The Self Standards Model Of Dissonance

The concept of self esteem is widespread in life. When it comes to academics and extracurricular actives people associate high self esteem is necessary for success. Society makes promoting self esteem an important goal. With that in mind, it is surprising that only recently scientific literature began providing insight into the nature of development of self esteem.

Climate change is the long term shift in global climate patterns attributed mainly to the use of fossil fuels. Many people are aware of this issue, however, there has been an increase in the amount of people who deny climate change. 23 percent of Americans (compared to last year’s 16 percent) believe that climate change is not a problem (Atkin). To conclude that people do not accept cli­mate change because they do not under­stand it or need to be educated about it, is reasonable. However, I believe that it isn’t skepticism driving this denial. Rather, it is the phenomenon of reaffirming one’s identity. Instead of analyzing the evidence, it is intentionally interpreted in such a way as to maintain a pre-existing belief.

In Michael Pollan’s article “Why Bother?”, he addresses the issue of climate change and the inner reasoning behind those who don’t acknowledge or bother with the crisis. Pollan intertwines a discussion of the rising danger of global warming with a psychological discussion of personal virtue. He emphasis his main point of climate crisis by providing examples and data stating, “we have only ten years left to start cutting—not just slowing—the amount of carbon we’re emitting…So:eight years left and a great deal to do.” (117). His discussion of personal reasoning to the problem of people not responding to global warming is intertwined through the direct question that is the title and by other experiences such as Wendell Berry’s comments on the

If one is trying to pull a thought or feeling in closer, or push it away, they may be attempting to manipulate their cognitive dissonance. If one knows that they are not happy with their actions, they can dilute that feeling of cognitive dissonance by decreasing the negative or enhancing the positive attitudes about it (Smith & Mackie, n.d.). One might be a smoker for instance, and know that smoking is bad for them, but continue smoking anyway. A perception of a clash of unsuitable elements is a way to describe the way one feels when their actions and beliefs are at odds (McLeod, 2014). So, if one is unhappy about the things they do because they do not match what they think they should do, they will be said to be experiencing cognitive dissonance.

Through his research, McCright proves that that there is sizable political divide between liberals/Democrats and conservatives/Republicans on the issue of global warming, which consequently has caused the divide between the public. The constant flow of political messages and media coverage of political debates, especially those concerning climate change, highly contribute to the growing divide between the public. Americans’ political orientations, moderate educational attainment and self-reported understanding are completely consistent with the predictions of the politicians’ hypothesis and information-processing theory. Given the bifurcated flow of conflicting information on climate change from the politicians on both sides of the political spectrum, ideological and partisan camps in the general public receive completely different information on climate change, which reinforces their existing political differences. This provides strong evidence of both ideological and political polarization on climate change beliefs and concern over the past decade. It demonstrates that since political ideologies so heavily influence people’s opinions and

Self-justification is a human defense mechanism that plays a significant role in our daily lives and may damage our relationships. Most people prefer selecting details that support their beliefs and ignoring evidence that conflicts with their beliefs. This “mental contortion” as the authors call it, is “confirmation bias” (22). They explain how “when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort,

Climate scientists have come to the deduction that human activity is responsible for the Earth’s surface temperature rising at a very rapid rate over the past thirty years and the very serious implications that could result. The purpose of this paper is to answer why there are an astounding number of Americans that deny global warming despite the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community. The hypothesis of this paper is: due to America’s shift from a functionalist perspective to a postmodern perspective; the population is more susceptible to information released by self interest groups attempting to sway public opinion. The study was a compilation of diverse methods. Using qualitative as well as quantitative research, the author came

According to Darity (2008), the theory of cognitive dissonance refers to an individual’s conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors, the resulting feeling of discomfort within the individual and the individual’s inevitable desire to reduce the discomfort by changing their attitude, belief or behavior in order to create cognitive consonance and harmony (Fox, 2006; Cognitive Dissonance, 2008; Hershey, Blanchard and Johnson, 2012). A cigarette smoker is a commonly used example of a cognitively dissonant individual. For example, Sarah, smoker may feel the need to quit do to the dangers of smoking but Sarah may also want to smoke because they like the feeling of smoking. Sarah’s attitudes are conflicting and to ease her discomfort she will adjust their attitude to fit the behavior by convincing her that there isn’t enough evidence of the dangers of smoking. Another example is when an individual decides that they don’t want to eat fatty foods in order to lose weight but the individual eats a donut after dinner and convinces themselves that the donut isn’t that fatty.

