Cognitive dissonance: Private ratiocination or public spectacle?

Examines various interpretations of cognitive dissonance. A review of the conditions which have reliably produced dissonance indicates that the phenomenon will occur whenever an individual can be held intentionally responsible for his behaviors and is concerned with the attributions others make about him. A social-psychologically based theory of impression management is offered to account for the results of dissonance studies. According to the theory, an individual learns that he must appear consistent in order to maintain his credibility as a social communicator. Additionally, he is constrained by normative considerations. Dissonance reduction will only be observed when a person believes that an outside o imputes intentionality to both of 2 contradictory statements or actions, and the 2nd action is believed to be counternormative or harmful in nature. The theory integrates the various viewpoints of L. Festinger, D. Bem, V. Allen, and M. Rosenberg, is supported by the existing dissonance literature, is rooted in socialization processes, and offers an alternative to the traditional intrapsychic explanations of dissonance. (50 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social comparison and dissonance reduction in self-evaluation.

This study is designed to compare and test some predictions about the self-evaluation process based on the theories of Festinger and Rotter. Contrary to suggestions by Rotter, it was found that minimal goals were no more resistant to change than were expected scores. Changes in minimal goals and expected scores tended to occur so as to minimize discrepancies with actual performance, and thus reduce dissonance in accordance with Festinger's theory. Consistent with Festinger's theory of social comparison processes, it was found that individual's self-evaluations are only influenced by reference group norms in the absence of a more objective criterion for self-evaluation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive dissonance reduction as constraint satisfaction.

A constraint satisfaction neural network model (the consonance model) simulated data from the two major cognitive dissonance paradigms of insufficient justification and free choice. In several cases, the model fit the human data better than did cognitive dissonance theory. Superior fits were due to the inclusion of constraints that were not part of dissonance theory and to the increased precision inherent to this computational approach. Predictions generated by the model for a free choice between undesirable alternatives were confirmed in a new psychological experiment. The success of the consonance model underscores important, unforeseen similarities between what had been formerly regarded as the rather exotic process of dissonance reduction and a variety of other, more mundane psychological processes. Many of these processes can be understood as the progressive application of constraints supplied by beliefs and attitudes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Misattribution of dissonance and behaviour-consistent attitude change.

Examined the prediction that people who have misattributed dissonance arousal to an external source may come to question the appropriateness of this attribution and may then be motivated to alter their attitudes. This was tested by having an experimenter discredit the plausibility of an external source after misattribution had presumably occurred. 80 female undergraduates participated in the study, with 16 of these Ss serving as controls. 64 Ss were given a pill described as having either unpleasant side effects or no side effects and then were committed to write counterattitudinal essays under high-choice conditions. Some Ss were then told that a mistake had been made and that they had actually been given the other form of the pill. As predicted, Ss who had initially been led to believe that the pill had aversive side effects but were later told that it did not manifested behavior-consistent attitude change. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Simulated organizational choice: Postdecision dissonance reduction and self-perception.

Tested the subsequent effect of choice between 2 equally attractive organizations on changes in their overall attractiveness and in the attractiveness of their instrumentality for the attainment of job goals (motivators and hygienes). Exp. I tested predictions from dissonance theory with 34 adult male students. Mean attractiveness of the chosen organizations increased and that of the unchosen organizations decreased significantly from before to after choice. Motivators, as compared with hygienes, significantly increased in attractiveness for the chosen organizations. Results make the motivation-hygiene taxonomy untenable in terms of its instrumentality for postdecisional accommodation to organizational choice. Exp. II enlisted an additional 74 Ss and controls to test the self-perception model as an alternative interpretation of dissonance phenomena. Results parallel dissonance predictions for changes in attractiveness of the chosen but not the unchosen organization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trivialization: the forgotten mode of dissonance reduction.

Trivialization as a mode of dissonance reduction and the conditions under which it is likely to occur were explored in 4 studies. Study 1 tested and supported the hypothesis that when the preexisting attitude is made salient, participants will trivialize the dissonant cognitions rather than change their attitudes. Study 2 tested and supported the hypothesis that following a counterattitudinal behavior, participants will choose the first mode of dissonance reduction provided for them, whether it is trivialization or attitude change. Study 3 tested and supported the hypothesis that following a counterattitudinal behavior, the typical self-affirmation treatment leads to trivialization. Study 4 demonstrated that providing a trivializing frame by making an important issue salient also encourages trivialization rather than attitude change even when there was no opportunity for self-affirmation. The implications for cognitive dissonance theory and research are briefly discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-consciousness, self-attention, and social interaction.

