Cognitive Dissonance

Question 1

What is the Tripartite model of attitudes (ABC)?

Answer 1

Cognition: we think about the positive or negative aspects towards an object
Affect: we can feel positive or negative attitudes towards the object
Behaviour: behave favourably or unfavourably towards the object

Question 2

What is attitude complexity?

Answer 2

People can have complex or simple attitudes.
simple: small number of aspects, e.g. dogs are sociable
complex: consider other dimensions, e.g. dogs smell
Some attitudes towards objects can be consistent, e.g. i like the doggy smell, dogs are friendly
They can also be inconsistent, e.g. i hate the doggy smell but love how friendly they are
Complex and inconsistent attitudes means the person has tried to integrate their beliefs

Question 3

What are Katz 1960 four important functions of attitudes?

Answer 3

1. the knowledge function: attitudes are schemas to help us make sense of information in the complex, social world. Focus on the important characteristics of an attitude object so they know to deal with it quickly and effectively.
2. utilitarian function: obtain rewards, avoid punishment, if we have socially correct attitudes, people may look more favourably on us. Expressing these attitudes can perform an impression management function.
3. value expressive function: attitudes may allow people to express their deep seated values
4. the ego defensive function: attitudes can protect us from psychological threats

Question 4

How do attitudes form?

Answer 4

Attitude consistency and balance
Social representations
Innate factors

Question 5

What are the criticisms of social representations?

Answer 5

Not clear what counts as a social representation

Question 6

How do habits and individual differences influence attitudes and behaviour?

Answer 6

Habits vs Individual differences
When behaviours are a habit, people don’t think about their actions or whether it’s appropriate, behaviour becomes automatic

A person’s consistency about answering questions based on their personality is more likely to engage in those behaviours strongly e.g. if a person is ranked high on an introvert scale, they will typically behave in an introverted manner in social interactions, more so than people who have inconsistent responses

Question 7

How does hypocrisy influence cognitive dissonance?

Answer 7

When attitudes and behaviour are inconsistent they experience hypocrisy
Useful for politicians or celebrities, if people are aware they are publicly advocating an attitude or behaviour but behave inconsistently they can experience strong dissonance.
A person freely chooses to promote a behaviour that they do not practise themselves

Question 8

What is the feelings as information perspective?

Answer 8

Emotions provide fast and reliable information about the issues that help shape what people do
People use emotions when they make complex rather than simple judgements

Question 9

What is the moral foundations theory?

Answer 9

Anger and disgust can be expressed differently to violations of different moral principles.
5 key moral foundations:
- harm/care: we should care for and avoid harming others, especially the weak or vulnerable
- fairness: we should treat others fairly
- ingroup loyalty: loyal to those in our social groups
- authority: we should obey and respect leaders
- purity: we observe the purity of the body and the divine
Left wing supports were more focused on the foundations of harm/care rather than purity, ingroup loyalty and authority as they were concerned with the welfare and rights of individuals

Question 10

What is an attitude?

Answer 10

A person’s evaluation of various aspects of their social world
Attitudes are preferences regarding an attitude object
Can be positive., negative or ambivalent

Question 11

What’s an attitude object?

Answer 11

What an attitude is about

Question 12

What are ambivalent attitudes?

Answer 12

Attitudes that are mixed, being both positive and negative

Question 13

What are values?

Answer 13

Help people organise their attitudes
Values can influence behaviour through their influence on attitudes; influenced by culture, politics, personality
10 values appear universal

Question 14

What are ideologies?

Answer 14

More general than attitudes
Explains social realities and suggests how social systems should be run
Influence attitudes, values and intentions to commit behaviours

Question 15

What are the criticisms of the tripartite model?

Answer 15

Only defines behaviour as an inherent part of attitude
Doesn’t look at how behaviour is related to how people think and feel about attitude objects
People don’t always behave in a way that is in accordance with their attitudes

Question 16

What’s a schema?

Answer 16

Cognitive structure
Represents information about a concept’s attributes and its relationship to other concepts

Question 17

What’s the mere exposure effect?

