Dissonance or Ambivalence

You may have heard of Post Purchase Dissonance before, where consumers experience
discomfort or dissonance occurs when a consumer holds conflicting thoughts about a belief or an attitude toward an object. When cognitive dissonance or ambivalence occurs  after a purchase it is called Post
Purchase Dissonance.

I would like to talk about Post Conversation Dissonance (PCD), where participants experience discomfort, holding conflicting beliefs about someone and dissonance or ambivalence about that person occurs after a conversation.

Post Purchase Dissonance occurs because each of the alternatives considered by the consumer usually has both advantages and limitations and a lack of research is done before purchase.

Post Conversation Dissonance can occur because participants have differing objectives for
having that specific conversation and fail to do the research beforehand.

The reason that we converse can be for a number of reasons depending on the situation or
person. For example, one may simply want to kill some time on a long trip, or doing some research in a new location. We may just want to share our latest triumph or get some consolation for our latest failure. We could be talking to the opposite sex and checking out a potential or doing some research on solving the problems of conflict in relationships (as I am doing here).

So what happens if any disagreement occur in such impromptu conversations? Do we end the conversation then and there and how do we do that, or do we simply change the subject? Or do we simply talk about stuff that has little if any chance of creating a disagreement. And finally how do we end such conversations.

All of these things go through our minds without us even being conscious of them but imagine if we became more aware of this issue and we carried out some specific research, before having our conversation? We could save ourselves some possibly uncomfortable situations and we also could end up with some very unusually productive conversations.