Definition
Cognition is the sum total of an individual’s beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, needs, goals, and learned reactions about some aspect of the individual’s world. A cognition is the pattern of meaning of a thing. The term refers to the mental processes of interpretation and decision making, including the beliefs and meanings they create.
Cognitive processes refers to the mental activities by which external information in the environment is transformed into meanings or patterns of thought and combined to form judgments about behavior.
Cognitive response refers to the thoughts a consumer has in response to a persuasive message, such as support arguments or counterarguments.
Cognitive dissonance is a term coined by Leon Festinger to describe the feeling of discomfort or imbalance that is presumed to be evident when various cognitions about a thing are not in agreement with each other—i.e., a psychologically uncomfortable state produced by an inconsistency between beliefs and behaviors, producing a motivation to reduce the dissonance. For example, knowledge that smoking leads to serious physical ailments is dissonant with the belief that smoking is pleasurable and the psycho-physiological need to smoke. Cognitive dissonance is similar to Heider’s work on Balance Theory and Osgood and Tannenbaum’s Congruity Theory.
References
- American Marketing Association, AMA Dictionary.