Cognitive Dissonance

Max Browning
April 8, 2015
Observation #2

On February 25th at 11:17 PM I was studying for my Argumentation and Debate class when I was surprised by the past year's president to tell me that I was the new president of Ball State University Dance Marathon.  While this should have been an amazing time in my life, the past year's executives kept mentioning that they were surprised that I did not happier.

Side note: I do not really show excitement.

Anyways, I was really just terrified.  I had gone to my interview and they drilled me with questions pertaining to problems they saw in my personality and leadership styles.  They made me defend every decision that I had made in the past two years and then told me why they disagreed.

This brought me a lot of dissonance as I felt as though I should be proud of my new position, but at the same time I felt as though I was not ready for the position.  This was the largest decision that I had made in my life to date and it created a deep need for reassurance.  The theory helps to clarify important decisions as those that are difficult to reverse and that had more time to past.  Becoming president of Dance Marathon is completely irreversible unless I were to step down which would put the entire organization at a disservice.  Likewise, the decision had been made over the past two and a half years.

It was not until I received more reassurance from my friends and family that I became confident in my ability to lead the organization (over 100 text messages in the first hour alone).  After all of the reassurance, I felt less dissonance about my decision.  I did not like the tension so I thoroughly enjoy now being able to make sense of everything.