Denial of responsibility: a new mode of dissonance reduction.

Abstract in brief

• The study explored how people use denial of responsibility as a way to reduce psychological discomfort (dissonance) after engaging in behavior that conflicts with their attitudes, through three experiments.
• The experiments found that individuals tend to choose the first available method of reducing dissonance—whether changing their attitude, trivializing the behavior, or denying responsibility—regardless of which option is presented first.
• The third experiment showed that denying responsibility helps decrease the negative emotions caused by dissonance, and the paper discusses how this denial functions as a mechanism for managing psychological conflict.]