Psychology 3740F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Cognitive Dissonance, Information Processing, Psych

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3740F/G
• Professor: Morrison

Document Summary

What gets encoded is what you are focusing on. Your attitude may effect what you encode. And the attitude will affect how you interpret it and remember it. Inconsistent cognitions produce dissonance: role in attention we ignore things that are inconsistent with our attitudes, festinger: shows cognitive dissonance in end of the world" cult. Subsequent research: freedman and sears, argued that there is no evidence people explicitly seek out information congruent with existing atittudes, frey and jonas: Individuals do pay more attention to information supporting their attitudes but sometimes the opposite occurs. Less attention when message goes against our attitudes. Attitude importance predicts whether we seek out more information. If we care about it, we want to learn more: continuously building upon what we already know. Visual attention more automatically drawn towards more objects that we have high accessible attitudes for. Where visual attention is influenced by attitude our attention gravitates to things that we already have attitudes for.