The principle of self-justification explains the dissonance of two or more thoughts or beliefs that are inconsistent. For example, when our attitudes change, we experience a feeling of tension that happens after we act in contrary to our attitudes or when we make difficult decisions to reduce the arousal of our behavior. Furthermore, these principle of self-justification is composed of two strategies the internal self-justification and the external self-justification. The internal self-justification refers to the change that people perceive when their actions are in denial or when they have negative consequences, while the external self-justification refers to the use of external excuses used to justify one’s actions.

The idea of self is a significant part of every individual’s life. The way we visualise ourselves can be altered by feelings of self worth and self esteem and lead to a change or influence in the way we act. The evaluation of one’s attitude towards self can be seen to be improved by the individual believing they are worthy which could lead to a self fulfilling prophecy. The better-than-average effect can depict this theory by assessing individuals on their motivational bias and attributes (Brown, 2011). In this particular study, participants are given a questionnaire regarding ten traits, half of high importance and half of low importance. They were then told to rate these attributes on importance of possession. As predicted, the results show that the

The first approach to self-schema development we will evaluate is Self-Discrepancy Theory (SDT) (Higgins, 1987). In this theory self-schemas develop to drive the actual self (who somebody is now) towards the ideal self (who somebody wants to be) and the ought self (who somebody should be according to others). Reflected appraisals build a network of the actual self, and this knowledge is used to move towards the ideal and ought selves. Discrepancies between actual and ideal result in dejection, and discrepancies between actual and ought result in agitation (Higgins, Bond, Klein, &

Self esteem can bring positive or negative outcomes when it comes to task performance. Thus, people with greater levels of self-esteem and no stereotype presence build on personal strengths to succeed, whereas people with lower levels of self-esteem and stereotype presence attempt to deal with their flaws to be accepted (Baumeister & Tice, 1985; Brown & Dutton, 1995). Therefore, we wish to determine whether stereotype threat effects could be reduced or eliminated by activating self-esteem. We hypothesized that by directly addressing the need to maintain a sense of self-worth through affirming a valued characteristic that is not under threat, we would reduce or eliminated the impact of the stereotype threat, allowing people to feel more confident to deal with the situation and perform better.

The present research set out to test Nail et al (2010, March) theory that using a role-playing paradigm instead of deception as an adequate way of testing cognitive dissonance. To do this we replicated Nail et al. (2010, March) experiment using the paradigm of being stood up by Chris who was in a car accident (sufficient justification) or being stood up by Chris who received another invitation for dinner by a different friend (insufficient justification). Our findings were in support of Nail et al. (2010, March), with sufficient participants level of dissonance at (M= 2.49) and insufficient participants level dissonance at (M= 8.05). The research also tested the theory that having social support would reduce the dissonance. To do

Leon Festinger created the cognitive dissonance theory as an attempt to explain why people desire to have consistency between their behaviors and actions. Cognitive dissonance is the distressing mental state people feel when they find themselves doing things that don’t fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold (Festinger, 1957; as cited in Griffin, 2009). Thus, people are motivated to change either their behavior or their belief when feelings of dissonance arise.

Most people strive to produce the most positive image of themselves, to society and those around them. This behavior, the outward expression of ourselves, is known as the social self. While most perceive our social self to be heavily influenced by our personal causes, studies continue to display situational influences as well (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2014). This underestimated role of situations on our social self, is coined fundamental attribution error (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2014). Below details individualistic and collective cultures influences and well as cognitive biases effects on fundamental attribution error and ultimately our social self.