Answer 17

Simply being exposed to a person or object can cause people to form more positive attitudes towards them
However, prolonged exposure (familiar) cases to have an effect, effects might reverse
More exposure can lead to negative attitudes

Question 18

What’s social learning?

Answer 18

Attitudes are largely learned from others

Question 19

What’s classical conditioning?

Answer 19

Stimulus evokes positive or negative reactions through repeated pairing with another stimulus
Can occur subliminally
e.g. Pavlov’s dogs,

Question 20

What’s instrumental learning?

Answer 20

Behaviour which is followed by a positive response is more likely to be repeated
Behaviour followed by a positive response
More likely to be reinforced and therefore repeated
Behaviour followed by a negative response is less likely to be repeated

Question 21

What’s observational learning?

Answer 21

Individuals attitudes and behaviours are influenced by observing others
Influences attitudes towards unfamiliar social groups
e.g. Bobo doll experiment

Question 22

How do innate factors form attitudes?

Answer 22

Genetic factors play a role in attitude development
e.g. twin studies
Diverse attitudes tend to be organised by political conservatism which seems to be heritable
Attitudes determined by genetics are also more difficult to change and more important to people

Question 23

What are attitude consistency and balance useful in attitude formation?

Answer 23

When attitudes are consistent with each other they are in a state of balance and form a coherent whole or unit
If we have positive attitudes towards an object, we will form positive attitudes to the objects positively related to it
Attitudes are likely to change if they’re balanced

Question 24

How do social representations form attitudes?

Answer 24

Theory that beliefs about the social world are formed through processes of social interaction
Attitudes are formed by our group and cultural memberships and are built up by social and cultural practises

Question 25

What are implicit attitudes?

Answer 25

unconscious

Question 26

What are explicit attitudes?

Answer 26

conscious

Question 27

What are attitude scales?

Answer 27

Series of questions to gauge someone’s attitudes
Quick and inexpensive
Used online
Rely on honesty

Question 28

What are observational studies?

Answer 28

Show actual behaviour in real life settings
Involve large amount of effort
Can be complicated ethically

Question 29

What is the bogus pipeline procedure?

Answer 29

Person attached to the device is known as the bogus pipeline
Told the pipeline can detect their true attitudes
People are afraid their dishonest answers will be noticed so they will be more honest than usual

Question 30

What is Electromyography?

Answer 30

Measures the electrical activity of muscles in the face
Allows to examine subtle facial movements that may not be visible to the naked eye
Tracks electrical activation in the muscle responsible e.g. smiling and frowning

Question 31

What are event related potentials?

Answer 31

observed using EEGs
Well suited to capturing rapid and short term neural responses to stimuli
Exaggerated responses to attitude objects that were disliked by ps

Question 32

What are FMRIs?

Answer 32

Brainmapping technique tracking which brain regions are activated by monitoring changes in bloodflow
Amygdala is activated when positively evaluated stimuli are presented and even more strongly activated when negatively evaluated stimuli are presented
Very expensive

Question 33

What is the Go/No Go task?

Answer 33

Measures accuracy in identifying specific relationships between target concept and specific attributes

Question 34

What is the IAT?

Answer 34

Implicit Association Test
Participants sat behind computer and asked to press different key to match concept during a series of trials
In theory: tests people’s implicit preferences for some classes of stimuli over others

Question 35

What are the criticisms with the IAT?

Answer 35

said to be better measure of attitudes individuals have been exposed to rather than the extent of how much they endorse those themselves

Question 36

What’s the APE model?

Answer 36

Implicit evaluations are the outcomes of associative processes
Explicit evaluations represent the outcomes of propositional processes
Associative processes: activation of mental associations on basis of feature similarity and spatiotemporal contiguity
Propositional processes: validation of activated information based on logical consistency

Question 37

What’s the evidence for the APE model?

Answer 37

Gawronksi et al. (2008):
Two ways of reducing prejudiced attitudes towards disadvantaged outgroups
Negation of stereotypes (“Roma are not thieves.”) vs affirmation of counter-stereotypes (“Roma are honest.”)
Negation task leads to individuals training their associative mental systems to produce an even stronger negative emotional reaction to Roma

Question 38

What did LaPiere 1934 find?

