L5 - Cognitive Dissonance

Question 1

What is classical conditioning?

Answer 1

• Pairing stimulus with a neutral stimulus until it elicits a reaction
• More abstract responses between stimulus-response but it still is stimulus-response learning

Question 2

What is behaviourism?

Answer 2

• Psychology should be an observational science
• Cannot observe internal mental states
• Behaviour is a function of the environment: things need to be quantified
• Reliable effects when you pair stimulus together to get the same results
• All about reinforcement - association is key

Question 3

What is radical behaviourism?

Answer 3

• Mental states do not cause behaviour
• James-line theory of emotion
• Stuff happens and then you rationalise that post-hoc (stimulus-response relationship)

Question 4

What did Festinger do (study)

Answer 4

• Natural experiment with a doomsday cult who predicted a massive flood
• Aliens will arrive and rescue the chosen
• Cult is infiltrated by researchers who then observe interactions
• Flood doesn’t arrive

Question 5

What happens when prophecy fails?

Answer 5

• Increased fervour in their beliefs
• Especially those who had the deepest convictions, committed action, social support
• Greater ‘liking’ following negative reinforcement
• Behaviourism cannot explain this and something unobservable has happened
• Was cognitive conflict and protecting self esteem

Question 6

What is cognitive dissonance theory?

Answer 6

• Consistency motivation
• Avoid experience of inconsistency
• Aversive arousal
• Altering attitudes or construals to reduce the feeling
• Reduce feeling in short term even if it leads to more punishment in the long term

Question 7

How does this compare to physics and gravity?

Answer 7

• Systematic changes in the env
• Look at the effects of changes e.g gravity only acts on something and you observe the change
• Similarly you have to infer mental states

Question 8

What is post-decisional dissonance?

Answer 8

• Once a choice is made, you are hyper aware of regrets and the negatives, but you miss the positives of the alternatives
• Convince yourself of something

Question 9

What is the free choice paradigm? (Exp)

Answer 9

• Tell people doing market research
• Rank items in terms of desirability (1-8)
• Will be given 2 random products
• 2 dissonance conditions: high dissonance condition: 2 things that are high or one thing is high and the other is low ranked
• Stopped before they leave the store and told to rank all the objects again
• Spreading of alternatives and the ones you get given move up the ranking

Question 10

What is the effort justification dissonance? (Exp)

Answer 10

• Female ppts join a group discussing sexual behaviour
• Control condition: travel stories
• Embarrassing test - how embarrassed do you get in an awkward situation
• Mild condition: about sex but not too obscene
• Severe condition: 12 obscene words and 2 vivid scenes from a book
• Ppts listen to a pre-recorded discussion about secondary sexual characteristics of animals
• Known to be a boring topic to discuss
• Ordeal to get to a certain point so you say you enjoy the topic
• Had to rate the interest of discussion and quality of group convo and those in the mild and severe conditions had higher scores of interest

Question 11

What is the forbidden fruit experiment?

Answer 11

• Children play with 5 toys and rank them 1-5
• Told they can play with 3 toys, but not allowed to play with the second ranked toy because (mild condition) the exp will be annoyed (little bit of free choice) or (Strong threat) exp would be angry, take all toys and go home, never play with kid again
• Had to re-rank toys: severe threat condition = increased liking of toy, mild = decreased ranking
• Doing what you are not supposed to increased sense of choice, could be more valuable

Question 12

What is compliance dissonance? (Study)

Answer 12

• Very boring task
• Told to instruct the next person that it was good either for a dollar or 20
• Asked to rate task on enjoyability: 1 dollar = say it was enjoyable, 20 & 0 = say it was boring
• Was it worth lying to someone over a dollar = dissonance goes away because they change the way they interpreted the experience.

Question 13

What is dissonance reduction? (How to do this)

Answer 13

• Explaining current behaviour
• Self-perception theory: no aversive arousal and no altered cognitions
• Just offering a plausible explanation for behaviour

Question 14

What is the misattribution of arousal?

Answer 14

How do we check if arousal produces dissonance

Question 15

How do we infer the role of arousal?

Answer 15

• Making people aware they are aroused
• Seeing if that extinguishes the dissonance effects
• Makes people misattribute their arousal to some other source

Question 16

Study of dissonance and the pill:

Answer 16

• Memory study where herbal thing is given and see if it impacts STM capacity
• Create diff pill expectations e.g tense, none, relaxed
• Second unrelated study where you write an essay on banning free speech on campus
• Either in high choice - pls do it but its upto you or low choice - you have to do it
• Measure attitude towards banning free speech
• Kills dissonance effect if the herbal thing was causing you to be tense due to misattribution

Question 17

What did Aronson say about dissonance reduction?

Answer 17

• Inconsistent with self-concept
• Negative behaviours
• Must cause harm with aversive arousal
• Violates self-concept and self-esteem

Question 18

What was Aronson’s study?

Answer 18

• Argue in favour of marijuana increase
• Either 5/50 dollars to three groups: opposed, in favour or neutral
• Only arguments to neutral should cause harm and violate self-concept

Question 19

What was the study on animals with cognitive dissonance?

Answer 19

• Rats and starlings appear to demonstrate effort justification dissonance reduction and prefer food they worked harder to obtain in the past
• Monkeys engage in post-decisional dissonance reduction and derogate favoured food they could not choose

Question 20

What is unconscious dissonance reduction? And results? (Pt 2)

Answer 20

• Pre and post manipulation measures of personal attitudes on several issues regarding university life
• Ppts who had a high choice in engaging in counter attitudinal behaviour changed their opinion towards the anti-control position = replication of previous findings, were also unable to recall their pre-manipulation attitudes correctly AND perceived their post-manipulation attitudes to be identical to their pre-manipulation attitudes AND did not perceive any attitude changes

Question 21

What was the study on unconscious dissonance reduction? (Pt 1)

Answer 21

• No choice: One page essay arguing students should have no control over courses at uni
• High condition: choose the position you want to defend, but they encouraged anti-control arguments
• Control: no essay

Question 22

Study on unconscious dissonance reduction: (art pt 1)

Answer 22

• Patients with anterograde amnesia cannot retain new info
• Free choice paradigm where you rank 15 art prints and choose 1/2 to take home and then rank all pairs and do a memory test
• Amnesiacs don’t remember which paints they chose but both normal and amnesic patients exhibited post-choice attitude change
• Explicit memory for their initial attitude is not necessary

Question 23

Part 2 of art study?

Answer 23

• Non-impaired ppts with the same procedure as before
• Manipulate cognitive load during the choice and re-rank phases e.g hear a tone but ignore them (low load) or count the tones (high load)
• Load should reduce attentional and processing capacity
• High load impaired encoding BUT both high and low load ppts had post-choice attitude change SO attention and working memory are not necessary so it is an automatic process

Question 23

What was the study on dissonance reduction and sense perception:

Answer 23

• When task was more challenging = more dissonance reduction by changing one’s perception
• Perceived as less challenging
• ANOTHER STUDY looked at the emotional reactions to embarrassing experiences
• Had to wear a carmen miranda costume and walk 111m on campus wearing the costume before guessing the distance they walked
• Low control = highest distance, low choice = lowest distance
• ANOTHER STUDY = push skateboard up a hill and had to estimate the incline of the hill, low choice = highest angle, high control = lowest angle