PSYC204 - Emotion, Cognitive Dissonance, Persuasion

Emotions

Brief, specific, subjective psychological and physiological responses that help people meet goals, many of which are social

-DIFFERENT from moods and emotional disorders.

-Emotions are brief, last for seconds or minutes. NOT hours or days.

• Facial expressions of emotion last 1-5 seconds

• Physiological expressions (sweaty palms, blushing, increased blood pressure) last seconds or minutes

-They are specific and are in response to specific people or events

-Emotions prompt us to act

Charles Darwin

Believes that emotions promote survival and reproduction. Emotions come from patterns of behavior that were beneficial for our evolutionary predecessors

Universality of Emotions

To some extent, emotional responses are innate and universal.

• People across cultures can recognize and understand certain emotions

• There are six universal emotions

  • Happiness

  • Surprise

  • Sadness

  • Anger

  • Disgust

  • Fear

• Emotions are encoded and NOT learned

  • People who are blind from birth show the same expressions as sighted people (Tracy & Robin, 2004; 2007)

Cultural Specificity of Emotions

Different cultures have emotional accents and “display rules”

-Focal Emotions: Emotions that are common in a given culture

• Mexico: Pride

• Tibet: Kindness

• Japan: Modesty

• Interdependent cultures: Shame and embarrassment

-Ideal Emotions: Cultures differ in the emotions they value or idealize— associate with cultural emotions

• US (value independence, expression): Excitement

• East Asian countries (value interdependence, harmony): Calmness and contentedness

-Display rules: Cultural rules that govern how, when, and to whom people express emotion (Ekman & Friesen)

Duchenne vs. Non-Duchenne Smiles

Other muscles can stimulate a smile, but only the peculiar tango of the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi produce a genuine positive emotion that is recognized as a Duchenne smile.

Emotions and social relationships

Promote commitment

-Signaling shows sympathy which shows concern for well being

-Guilt can cause motivation to apologize

Hertenstein et al. 2006

-Two P’s sat at a table in front of a black curtain.

-The P’s put their hands through the curtains, and one was instructed to convey a particular emotion by touching the other P’s forearm

-The other P had to identify which emotion was being conveyed by selecting it from a list

Motivating Coordinated Action

-Touching promotes confidence

• Students who were touched were more likely to go to the blackboard to solve a difficult problem the teacher had assigned

-Touching encourages cooperation (Kraus)

• Pro basketball teams that touch more (high five, fist bump) cooperate better and play better

Niedenthal and Sutterland

Perception of events line up with our emotions

-P’s in positive mood more quickly to recognize positive words vs negative ones, and vice versa

Broaden-and-Build Hypothesis

Positive emotions broaden thought and action repertoires, helping people build social resources

-Positive emotions broaden our thoughts and actions by

• enabling more creative thought patterns

-Increases in intellectual resources build social resources

• Friendships and social networks

The Bridge Study

A female experimenter approached men who were crossing a dangerous bridge or a safe bridge

The men filled out a survey, and at the end the experimenter gave them her number

Results: More men called the female experimenter on the dangerous bridge than on the safe bridge. They misattributed their increased heart rate to the woman (I must have been nervous she was so attractive)

Social intuitionist model of moral judgement

People have automatic emotional reactions to moral situations which guide moral reasoning

Moral Foundations Theory

We assess the morality of a behavior based on 5 dimensions

• harm/care

• fairness/cheating

• loyalty/behavior

• authority/subversion

• purity/degradation

Emotions Influence Moral Judgements

• Extreme liberals rely on 1.) harm and 2.) fairness

• Extreme conservatives rely moderately on all 5

The Trolley Dilemma

The trolley dilemma is a thought experiment that explores whether it's morally acceptable to sacrifice one person to save more. It's a well-known problem in philosophy. 

If you had a switch that would either kill one person and save five people, or kill five people and kill one person, and you HAD to flip it, which would you choose?

Happiness

Has two components

• Life satisfaction- how well you think your life is going

• Subjective well-being- peoples cognitive and affective evaluations of their lives (tendency to experience more positive vs. negative emotions)

Affective Forecasting

Predicting future emotions, such as whether an event will result in happiness or anger, and for how long

• People tend to overestimate how much a romantic breakup would diminish their life satisfaction

Immune Neglect

Tendency to underestimate our resilience during negative life events

• painful and difficult experiences are often less upsetting than we expect them to be

Focalism

Tendency to only focus on one aspect of an experience or event when trying to predict future emotions

• even if one bad thing or good thing happens, there are still plenty of other things going on in your life that influence your happiness

Duration Neglect

Length of emotional experience has very little influence on our overall evaluation of the experience

• the length of the movie, time spent at the beach

The Pursuit of Happiness

• some evidence that older people are more happy

• No gender differences in subjective well being

• Money, only up to a certain point, plateaus around 75,000 dollars (138,000 present day)

• People are happier in countries where individual rights and economic opportunities are available

• Social relationships are the most powerful sources of happiness

• Practice gratitude

Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is a feeling of discomfort that occurs when a person holds conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. It can also occur when a person's actions don't align with their beliefs

• Decisions and dissonance

• Effort justification

• Induced Compliance

Cognitive Dissonance: Effort Justification

When you have devoted time, effort, or money to something that has turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing, you tend to justify why you spent all that time, money, and effort

• Aronson and Mills

  • Female undergraduates thought they were joining on ongoing discussion group about sex

  • Participants were told that not everyone is good at speaking openly and freely about sex, so they would have to pass a test before joining

    • Mildly embarrassing words

    • Severe words

    • Control (no test)

  • Participants were then asked “how interesting was it?”

