Lecture 2 Flashcards
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Cognitive dissonance: “Discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas or values, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values”
Boring task - people who lie and say task is good for a small reward are motivated to reduce tension and to update their belief about how much they enjoy the task. Do not have cognitive dissonance if they are paid more to lie as they can justify with monetary reward.
Self-Perception Theory
When we have internal cues that are vague, we observe ourselves to determine what our feelings are.
Two kinds of dissonance
Pre-decisional dissonance and post-decisional dissonance
Pre-decisional dissonance
Feelings of dissonance influence decision
Example: Store A had cheaper time magazine in week 1 than store B, but they had same (more expensive) price in week 2. Store A has a lower average price but the price increase causes dissonance as people think that the magazine (week 2) is worth 25 and that they are being over-charged.
Post-decisional dissonance
Dissonance is the result of a decision, and there is an attempt to reduce this feeling.
Example: If you vote for a candidate you will rate their chances of winning as higher than before. Dissonance: you vote, and then why would you vote for somebody that you think wouldn’t win? -> change rating
Cognitive dissonance and political campaigns
Foot-in-the-door: ask for small contribution; “I gave her money, so I must like her”
Cognitive dissonance and introductory offer/marketing
Introductory offer phrase used to avoid pre-decisional dissonance. If price increases, always stress “new” and “improved”
Strategies against cognitive dissonance
Stop and consider the unpleasant sensation - why do the thoughts conflict, and which one is closer to true views? Accept the dissonance, change, retract ideas.
Selective perception
Perception is affected by expectations and goals (for cognitive consistency)
False memory/memory distortions
Context at time of recall can alter memory/create false memories - not fixed in storage.
Memory reconstruction experiment (Loftus and Palmer 1974)
- Film clip of traffic accident
- How fast were they going when they: contacted, hit, bumped, collided, smashed into each other. In order, speed was higher and higher. People “remembered” differently depending on the verbs used.
- Follow-up to see if memory could be altered: asked how fast when hit, smashed, and then control where they didn’t ask anything. 1 week later, “did you see any broken glass?” lots of people remembered in smashed into each other vs others.
Bransford & Franks (1971)
People don’t memorize sentences, they memorize a story. Difficult to recall specific sentences, easier to remember meaningful whole. That is why the ants eating sweet jelly task is so hard. Would be very taxing on memory to recall everything verbatim
Memory biases
Hindsight bias, Confirmation bias
Hindsight bias
Learning new info affects your memory of time before you knew it. So if somebody would say Obama had a 55% chance of winning before the election, but might say thought there was 75% chance after the election. Knew it all along.
Question formulation
Context; the way a question is worded -> different results. Middle of the road answer can really affect things
