Cognitive Dissonance

<-NARRATOR:-> Now listen to part of a lecture about this topic in a sociology class.
<-MALE PROFESSOR:-> This is a true story—from my own life.
In my first year in high school, I was addicted to video games.
I played them all the time and I wasn't studying enough—
I was failing chemistry.
That was my hardest class.
So this was a conflict for me, because I wanted a good job when I grew up, and I believed—I knew—that if you want a good career, you got to do well in school.
But I just couldn't give up video games.
I was completely torn.
And my solution was to...to change my perspective.
See, the only class I was doing really badly in was chemistry.
In the others, I was...l was ok.
So I asked myself, if I wanted to be a chemist when I grew up, and the fact is I didn't.
I was pretty sure I wanted to be a sociologist, so I told myself my chemistry class didn't matter, because sociologists don't really need to know chemistry.
In other words, I changed my understanding of what it meant to do well in school.
I reinterpreted my situation.
I used to think that doing well in school meant doing well in all my classes.
But now I decided that succeeding in school meant only doing well in the classes that related directly to my future career.
I eliminated the conflict, at least in my mind.