Attitudes & Cognitive Dissonance

Attitude

  • A psychological tendency expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of positivity and/or negativity

Attitude Formation

  • Exposure effect

  • Classical & operant conditioning

  • Social learning

Direct experience > Secondhand information

Operant Conditioning

  • Operant conditioning

    • Learning through consequences

    • Behavior more or less likely to be repeated

  • Operant response

    • Behavior that acts on the environment

  • Reinforcer

    • Increases the likelihood a behavior will be repeated

Law of Effect

  • Rewarded behaviors → repeated

  • Ineffective behaviors → decrease

Cognitive Dissonance

  • The psychological discomfort experienced when a person holds two or more inconsistent cognitions (beliefs, attitudes, or awareness of their own behavior) which motivates then to reduce the inconsistency.

  • Dissonance = behavior contradicts attitude

Insufficient Justification

A small external reward doesn’t fully explain the behavior

  • So the mind fills the gap with an internal explanation instead

The $1 participants needed an internal reason for lying

  • ‘I must have actually enjoyed it’ resolves the inconsistency better than ‘I lied for basically nothing’

Steps of Cognitive Dissonance (Cooper & Fazio, 1984)

  1. The behavior must produce unwanted negative consequences

  2. The person must feel responsible for it; requires free choice, not coercion

  3. The behavior must produce physiological arousal

  4. The person must attribute that arousal to their own behavior

Dissonance Reduction Strategies

  • Change the behavior

    • Stop the behavior that conflicts with the belief, ex., refuse to lie about enjoying the study

  • Change the belief

    • Like the $1 participants did

  • Add a new, constant cognition

    • ‘I smoke, but I also exercise, so it balances out’

  • Trivialize the inconsistency

    • ‘It doesn’t really matter that much anyway’

Effort Justification

Dissonance effect: valuing what costs us more

Mechanism: Cognitive inconsistency

Resolution: Retrospective attitude

Example: Value a self-assembled piece of cheap furniture much more than a pre-built item of higher quality