Conducted 2 experiments with a total of 128 female undergraduates to test the effects of self-focused attention on positive and negative social interactions. In Study 1 the behavior of dispositionally high and low publicly self-conscious women (as measured by the Self-Consciousness Scale) was examined in an interpersonal situation involving rejection by a group. It was hypothesized that persons high in self-consciousness, being more aware of how they are perceived by others, would be more sensitive and react more negatively to the rejection than those low in self-consciousness. The predictions were confirmed. In Study 2, female Ss were presented with favorable or unfavorable feedback in the context of an interview, and self-attention was experimentally manipulated by exposing half the Ss to their images in a mirror. Self-awareness increases the negative response to the negative evaluation and tended to increase the positivity of the positive evaluation. The implications of self-awareness theory for the social self and social interaction are discussed. (38 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Private archives and public needs.

Discusses issues related to psychologists' willingness to share data from research projects supported by tax dollars. Attention is focused on the legal, ethical, and pragmatic reasons given for refusing to share the raw data of one's federally sponsored research with other psychologists. A proposal to mandate data sharing is proposed, with discussion of the technical and ethical costs and benefits it would likely entail. Such a proposal would be congruent with mission statements contained in grant announcements, the public's right to know, and a change in attitudes in the field of professional psychology from a Cartesian to a Baconian orientation. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Alternative responses to dissonance.

50 male and 50 female Ss were placed in an experimental situation in which they found their judgments contradicted by a respected associate of the same sex. Ss were free to resolve the dissonance by conforming to the contrary judgments of the associate, rejecting the associate as one who was less competent than he had been thought to be, underrecalling the disagreements, or, devaluating the importance of the topics about which disagreements had occurred. Female Ss made less use of rejection than did male Ss and were more inclined to tolerate the conflict. Other findings suggest that individuals are inclined to employ the 4 responses as alternative means of reducing dissonance rather than as supplementary means. Finally, correlations relating the MA scale to conformity, underrecall, and tolerance were significantly different for the 2 sexes, suggesting that the effect of anxiety upon Ss' choice of dissonance reducing response depends upon the sex of the Ss. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Subjective certainty and resistance to change.

"Ss were led to believe that they were exchanging numbered counters with one another, through a messenger, to the end that all six members could achieve simultaneous solutions to a problem… . The crucial determination was whether or not S would break his own solution to yield to a simulated request from another group member for one of the numbers he was using… . evidence is used to support an interpretation of yielding to group pressure which takes account of Ss' perceptual modes of organizing complex, ambiguous situations." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive dissonance, sensitivity, and evaluation.

In a test of dissonance theory the sensitivity of regular smokers to information about smoking and lung cancer was compared to nonsmokers. Smokers were more interested in such information than nonsmokers; but they did not seek out negative evidence about lung cancer and smoking, nor did they reject information about the harmful effects more than nonsmokers. No clear-cut results emerge from the analysis of dissonance reduction in relation to extraversion and neuroticism, though regular smokers were higher in extraversion than nonsmokers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Role playing, incentive, and dissonance.

Incentive theory is advanced as more satisfactory than dissonance theory in dealing with attitude change induced through role playing. Incentive theory and dissonance theory yield opposite predictions about attitudinal results of role playing which involves different incentive levels. Experimental studies in this area are reviewed, and alternative explanations are discussed. Results which appear to support dissonance theory can generally be attributed to the arousal of interfering negative affect by increasing reward levels. When opportunity for instigation of such interfering reactions is low, increased reward may lead to more effective biased scanning and thus to more attitude change. Complicating factors are noted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generalization of dissonance reduction: Decreasing prejudice through induced compliance.

