PSY 161 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Cognitive Dissonance, Attitude Change, Impression Management
17 Jul 2018
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Alternatives to Cognitive Dissonance Theory
1. Self-Perception Theory
2. Impression management Theory
3. Self-Affirmation Theory
Self Perception Theory
- attitude change is due to inference from behavior
- not driven by dissonance
- trying to figure out whether or not you want to go grocery shopping, when prof
volunteers to go grocery shopping more often than his wife, he infers that he likes to go
grocery shopping
Bem (1965)
- find a way to explain this phenomenon
- objective observers, can read the content of the experiment
- can successfully guess results
- if you lie for no reason, you might actually like the task and it's not an actual lie
- people were presented with a situation, and guessed that they liked this, people are
using behaviors to guess what they like/dislike
Another ex.
- attitude change is a rational, emotional process
- people figure out attitude from their behavior
- ambiguous situation, you look at your own behavior and you infer your attitude
"mom what do I feel like doing?"
we aren't always sure about how we feel about certain things, especially things that aren't
that important to us
Bottom Line:
how do social psychologists think about this -
this does a pretty good job explaining a certain type of situation
but does not account for all situations
works for ambiguous situations
- it's accurate, for small circumstances, when you don't have a strong attitude in the first
place
Impression Management Theory
- what looks like attitude change really isn't attitude change at all
- assumption: people don't really want to be consistent
- we don't care if we're consistent, we only want to look consistent because we think it's
socially acceptable, and that's perceived by others well
- APPEARING consistent > actually being consistent
- F & C results, people are trying to not look bad in front the experimenter
(Festinger and Carlsmith)
Bottom line:
social psychologists see this as accounting for some kind of attitude change
but - cognitive dissonance researchers found that people writing for tuition increase,
Attitudes III
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
3:27 PM
CSP.PSY 161 EXAM 2 Page 1
