Chaper 6 - The need to justify our action Flashcards
What is cognitive dissonance?
A drive or feeling or discomfort, originally defined as being caused by holding two or more inconsistent cognitions and subsequently defined as being caused by performing an action that is discrepant from one’s customary, typically positive self-conseption.
Who first discovered the process of cognitive dissonance?
Leon Festinger.
Mention three ways of reducing cogntive dissonance?
- Changing our behavior so that it’s on par with our dissonant cognition.
- Justification of our behavior through changing one of our dissonant cognitions.
- Justifying our behavior through adding new cognitions.
With cigarette smoking as an example of cognitive dissonance( I smoke, but I know that it might kill me), explain how people could reduce cognitive dissonance according to the three stratergies.
- Quit smoking. Your behavior is now not causing a dissonance with your knowledge of the dangers of smoking.
- Smoking isn’t really that dangerous. You’ve changed your cognition.
- But smoking is so relaxing, makes me less stressed, keeps me slim, and hightens my quality of life. You’ve added new cognitions justifying the bad qualities of smoking.
Why is it so troublesome for us to have dissonant cognitions?
We have a need to maintain a positive self-image as a rational and competent person. Doing something that you don’t believe in is irrational.
What is impact bias?
Our tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of one’s emotional reactions to future negative events. Aka, you forget how good they are at reducing cognitive dissonance?
Why, do we fall to the impact bias? We’ve successfully reduced cognitive dissonance before, we will do it again.
Because dissonancereduction is mostly unconscious.
What is postdecision dissonance?
DIssonance aroused after making a decision, typically reduced by enhancing the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and devaluating the rejected alternatives. The more important the decision, the greater the dissonance. More dissonance is also caused if the decision is permanent.
How can dissonancereduction change your moral attitudes?
Studies on cheating carried out by Judson Mills (1958). He gave difficult tests to a class and making it easy to cheat. The ones who cheated loosened in their stance on cheating in order to reduce the dissonance their cheating had caused. The ones who refrained from cheating, and therefore did poorly on the test - not winning the prize, experienced dissonance because they could have cheated easily and won. Their stance on cheating became much more strict than it was before.
Explain the neural mechanisms of cognitive dissonance as discovered by Drew Westen et al (2006).
They found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when a person was confronted with dissonant information, and that the emotional circuits light up happily when consonance was restored. As Westen put it, people twirl the “cogntivie kaleidoscope” until the pieces fall into the pattern they want to see, and then the brain repays them by activating pleasure circuits.
What is justification of effort?
The tendency for individuals to increase their liking for something they have worked hard to attain. Aronson and Mills (1959) studied this in the sex-discussion-experiment.
What happens when you do something counter to your beliefs and there is a lack of external justification?
Cogntive dissonance theory predicts that you will have to change your beliefs about the behavior so that it does not create dissonance. This was studied by Festinger & Carlsmith (1959) where they induced students to use one hour on an extremely boring task, and offered them money (1$/20$) to tell the next participant that the experiment was really interesting and fun. The students who were offered little external justification for this lie tended to like the experiment more than the other group.
How can you try to change someone’s opinions by the exploitation of cognitive dissonance theory and what we know about internal and external justification?
Through hypocricy induction.
What is hypocricy induction?
The arousal of dissonance by having individuals make statements that run counter to their behaviors and then reminding them of the inconsistency between what they advocated and their behavior. The purpose is to lead individuals to more responsible behavior.
Does cognitive dissonance theory favor mild or severe punishment?
Mild punishment, because if they refrain from doing something because of insufficient punishment(external justification), they will experience cognitive dissonance and have to make an internal justification.
