Analysis: Cognitive dissonance is having inconsistent thoughts with beliefs and attitudes. The person knows right from wrong but, they choose to do wrong instead of right most of the time. In the example, the belief is that the person believes in God. The action, however contradicts the person's belief.…
An uncomfortable state of tension is caused when contradictions occur within the cognitive system. People are therefore motivated to reduce or eliminate this tension state, which is known as cognitive dissonance (Larson, 29). For…
Dissonance: A state of tension that occurs when a persons simultaneously holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistant, or when the person's belief is incongruent with his or her behavior.(Page 238, Chapter 7)(See also, exagerating and minimizing Page 234)…
individual behavior, and has been used as a basis for many different types of research…
M. Explains the tendency for individuals to seek consistency among their cognitions, such as beliefs and opinions. When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance. In the case of a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior, it is most likely that the attitude will change to accommodate the…
Cognitive dissonance theory can be used in today's communication research as a persuasion tool to induce behavioural change, for example: water conservation, side effects of smoking, AIDS prevention and health issues. According to the theory of cognitive dissonance when someone experiences inconsistency between their attitudes and beliefs, their discomfort grows and they get rid of their discomfort feeling by changing their actions or thoughts.…
Briefly explain the general concept of cognitive biases in your own words. Choose two specific types of cognitive bias, explain them, and provide an example in your own life where this bias resulted in your making a poor decision. How might that mistake have been avoided?…
Albert Bandura was a psychologist who came up with what is known as the “Social Cognitive Theory” (“Albert Bandura,” 2015). He believed that two aspects, imitation and operant conditioning, result in social learning. According to Hannum (2005), “Bandura noted that our behavior is changed when we see a person take a specific action and be rewarded for that action”. This is where both operant conditioning and imitation comes in. Operant conditioning is any learning that is established through the use of punishments/behaviors (Cherry, 2015). In order for imitation to be successful, there are elements such as direct and vicarious reinforcements (Lefrancois, 2012, p. 326-327).…
What is cognitive dissonance? How can it be used in our daily lives? These are some of the questions that social psychologists ask each day to explain people’s behavior. When it comes to how we act as individuals, there are all kinds of words and expressions that we can use. We can use words that can describe us physically, mentally, and emotionally, but when it comes to the way that we describe ourselves in our social worlds, we have a harder time. Dealing with our social worlds and how society affects how we act at certain moments, it is important to always talk about our attitudes and behaviors. What triggers us to engage in behaviors that violate social values, beliefs, attitudes, and morals? Every day, people engage in activities that violate who they are as a person and then make excuses. From lying on their taxes, cheating on a test, speeding, and even calling into work sick when they are not sick, individuals everywhere make decisions that violate who they truly are, After the behavior is violated and excuses are made, people would start to wonder why engage in the behavior if they are just going to justify it later? Social psychologist work every day to answer this question. In this paper, we will be discussing a situation and subsequent behavior that people engage in that violates who they are, we’re going to discuss possible explanations for the behavior using the attribution theory, were going to describe the reciprocal relationship between behavior and attitudes, and were going to explain how the individual could have used the cognition dissonance theory to rationalize his or her behavior.…
I think cognitive dissonance is extremely common in our lives, whether we realize it or not. Almost every day I can say that I am faced with cognitive dissonance. For example I’m on a diet and I know I should not be eating sweets, but when I come by one, even though I’m telling myself in the moment I shouldn't be doing this, I eat the sweets anyway. Shortly before or after eating it I will try to justify in my mind why I just did that or why it was ok. Something like “oh it was just one; as long as I don't keep doing it I’ll be ok.” Just telling myself this in my head is enough sometimes to continue with my actions even though I know I’m contradicting myself.…
The story begins with two respectable men taking a stroll. One of them, a man named Enfield, relates to his relative, a prosecutor named Utterson, an encounter he had had some months ago with an evil looking man named Hyde. The man had trampled a little girl he ran into on the street. Enfield, along with several people on the street, took an immediate and overpowering dislike of Hyde’s sinister appearance. After the incident, Hyde enters a building and subsequently exits it with a cheque signed by a Dr. Jekyll in recompense for the damage he had caused. As the novel progresses, Hyde is linked even more to Dr. Jekyll, a client of Utterson. More and more it becomes apparent that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have a strangely strong connection. Eventually it is revealed that the two do in fact share a very strong connection; Dr. Jekyll had formulated a potion in the hopes that he could separate his bad side from his good side, resulting to the manifestation of a separate person of pure evil. With the use of the potion, Dr. Jekyll transforms into Mr. Hyde, allowing him to tap into his darker side and live a life free of morality. Eventually, Dr. Jekyll found himself transforming into Mr. Hyde even without ingesting the potion. This incident became more and more frequent until eventually Dr. Jekyll became Mr. Hyde entirely, resulting to Mr. Hyde’s suicide and the disclosure of his secret to Utterson.…
In the most basic turns, the social cognitive theory refers to the view that one learns by watching the behavior of others. With mass media becoming more and more relevant in today’s society, understanding how symbolic communication influences human thought, affect, and action is essential (Bandura, 2002, p. 265). In this transactional view, personal factors such as cognitive, affective, and biological events, behavioral patterns, and environmental events, work simultaneously and operate as interacting determinants that influence each other (Bandura, 2002, pg. 266). The theory has been applied in varied and diverse areas of life, including one’s career choice, organizational behavior, athletics, and even mental and physical health (Pajares,…
The term cognitive dissonance explains 2 conflicting cognitions where behavior and belief are inconsistent between each other. When one’s behavior and belief contradict each other, we possess an uncomfortable feeling by which we call dissonance. Because we are not able to change our behavior, we unconsciously change our attitudes for our behaviors to be consistent with each other; making the uncomfortable feeling go away. This adjustment is termed insufficient justification.…
Have you ever done something you are normally against and immediately had that feeling of unrest? That feeling is known as cognitive dissonance. Tension arises when one is simultaneously aware of two inconsistent cognitions or a cognition and behavior. Cognitive Dissonance theory is: When people behave in a way that is inconsistent with their existing attitude(s), they experience discomfort.…
My brain is utterly discordant. Curiosities, ranging from abortion in colonial America to the enlarged paralimbic region of whale brains, battle for priority of investigation in my mind. As I sit hunched over my laptop, my screen is always split in two. What my mom sees as a teenager wasting away behind a glowing screen is actually me trying to watch a documentary on Magritte and his genous style of surrealism while learning about the groundbreaking water geysers found on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Such investigative tendencies are even evident in my running list of ideas for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, with topics ranging from the cycle of recidivism that fosters the prison industrial complex to the removal of people of color from 17th and 18th century paintings in current academia.…