Answer 38

Travelled around USA with Chinese couple; calling at 184 restaurants and 66 hotels after their visits there
The couple was always served courteously
However, after the study, the establishments were contacted and 92% said they would not serve Chinese visitors
Attitudes may not always predict behaviours

Question 39

What factors predict attitude behaviour?

Answer 39

Situational and attitudinal factors

Question 40

How do situational factors affect attitude behaviour?

Answer 40

Not always possible to express or act on our attitudes
Situational factors either constrain or facilitate the expression of attitudes
For example: expressing one’s political attitudes at a rally
People tend to seek out situations in which they can express their attitudes

Question 41

How do attitudinal factors affect attitude behaviour?

Answer 41

Attitude strength: the stronger (accessibility, intensity and knowledge about attitude object) the attitude, the more likely it will influence behaviour
Level of specificity: if specificity of attitude and behaviour are closely matched then the attitude is more likely to affect behaviour

Question 42

How do values and ideology affect attitude behaviour?

Answer 42

Priming values influences people behaviour
Becomes more aligned with their values

Question 43

What’s the theory of planned behaviour?

Answer 43

Several factors determine behavioural intentions concerning the behaviour
Factors: subjective norms, attitudes towards the behaviour and perceived behavioural control
In turn, behavioural intentions strongly determine whether the behaviour is performed

Question 44

What’s the theory of reasoned action?

Answer 44

Predecessor to theory of planned behaviour
Key difference: Did not take perceived behavioural control into account as a predictor of intentions

Question 45

What is cognitive dissonance?

Answer 45

An unpleasant psychological state which occurs when people notice that their attitudes and behaviours (or different attitudes) are inconsistent with each other

When in state of tension, people will change their attitudes to be more consistent with the behaviour they have performed
Tension is fairly minimal in many cases
BUT state of tension especially strong when inconsistencies are self-relevant

Common across cultures
Experienced by animals

Question 46

What did Festinger and Carlsmith find?

Answer 46

Boring experiment doing repetitive task
Lie to next participant that task was enjoyable for payment of $1 or $20
Agreeing to describe task as enjoyable to someone else creates cognitive dissonance
To resolve inconsistency between behaviour and attitudes, revision of attitudes occurs

Question 47

What 4 conditions need to be satisfied for dissonance to produce these types of effects?

Answer 47

The individual has to realise the inconsistency has negative effects
The individual has to take responsibility for the action
The individual has to experience physiological arousal
The individual has to attribute the above feeling to the action itself

Question 48

What did Harmon jones 2000 find?

Answer 48

Participants had to write counter-attitudinal essays (i.e., state that boring paragraph was interesting)
Low choice vs high choice condition
High choice condition: felt more discomfort and greater negative affect than low choice condition

Question 49

How can you reduce dissonance?

Answer 49

People change the way they think rather than behave
Change attitude to match behaviours
Reduce the importance of dissonance
reduce discomfort by self affirmations and restore positive self views
People don’t always seek to reduce dissonance

Question 50

What did Egan et al find?

Answer 50

Observed that the monkeys liked red, blue and green M and Ms equally
Monkey was forced to choose between red and blue M and M (equally preferred)
Monkey forced to choose between green and blue M and M which aren’t equally preferred
Monkey picks the green one as they rationalize the initial rejection of blue M and M by telling itself it doesn’t like blue

Question 51

What is embodied social cognition?

Answer 51

Research area showing broadly that bodily states influence attitudes, social perception and emotion
Engaging in positive behaviours that typically accompany positive attitudes leads to more positive evaluations
Engaging in negative behaviours that typically accompany negative attitudes leads to more negative evaluations
Ability to perceive our bodily position (proprioception) plays a fundamental role in our thoughts, feelings, and actions

Question 52

What is the self perception theory?

Answer 52

People become aware of their own attitudes by looking at what they do
People look at own behaviour and infer their own attitudes from that behaviour – much like an outside observer would

Question 53

How well do cognitive dissonance and the self perception theory compare?

Answer 53

Alternative account of cognitive dissonance, now widely considered complimentary
Theory relates to situations in which individual’s attitude is ambiguous or weak