feelings were alleviated.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
McKimmie, B.M., Terry, D.J., Hogg, M.A., Manstead, A.S.R., Spears, R., & Doosje, B. (2003). I'm a hypocrite, but so is everyone else: Group support and the reduction of cognitive dissonance. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 7, 214-224.
That's rough. I feel like sometimes I do that a lot to my lady friend. She has a high position in an organization on campus and sometimes I give my input on how she should handle certain situations, given her authority. I sound big and bad when I say some things and kind of get upset when she doesn't take my advice on bold actions, but to be honest I'd probs be to scared to do some (maybe most) of the things I propose. :/ I say that she's all for a cause until somethings actually has to be done about it, which is so hypocritical of me.
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