As with several others, after reading the article on cognitive dissonance, I was left rather confused. I have heard of cognitive dissonance in previous Psychology classes, but I found the meaning of this article was rather scrambled. The definition of cognitive dissonance itself was easy to understand and grasp, but once the authors started going into examples and trying to explain the experiments, the confusion began. The example of the flood is almost absurd to me; I see the connection between the thought of the flood and cognitive dissonance because on the day the flood was supposed to come, it hadn't, but they believed it would. The absurd part to me is that they actually believed that such a catastrophic flood could be predicted so narrowed to a certain date. The experiment involving the Intro to Psych students at Stanford really helped explain cognitive dissonance to an understandable level. In the first sentence under 'An Experimental Investigation" the authors stated that they created dissonance by inducing the students to say something that intentionally went against their personal belief. After reading that entire section, I understood the article a lot better, but still feel that the meaning is still a little scrambled and confusing because of the other examples given.