CAS PS 261 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Cognitive Dissonance, Attitude Change
28 Sep 2018
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Document Summary
Attitude change occurs to reduce the unpleasant arousal experience when: You engage in a behavior that conflicts with your attitude. Inconsistent cognitions (or cognition(s) is inconsistent with behavior): Dissonance = unpleasant psychological state of arousal. We look for excuses, try to justify current attitudes and make themselves feel better. Dependent variable: all participants express rating of their own enjoyment of task. People on the control condition had no dissonance (they said it wasn"t fun) People in the group had low dissonance. They had enough incentive to lie without feeling bad about it. People in the group had high dissonance. Motivated to reduce that dissonance so you rate the task as more interesting and try to convince yourself that it wasn"t that bad so they don"t feel as bad about lying. When you have sufficient justification there"s less tension to change your attitude. condition experienced cognitive dissonance because they had insufficient justification for lying.
