PSY 306 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Cognitive Dissonance, Leon Festinger, Mirror Neuron
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10 Aug 2019
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Class 8: February 4: Attitudes and Consistency
What is an attitude?
● Attitude: enduring response disposition with an affective,
cognitive, and behavioral component
○ Enduring: stable across time and situations
○ Disposition: predictive of behavior
○ Behavioral: we are aware of them and can accurately
self-report on them
Theories of Attitude
Formation and Attitude
Change
Expectancy-Value Theory
● We consciously choose our attitudes
○ To do so, we weight the pros and cons of various
attitudes and pick the one that works best
● Value x Expectancy = Attitude → Behavior
○ Most people don’t do this, it’s more of a normative
than a descriptive idea
● Williams and Bargh, 2008, Telling more than we know
○ People rated someone with more interpersonal
warmth when that person asked them to hold a hot
drink rather than a cold one
● Mere Exposure suggests that attitudes are more implicit than
explicit
○ People like things the more they are exposed to those
things
Learning Theory
● Derived from the study of behavior
○ Associations
■ Link in memory between stimuli
■ Formed through repeated pairings
■ Ex: Romeo ← → Juliet
○ Reinforcement
■ Learn a response through reward
■ Ex: social rewards for expressing certain
opinions, subtle reinforcement for gender
attitudes
○ Punishment
■ Learn NOT to perform certain behavior
through punishment
■ Ex: social punishment for other kinds of
opinions
○ Observation
■ Learning by watching others and repeating
■ Modeling “appropriate” or socially-
acceptable behavior
■ Role for “mirror neuron” system
● Bandura’s Bobo Doll Study (Observation)
○ Children were more likely to hit a bobo doll if they
saw an adult hitting the doll earlier
Cognitive Consistency
● When Prophecy Fails, Festinger et al. 1956
○ Marian Keech thought she received a message from
aliens saying Earth would be destroyed but her
followers would be saved
○ They ignored the press, but then when the destroying
of the Earth didn’t happen, they all of a sudden
wanted interviews and to spread the word of the
“saving of Earth”
○ Did they believe they were wrong? No, they believed
God was so impressed with their response that he
saved the world
● Rationalization: explaining to ourselves how something
happened or why something occurred
○ Due to the need to feel (if not actually be) consistent
and authentic
Consistency Theory: Balance Theory
● People want to be consistent especially when it comes to
their relationships with others
○ If we feel out of balance, then we are motivated to
restore the balance (interpersonal conflict)
● Three elements: P (the person to analyse), O (the comparison
person, X (comparison thing, sometimes another person)
○ The goal is to understand the relationship between
each pair based on liking and belonging
● There are four sets of information that are balanced
○ P + O, P + X, O + X
○ P - O, P - X, O + X
○ P - O, P + X, O - X
○ P + O, P - X, O -X
● Example
○ My friend’s friend is my friend