Sweet to bitter: Dissonance of scuba diving experience

This paper investigates cognitive dissonance in the scuba diving experience. Recent studies show that despite the positive attitudes of scuba divers, negative behaviour and unsupervised practices have had undesirable effects on the ecosystem and its experience economy. Therefore, this paper examines the sweet and bitter sides of experience from scuba divers' perspective, and the role of cognitive dissonance. Using Benner's interpretive phenomenology approach, this paper explores how scuba divers experience cognitive dissonance when confronted with sustainability issues. The findings highlight that while scuba divers have positive feelings about their experience, once sustainability issues are addressed, the experience becomes unfavourable, and the experience economy turns into unpractised; joylessness; unesthetic; and realistic.