Cognative Dissonance

...

course, just decide that cheating is okay. This would take care of any dissonance. However, if the belief is fundamental and important to you such a course of action is unlikely. Moreover, our basic beliefs and attitudes are pretty stable, and people don’t just go around changing basic beliefs/attitudes/opinions all the time, since we rely a lot on our world view to organise our thoughts and live the way we want. Therefore, though this is the simplest option for resolving dissonance it’s probably not the most common or most suggested. And researchers state that if one were to resolve dissonance through this method, the initial belief probably wasn’t even that important to the person and thus changing their belief is not detrimental to their life.

Change actions

A second option would be to make sure that you never do this action again. Everyone knows that guilt and anxiety can be motivators for changing behavior. So, you may say to yourself that you will never cheat on a test again, and this may aid in resolving the dissonance. However, aversive conditioning like anxiety and guilt can often be a pretty poor way of learning,and becomes especially dangerous if you can train yourself not to feel these things. Plus, you may really benefit in some way from the action that’s inconsistent with your beliefs. So, the trick would be to get rid of this feeling without changing your beliefs or your actions, and this leads us to the third, and probably most common, method of resolution.

Change perception of action

A third and more complex method of resolution is to change the way you view/remember/perceive your action. In more colloquial terms, you would "rationalize" your actions. For example, you might decide that the test you cheated on was for a dumb class that you didn’t need anyway. Or you may say to yourself that everyone cheats so why not you? In other words, you think about your action in a different manner or context so that it no longer appears to be inconsistent with your beliefs..

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable called cognitive dissonance. And because it so important to protect that core belief,they will rationalize,ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief” -Frantz Fanon, philosopher,psychiatrist and humanist.