The Salience Of Attitude Importance In Cognitive Dissonance

When it comes to cognitive dissonance and how it creates attitude change it all comes about because of cognitive dissonance having a lot to do with emotional turbulences, with this it causes people to change their attitudes. This happens because people change their attitudes just to get over the conflict that results from cognitive dissonance. The fact of the matter is that if someone has a negative attitude about something, his or her attitude about the given situation and sometime even feels that he or she enjoys it just so they can feel good. At the end of the day cognitive dissonance is a very powerful motivation tool and in turn it can be used to change someone attitude. It is not used in mass advertising because cognitive dissonance can

Cognitive dissonance is defined as the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change. Cognitive dissonance occurs most often when a person’s beliefs, morals or feeling are one way but they do not act accordingly. This dissonance may be displayed in numerous ways that may be done outwardly but also there is an internal process that takes place. A use of internal processing involves many different functions, included but not limited to, thinking, perception and problem solving. The driving force of dissonance is that we as humans attempt to align opposing thoughts or ideas and carry on with life in a way that still meets our morals, set standards or way of thinking. In doing so, we are then challenged to find what we believe as appropriate reasoning for making

The subjects performed a series of tedious task involving using one hand to put spools onto and then off of a tray for half an hour and then told to use one hand to turn pegs a quarter turn clockwise for another half an hour. Cycle was repeated until time ran out. The independent variable was the amount of money the participants were paid, either one dollar or twenty dollars, to tell the next participant that the task was enjoyable. In the control condition, the subjects did not have any expectations for the task as the subjects were never told or asked to tell the female confederate waiting in the secretary’s office about the experimental tasks. In the experimental conditions, the subjects were paid to tell a female confederate that the experimental task was interesting and fun. Subjects were paid one dollar in one condition and twenty dollars in another condition. The conversation was recorded and coded. The dependent variable was the participants’ actual rating of their enjoyment of the task, assessed in an interview following the task. The interview looked at the how the person liked the task on a negative 5 to positive 5 scale. Second area did the experiment gave them an opportunity to learn about one’s own skills, assessed with a zero to ten scale. The third area used the zero to ten scale again to rate whether they felt the activities were important. Lastly, subjects used a negative 5 to positive 5 scale to measure one’s likelihood to participant in a similar studies in the

For the theory to be accepted though, the assumption that dissonance is psychologically uncomfortable must be agreed upon. Another assumption is that people prefer consonance to dissonance. People are pleased when there are no conflicts between their cognitive elements, because it creates harmony within the person. From here, Festinger proposed the major theoretic proposition of the theory that the higher the dissonance, the higher the drive to reduce it. The problem with any assumption is that the criterion has to be filled in order for the theory to work. If there is a person who does not feel psychologically uncomfortable with cognitive dissonance, the theory will not apply. These people do not fit into society and lead to many problems such as serial killers or random shooters.

The principal assumption of the theory regarding to Hogg and Vaughan (2011, p.214) “is that cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant state of psychological tension generated when a person has two or more cognitions (bits of information) that are inconsistent or do not fit together. So if people at the same time hold those two cognitions (thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, states of awareness of behaviour), which are psychologically inconsistent, then we experience dissonance. The theory also accounts for discrepancies between behaviour and attitudes. For instance, when people act in a manner that is inconsistent with their attitudes, then they experience tension. And how people can reduce this tension? Festinger (1957) suggested people have to do it by changing their attitudes so that they are in line with their behavior. The main way of reducing dissonance is attitude change. The theory propose that when we are dealing with two conflicting beliefs then we experience tension or an aversive state and a good example is military training. The military teaches and telling soldiers that when they kill the enemy its nothing wrong and killing them is a good thing but those same soldiers have a deeply natural and inborn belief that “thou shalt not kill”(Sturman, 2012) . Another example is about person who smokes cigarettes. Regarding to Stone and Cooper (2001) most people

Taylor Wood COM-201 Response Paper 1: Cognitive Dissonance Theory Life is full of uncomfortable situations. Whether it’s 12:01 on December 21, 2012 or seconds before a drop on a rollercoaster, we rationalize the situation to create a sense of equilibrium. Cognitive Dissonance Theory explains why we experience the mental discomfort called dissonance that arises from “inconsistent attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors” and how we take action or change our thinking to alleviate the discomfort (West & Turner, 2014, pp. 110-111).

Cognitive Dissonance is a tense discomfort that we get when we realize that we have made a mistake or have committed hypocrisy. There are several different ways that we get rid of cognitive dissonance, some of them include a change in behavior, denial, and excuse making. In this essay I will discuss cognitive dissonance, its consequences, and how to solve the problem of excuse making in our society.

