Cognitive Dissonance and Self-Affirmation Process Flashcards
what contributes to a state of harmony, balance and consonance?
beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviour and mental representations.
describe the balance theory.
either have a steady state, or an imbalance (unsteady state) leading to feelings of tension.
how can balance be achieved?
- through attitude change
- behaviour change
- adding consonant elements.
define Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance.
when cognitive elements do not fit together, they stand in a dissonant relationship, dissonance leads to pressures to reduce or eliminate it, which is achieved through behaviour change.
in the forced compliance task, out of which participants lied more about enjoying the tasks?
those in the $1 condition.
explain why participants in the $1 condition were more willing to lie about enjoying the task to the next group of participants.
$1 is not sufficient enough to lie, and so causes dissonance which leads to behaviour change, so they say they like the task, whereas no dissonance is caused in the $20 condition and so no behaviour change.
which condition caused aversive arousal: $1 or $20?
$1 condition (high dissonance)
why were participants who had an unattractive experimenter more in favour of using grasshoppers as food?
having an unattractive experimenter caused dissonance as so participants developed a positive attitude towards the experimenter to reduce dissonance.
explain the ‘effort justification’ of dissonance.
women who had severe initiation experienced higher embarrassment and so rated enjoyment of the discussion as higher than mild initiation to justify the effort they had to put in.
development depends on the importance of…
- freedom of choice
- personal responsibility
- aversive consequences
- commitment
state alternative explanations for dissonance
- self-concept involvement
- impression management
- self-perception theory
give evidence that dissonance leads to arousal.
those in the high choice condition to write the counter-attitudinal essay on inflammatory speakers, and were not told about side effects about the capsule felt more tense that those in the low choice condition.
who out of the participants asked to write counter-attitudinal essays on inflammatory speakers had the most attitude change?
those in the high choice, no side effects condition, this is because they experienced the most dissonance that therefore lead to greater attitude change to reduce tension.
state Ciadini’s alternative perspective.
individual differences measure of preference for consistency (PFC).
“criticisms of inconsistency that raise the need for defensive justification”
those in the hypocrisy condition bought the most condoms and had greater intentions to use condoms in the future compared to other conditions, why is this?
they had more dissonance created by the fact they were promoting condom use but had to be mindful about past failures not using condoms, which created dissonance, leading to positive behaviour change.
define dissonance.
lack of agreement or harmony between people or things.
outline Steele’s study of the name calling condition.
name calling - “uncooperative with community project”
positive - “cooperative”
irrelevant - experiment criticised the communities concern for safe driving.
- two days later, called again and asked if interested to set up a food cooperative in their community.
what were the results of Steele’s name calling study?
- women in the relevant and surprisingly irrelevant negative name condition were more compliant to dev the food cooperative suggested.
what is self-affirmation concerned with?
how people are motivated to reaffirm a sense of personal integrity, the their self-integrity is threatened.
define aspects to the self-affirmation theory.
- people are motivated to maintain a sense of self-integrity, of positive self-regard
- threats to self-integrity may promote defensiveness
what do self-affirmation manipulations show?
shown to promote more systematic processing of information, greater information acceptance and changes in attitudes, intentions and behaviour.
‘people are motivated to deal with “the threat that inconsistency poses to the perception of self-integrity” ‘. How is this similar to cognitive dissonance?
“dissonance is at its greatest when it involves a cognition about the self and a piece of our behaviour that violates that self-concept”.
- both to do with inconsistency
describe a common method of self-affirmation manipulations.
- people are asked to complete a series of simple questions about positive acts they have carried out
- then are asked to write about their most important values to them.
describe the ‘values’ affirmation method.
- self-affirmation condition: “most important value to me is… and why?”
- this affirms you of sense of self.
- control condition: “least important value to me is… why would this be important to another person?”
