Like any responsible dog owner, you carry plastic bags and always clean up after your dog. One day, you realize you forgot the bags while halfway through the walk.
And your dog chooses that moment to do his business. You take a quick look along the street. Once home, you begin to feel guilty. You ran out of bags. Chances are, you value your health. You make a conscious effort to choose nutritious foods, try to avoid processed foods and soda, and shoot for eight hours of sleep every night. But you spend most of your day sitting at your desk. You even joined a gym a while back, but you never go.
Every time you see the membership tag on your keychain, it reminds you of that pesky truth — that exercise is part of a healthy lifestyle. Finally, you decide to go to the gym. You start going to bed earlier and get up with enough time to work out. You and your partner live in a large city. One day, your partner comes home from work with some news. You feel unhappy. Little by little, you begin to consider the pros of living in a small town.
You even read some articles on small-town living. As people justify each step taken after the original decision, they will find it harder to admit they were wrong at the outset. Especially when the end result proves self-defeating, wrongheaded, or harmful. To reduce that dissonance, participants unconsciously focused on whatever might be good or interesting about the group and blinded themselves to its prominent negatives. The people who did not work hard to get into the group could more easily see the truth—how boring it was.
Because they had very little investment in joining, they had very little dissonance to reduce. Read: This is not a normal mental-health disaster. For example, when people feel a strong connection to a political party, leader, ideology, or belief, they are more likely to let that allegiance do their thinking for them and distort or ignore the evidence that challenges those loyalties. The social psychologist Lee Ross, in laboratory experiments designed to find ways to reduce the bitter conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiators, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, and asked Israeli citizens to judge them.
Because of the intense polarization in our country, a great many Americans now see the life-and-death decisions of the coronavirus as political choices rather than medical ones. In the absence of a unifying narrative and competent national leadership, Americans have to choose whom to believe as they make decisions about how to live: the scientists and the public-health experts, whose advice will necessarily change as they learn more about the virus, treatment, and risks?
The cognition I want to go back to work or I want to go to my favorite bar to hang out with my friends is dissonant with any information that suggests these actions might be dangerous—if not to individuals themselves, then to others with whom they interact. Share on Pinterest A person may reconcile differences by giving up eating meat because they love animals.
Latest news Could 'cupping' technique boost vaccine delivery? Scientists identify new cause of vascular injury in type 2 diabetes. Adolescent depression: Could school screening help?
Related Coverage. What is antisocial personality disorder? Medically reviewed by Alexander Klein, PsyD. What to know about generalized anxiety disorder. What are neurotransmitters? Medically reviewed by Nancy Hammond, MD. What to know about epinephrine and norepinephrine. Medically reviewed by Elaine K.
Luo, M. After reading the reports about the various products, individuals rated the products again. Participants in the high-dissonance condition spread apart the alternatives significantly more than did the participants in the other two conditions. In other words, they were more likely than participants in the other two conditions to increase the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and to decrease the attractiveness of the unchosen alternative.
It also seems to be the case that we value most highly those goals or items which have required considerable effort to achieve. This is probably because dissonance would be caused if we spent a great effort to achieve something and then evaluated it negatively.
We could, of course, spend years of effort into achieving something which turns out to be a load of rubbish and then, in order to avoid the dissonance that produces, try to convince ourselves that we didn't really spend years of effort, or that the effort was really quite enjoyable, or that it wasn't really a lot of effort.
In fact, though, it seems we find it easier to persuade ourselves that what we have achieved is worthwhile and that's what most of us do, evaluating highly something whose achievement has cost us dear - whether other people think it's much cop or not! This method of reducing dissonance is known as 'effort justification. If we put effort into a task which we have chosen to carry out, and the task turns out badly, we experience dissonance.
To reduce this dissonance, we are motivated to try to think that the task turned out well. In the 'severe embarrassment' condition, they had to read aloud obscene words and a very explicit sexual passage. In the control condition, they went straight into the main study. In all conditions, they then heard a very boring discussion about sex in lower animals. They were asked to rate how interesting they had found the discussion, and how interesting they had found the people involved in it.
Dissonance can be reduced in one of three ways: a changing existing beliefs, b adding new beliefs, or c reducing the importance of the beliefs. When one of the dissonant elements is a behavior, the individual can change or eliminate the behavior. However, this mode of dissonance reduction frequently presents problems for people, as it is often difficult for people to change well-learned behavioral responses e.
A person could convince themself that it is better to "live for today" than to "save for tomorrow. In other words, he could tell himself that a short life filled with smoking and sensual pleasures is better than a long life devoid of such joys. In this way, he would be decreasing the importance of the dissonant cognition smoking is bad for one's health. There has been a great deal of research into cognitive dissonance, providing some interesting and sometimes unexpected findings. It is a theory with very broad applications, showing that we aim for consistency between attitudes and behaviors, and may not use very rational methods to achieve it.
It has the advantage of being testable by scientific means i. However, there is a problem from a scientific point of view, because we cannot physically observe cognitive dissonance, and therefore we cannot objectively measure it re: behaviorism.
Consequently, the term cognitive dissonance is somewhat subjective. There is also some ambiguity i.
0コメント