What gives people the values and ideologies they hold so dear as adults? It all begins with their first role models. The first role models for children are their parents. It is from their first role models children begin to cognitively form, develop, and learn their first ideologies and values, which shapes who they are and what they believe as children. They start to develop their first political ideologies from their parents. Naturally, they follow the religiosity of their parents. They learn many of their behaviors and attitudes from their parents. However, as these children grow older there will eventually be a time when these ideologies and values fall into question, especially when two conflicting beliefs upset the inner harmonious

- According to cognitive dissonance theory, there is a tendency for individuals to seek consistency among their cognitions (i.e., beliefs, opinions). When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance. In the case of a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior, it is most likely that the attitude will change to accommodate the behavior.

People have the tendency to only see what they want to see sometimes, but why? Seeing or hearing something that does not match up with one’s views or morals can lead to cognitive dissonance. According to Thibodeau and Aronson (1992) this is particularly true if a person hears something that can lead to them themselves being personally responsible for a negative event. The thought of causing something they know to be negative doesn’t coincide with their need to be good and right. People typically like to believe that their views and they themselves are right, and any objection to either of these things can be interpreted by the person as they themselves being bad.

People experience cognitive dissonance when they perceive that there is a mismatch between their attitudes and behaviors. Because we are motivated to keep our cognitions consistent, the inconsistency brought about by dissonance becomes a drive that must be reduced. This is done by changing either the attitude or the behavior such that they may accurately align with each other. Eventually, the New Look model to dissonance will shift the causal path to an explanation using avoidance of aversive consequences, but still resulting in the same need to reduce cognitive inconsistency. Finally, addressing the limitations of the former, the Self-Standards approach operationalizes the nature of aversive consequences as violations of societal or

What are cognitions? It is a way of knowing, believing, judging, and thoughts (West & Turner, 2014, p. 110). Leon Festinger used the theory of Cognitive Dissonance to explain imbalances of cognitions. So Cognitive Dissonance simply is the discomfort that is caused by holding conflicting cognitions. The theory argues that dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling that motivates people to take steps to reduce it (West & Turner, 2014, p. 110). The reason to for wanting to reduce it is because when people are in the state of dissonance and may feel dread, anger, guilt, or embarrassment. As a result, people will often ignore views that oppose their own, change their beliefs to match their actions (or vice versa), and/or seek reassurances after making

The cognitive dissonance theory specifies that inconsistencies in an individual’s thoughts and actions lead to mental tension, dissonance, and cause us to take actions to reduce this dissonance. Actions include either changing the way you think about something or the way you action. The amount of dissonance can vary depending on justification; an unjustifiable causes more dissonance in comparison to acting with a good enough reason, depends how the individual’s morals. In Festinger and Carlsmith’s study, individuals were either given $1 or $20 to state opinions that weren’t consistent with there own. Individuals who were paid $1 had less justification for the inconsistency which lead to higher levels of dissonance. As a result, they were more

side from being testable through experiments such as the mentioned above, cognitive dissonance theory can predict future events, which is a criteria of a good theory according to Griffin (p. 25), by helping to explain human behavior. “Social psychologists have been trying for many years to predict the conditions under which attitudes and opinions are changed...first major breakthrough in this area came [from] Leon Festinger” (Chapanis, 1964). Objective theorist aim for reality, and when they measure and report their experiments, they prefer to use numerical terms rather than linguistic terms (Griffin, 215, p.28). The most eye grabbing criteria of any theory is simplicity. “No matter how complex the social situation, Festinger assumes that it is possible to represent the meaning which the situation has for an individual by a series of elementary cognitions—statements that an individual might make describing his knowledge, opinions or beliefs“ (Chapanis, 1964).

Cognitive Dissonance has provided me with theoretical orientation which has assisted me in understanding the “psychological discomfort” experienced when some beliefs were incongruent with my behavior. But first we need to revisit time spent with my family as a I grew up, to understand how the cognitive dissonance experience came to be. I consider myself to be fortunate for having such a close relationship with both my sisters and my parents. We laugh together, we discuss politics, philosophy and religion. However, the subject of the conversation sometimes shifted gears and the center of the stage was taken over by both my parents speaking about “mujeres liberales” women who were too liberal. One theme that often seemed to accompany the subject of the dialogue were women who spent time at the night clubs. I unconsciously internalized their stories and when I went off to college I had many opportunities to do just that and spend time dancing at the clubs.