Three studies involving a total of 318 White college students demonstrated that induced compliance can change socially significant attitudes and that the change generalizes to broader beliefs. Ss wrote an essay endorsing a pro-Black policy that was costly to Whites. In Exps 1 and 2, attitudes and general beliefs about Blacks became more favorable in both high- and low-choice conditions, provided publicity of the essay was high. Overall, choice and publicity had additive effects on attitude change. Some high-choice Ss wrote only semipositive (semicompliant) essays and did not change their essay attitudes. Yet their beliefs about Blacks still became more favorable. In Exp 3, racial ambivalence, but not prior attitude, predicted essay compliance. Ambivalent Ss were more likely to comply than were less ambivalent Ss. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Denial of responsibility: A new mode of dissonance reduction.

Denial of responsibility as a mode of dissonance reduction and the conditions under which it is likely to occur were explored in 3 experiments. Two experiments tested and supported the hypothesis that following a counterattitudinal behavior, participants prefer the mode of reduction made available to them first, regardless of whether it is attitude change, trivialization, or denial of responsibility. The 3rd experiment tested and supported the hypothesis that denial of responsibility reduces the negative affective state induced by dissonance. The mechanism of denial of responsibility in dissonance reduction is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Vicarious dissonance: Attitude change from the inconsistency of others.

Three studies support the vicarious dissonance hypothesis that individuals change their attitudes when witnessing members of important groups engage in inconsistent behavior. Study 1, in which participants observed an actor in an induced-compliance paradigm, documented that students who identified with their college supported an issue more after hearing an ingroup member make a counterattitudinal speech in favor of that issue. In Study 2, vicarious dissonance occurred even when participants did not hear a speech, and attitude change was highest when the speaker was known to disagree with the issue. Study 3 showed that speaker choice and aversive consequences moderated vicarious dissonance, and demonstrated that vicarious discomfort--the discomfort observers imagine feeling if in an actor's place--was attenuated after participants expressed their revised attitudes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of self-attention and public attention on eating in restrained and unrestrained subjects.

Conducted 2 experiments to assess the effects of self-attention and public attention to food intake on eating by dieters and nondieters. In Exp I, in which 96 female undergraduates participated, female dieters ate the greatest number of candies ad lib after consuming a forced 2-milkshake preload; the addition of either self-attention or implied public attention, through the manipulated availability of a wastebasket for the disposing of candy wrappers, inhibited eating substantially. For nondieters, the preload itself inhibited candy consumption, which declined further only under conditions of public attention to candy intake. In Exp II, in which 105 female university students and 3 secondary school students participated, self- and public attention again inhibited the cookie consumption of preloaded dieters, but preloaded nondieters were not influenced by the attention manipulations, eating minimally in all conditions. Nondieters who were not preloaded, however, reduced their intake in the 2 attention conditions. Implications for regulatory self-control were discussed. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Consciousness of body: Private and public.

A body consciousness questionnaire administered to 188 undergraduates yielded 2 separate factors: Private (awareness of internal sensations) and Public Body Consciousness (awareness of observable aspects of body). For each factor, norms, test–retest reliability data, and correlations with other personality measures (Self-Consciousness Inventory, Hypochondriasis scale of the MMPI, and the Emotionality scale of the EASI [Emotionality, Activity, Sociability, Impulsivity] Temperament Survey) are presented. An experiment on reaction to ingestion of caffeine revealed that only Ss high in private body consciousness or high in both private body consciousness and private self-consciousness were stimulated by caffeine; individual differences in public body consciousness and in private self-consciousness alone had no impact. Findings have implications for biofeedback, false physiological feedback, and excitation transfer. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Private and public self-consciousness and articulation of the self-schema.

Two studies assessed recognition memory of interpersonal traits that subjects had rated according to either private self-reference (Study 1) or public self-reference (Study 2). Both studies also administered the Self-Consciousness Scale, which permitted a dual classification of subjects according to private self-consciousness (high and low) and public self-consciousness (high and low). Study 1 revealed a private false alarms effect (FAE), the strength of which was moderated by private self-consciousness, whereas Study 2, revealed a public FAE, the strength of which was moderated by public self-consciousness. From the convergent and discriminant evidence, two hypotheses received support—namely, that (a) individuals articulate both private and public components of the self-schema, and (b) private self-consciousness predicts the extent to which individuals articulate the private component, whereas public self-consciousness predicts the extent to which individuals articulate the public component. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)