Cognitive Consistency and Social Motivation Notes

Cognitive Consistency: Refers to the idea that individuals strive for harmony among their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

Core Concept: Seeks balance in relationships among three elements - two people and an object or idea.
Balanced State: Occurs when the relationships are consistent.
Unbalanced State: Results in discomfort that motivates change to restore balance.
Critique:
- Fails to explain the mechanism to restore balance.
- Neglects the significance of the individual elements in the relationship.
- Does not quantify the level of imbalance necessary to instigate change.

Definition: Awareness of inconsistency among beliefs, attitudes, opinions, and behaviors leads to a motivating discomfort.
Types of Cognition:
1. Consonant: Two cognitions are in harmony.
2. Irrelevant: Two cognitions do not affect each other.
3. Dissonant: Two cognitions conflict.
Methods to Alleviate Dissonance:
- Change one cognition.
- Alter behavior.
- Introduce a consonant cognition, often as rationalization.

Greater Impact: Amount of dissonance increases with the number of dissonant cognitions.
Significance: More distress is felt for important beliefs.

Vagueness: Hard to assert when cognitions conflict.
Varied Reduction Approaches: Similar to Balance Theory, numerous ways exist to mitigate dissonance.
Alternative Explanations: Other theories may account for observed behaviors.

Induced Compliance: Participants publicly advocated contrary to their private beliefs, prompting them to rate an uninteresting task more favorably when given minimal justification.
Justification of Effort: Higher effort to achieve a goal leads to greater appreciation; example: reading sexually explicit material made following boring tasks seem more engaging.
Post-decisional Dissonance: Individuals inflate preferences for their choices and ignore contradictory information; evident in betting scenarios (bet bolstering).

Understanding Behavior: Similar to an outsider evaluating one's actions to form opinions.
- Payment influences perceptions of enjoyment of tasks.
- Results suggest attitude change does not require tension-driven motives.

Motivation Variance: Not everyone feels compelled to resolve cognitive inconsistencies.
Pleasurable Inconsistency: Some individuals actively seek inconsistencies, which may optimize motivation.
Behavioral Constraints: Inconsistencies may not always override normal behaviors; personal preference for consistency (PFC) varies across individuals, possibly influenced by cultural factors.

Performance: Improved in competitive settings due to presence of others.
Coaction Effect: Increased consumption (food/drink/spending) in non-competitive social environments.
Evidence: Observed in both humans and animals; also noted in audience scenarios where even passive spectators induced performance changes.

Audience Effect: May elevate arousal levels.
Performance Influence:
- When familiar with a task, audience presence can enhance performance through challenge response.
- When a new task is involved, performance may suffer due to a threat response.

Definition: Change in beliefs/behaviors in response to group pressures.
Experiment: Autokinetic effect illustrated how perceptions of motion aligned when participants were grouped together.
- Conformity mechanisms: distortion of judgment (informational influence) and distortion of action (normative influence).

Ambiguity: More ambiguity leads to higher likelihood of conformity.
Group Size: Incremental increases in group size correlate with increased conformity; studies show marked increases as group size grows.
Unanimity: Having even a single ally can decrease conformity pressure.

Critique of laboratory settings vs. real-world applicability.
Acknowledgment of important social situations beyond laboratory influences, stressing that conformity can occur in significant contexts like jury decisions.

Foot-in-the-Door (FITD) Effect: A small request increases likelihood of agreeing to a larger request later; evidenced by sign placement after petition signing.
Door-in-the-Face (DITF) Effect: Starting with a large request followed by a smaller one increases compliance likelihood through perceived concessions.

Study Objective: Investigate obedience behaviors akin to those observed during the Holocaust.
Experiment Design: Unwitting participant as 'teacher' inflicted shock on a 'student' for wrong answers; significant compliance observed despite ethical concerns.
Factors Influencing Obedience:
- Perception of authority.
- Context and proximity of authority figures.

Helping Motives: Depend largely on situational contexts, with distinct dynamics in emergency versus non-emergency situations.
Model of Intervention: Helps in understanding when individuals might act or refrain from helping following a chain of cognitive acceptance of the emergency.
Bystander Effect: Particularly reduced in high-stakes scenarios, and influenced by individual empathy levels and time availability to assist.