PSYC 2120 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Condom, Cognitive Dissonance, Parasympathetic Nervous System
15 Apr 2018
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Chapter 6: the key self-motives: consistency, esteem, presentation and growth. Self-consistency at the micro level: cognitive dissonance theory. Cognitive dissonance theory: the idea that people have such distaste for perceiving inconsistencies in their beliefs, attitudes and behaviour that they will bias their own attitudes and beliefs to try to deny inconsistencies. 3 ways to reduce dissonance: change one of the cognitions, add a third cognition that makes the original two cognitions seem less inconsistent with each other, trivialize the cognition that are inconsistent. Two paradigms explain the conditions that arouse dissonance and the ways people reduce it: The free choice paradigm: a laboratory situation in which people make a choice between two alternatives and after they do, attraction to the alternatives is assessed. They do so by spreading the alternatives: after the choice is made, people generally place more emphasis on the positive characteristics of the chosen alternative and the negative aspects of the rejected alternative.