  • Results: P’s who were made most comfortable rated the discussion group as most interesting in order to reduce their severe dissonance

Induced Compliance

The “Peg Study”

• Participants were asked to turn pegs on a pegboard for an hour

• Asked to lie to the next participant that the study was interesting with a reward of

  • one dollar for telling the lie or twenty dollars for telling the lie

• Results: Participants in the one dollar condition rated the task as more enjoyable than the 20 condition

• 20 dollar condition had justification for lying

• One dollar condition didnt = dissonance

Forbidden Toy Paradigm

The forbidden toy paradigm describes the effect that causes kids to want to play more with a toy that is said to be forbidden once it is no longer forbidden even if there are other non forbidden toys to play with at a later date. This was shown through a study in which kids were put in a room full of toys.

When does attitude-behavior inconsistency cause dissonance

• Free choice

  • If behavior is freely chosen

• Insufficient Justification

  • If there is a low incentive for performing a counter-attitudinal behavior

• Negative Consequences

  • If there are negative consequences

• Foreseeability

  • If the consequences were foreseeable

Self Perception Theory

People come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and inferring what their attitudes must be

• If I chose this, I must like it

Components of attitude

Evaluation of an object or behavior

-Affect

-Behavior

-Cognition

Affect

Emotional reactions to an attitude object

Behavior

Knowledge about interactions with an attitude object

Cognition

Thoughts about the attitude object

Implicit Attitude Measure

An indirect measure of attitudes that does not involve self-report

Captures non-conscious attitudes

Response Latency

The amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus, such as an attitude question

Centrality

How central is an attitude to your belief system

(IAT) Implicit Association Test

• Pros:

  • Response time indicates attitude accessibility

  • Less prone to social desirability bias

• Cons:

  • More difficult to administer

    • Time intensive

    • Requires a computer

  • They still do not tell the full story behind one’s attitudes

Introspection

the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes.

• P’s were asked about the person they were dating

  • Overall evaluation of the relationship

  • List the reasons you feel the way you do, then overall evaluation of the relationship

  • Results:

    • Attitudes of group 1 more accurate predictors of relationship status

    • Thinking about why we like someone can mislead us in terms of our full attitude towards that person, which weakens the link between attitude and behavior.

Dual-Process Model of Persuasion

Made up of two processes

• Peripheral process

  • Unconscious, fast, automatic

    • Source attractiveness, source expertise

• Central process

  • Use of systematic processing of information for evaluation

    • Argument quality (Does the argument make sense? Is it convincing?)

Elaboration-Likelihood Model

ELM is a theory regarding a message recipient’s cognitive responses to persuasion/persuasive materials

• Peripheral route= low elaboration

• Central route=High elaboration

What is important about the ELM?

Peripheral

• Weaker arguments

• Low attention

• Low motivation and ability

Central

• Strong, logical arguments

• High attention

• High motivation and ability

What determines persuasion?

Who: Message source

What: Message content

Whom: Message audience

Attractiveness

More attractive people are more persuasive

Halo effect

People you like are assumed to have other good qualities as well

Credibility

Are the sources reliable or not?

Certainty

Related, but different than credibility

• People who are certain and confident tend to be judged as more credible

The sleeper effect

Messages from unreliable sources tend to be rejected initially, but over time become accepted.

Message vividness

More vivid messages are more persuasive

Identifiable Victim Effect

Message that focus on a single, vivid individual are more persuasive than fact-based messages

Fear

Fear works as a persuasion

• Smoking campaign

  • Read a pamphlet about how to quit smoking

  • Watched a graphic film about smoking

  • Watched the film and read the pamphlet

• Results: Inducing fear about something by showing vivid images reduced smoking substantially more than simply providing instructions about quitting

Extreme Fear

Causes people to tune out the message, resulting in a lack of persuasion

Self vs. other

Eastern ads emphasize the group

Western ads emphasize the individual

Promotion/Prevention

East Asians respond more favorably to prevention focus advertising vs. westerners

Age

Young people are more persuadable than old people

• Malleability of 18-25 year olds during presidential elections

Need for cognition

The degree to which someone thinks deeply about things

• High NFC people are persuaded by central cues

• Low NFC people are persuaded by peripheral cues

Metacognition

Thinking about our own thinking

• We have primary thoughts and then thoughts about the thoughts we just had

Self validation hypothesis

The idea that feeling confidence about our thoughts validates those thoughts, making it more likely we’ll be swayed in their direction

Agenda control

Media contributes to shaping the information that we think is true and important

Shared attention

When people believe they are attending to a message simultaneously with other people, they process it more deeply using the central route

Selective Attention

In 1964, the Surgeon General reported links between smoking and lung cancer

• 40% of smokers found the document to be flawed, only 10% of non-smokers

Thought polarization

Simply thinking about an issue tends to produce more extreme, resistant attitudes

When you are free to think about something, you naturally think about the arguments you already know — this will reinforce your current attitude

Attitude Inoculation

Resisting a “small” attack on our attitude makes us better able to resist larger attacks later on