Transcript of Audio Lecture
Welcome to lesson four,
module one, self-justification.
Let’s move to slide two
and begin. Cognitive dissonance. This is the idea that when you hold two
discrepant beliefs or act in a way that’s discordant with your beliefs,
that you will experience discomfort, that is dissonance.
Let’s move on to slide
three and talk about cognitive dissonance further. When we’re
experiencing cognitive dissonance or that sense of discomfort that comes
from doing something that’s discrepant to their belief or having to hold
two beliefs that are discrepant or discordant with one another. For
example, believing that killing others is wrong, but also feeling that
capital punishment is in order in some cases. This may give some people
the feeling of cognitive dissonance. So one thing we can do is change our
behavior that will then change our attitude. That is, we can go in a way
that is congruent with our beliefs and then change our other beliefs to
match. Cognitive dissonance also causes physiological arousal. That is,
the discomfort has some physiological components. In addition, cognitive
dissonance is strongest when there are negative consequences for having
these two discrepant believes. Finally when you have a free choice, that is you
freely chose your behavior and the last thing is that you attribute that
physiological arousal to the fact that you’ve done something discrepant.
For example, if you believe and know that smoking is highly linked to
lung cancer, but you do not change your behavior, you continue to smoke in
spite of this knowledge. This may cause you to have some discomfort and
there are certainly negative consequences in that you’re going to be
uncomfortable and you’re freely choosing to smoke and it’s likely that
you’re going to attribute that physiological arousal to the idea that
you’re doing something that you know is not good for you. This is defense
of cognitive dissonance.
Let’s move on to slide
four. The 'peg turning' study is classic study is as follows. This is when they first
discovered the idea of cognitive dissonance. The tests are something like
this. Participants are asked to do a very boring task, typically turn a
series of knobs on a table a quarter of a turn clockwise. Then once
they’re done, to turn them a quarter of a turn counter-clockwise. And then
again clockwise and then again maybe half a turn counter-clockwise and to
do this continually for quite some time. After they’ve completed this,
they’re asked the extent to which they would be willing, if they’re paid,
to help out in the experiment and they’re told they can either be paid a
dollar or half of them are told they’ll be given twenty dollars and all
they need to do is tell the next participants what a good time it was to
do this task, that is to, essentially lie because certainly turning these
knobs is not in fact very fun at all. Once they’ve done this and they’ve
been paid and told to lie. Remember everyone agreed to do this and
everyone successfully lied. We then measure their attitude toward the
task, so to what extent did you in fact like the task. Those in the
twenty dollar condition reported liking the task less than those in the
one dollar condition. The idea here is that those in the one dollar
condition had to report that they liked the task a lot, otherwise they
would have cognitive dissonance because lying for one dollar doesn’t seem
like a very good thing to do and is probably causing some dissonance with
some beliefs they have about telling the truth and being honest. However, if
someone gives you twenty dollars to tell such a lie, well the reason you
did it is for the twenty dollars and so that’s ok, that was justified.
Let’s move on to slide
five. As you saw in the previous slide, one way to reduce dissonance is to
change the attitude. Decide you did in fact really liked the task. The second
would be to change the next behavior, so for example if you’re smoking and
you realize that that’s wrong, the next time that you are in a situation
where you might smoke, choosing not to smoke would be another way to
reduce dissonance. We also can rationalize and this is much more common
than either of the other two. That is, we minimize the negative
consequence. One example is my grandmother who smoked right up until she
died of lung cancer and she would often minimize the negative consequences
early on before she ever became ill by saying everyone has to die of
something so I’m actually making a choice to die of lung cancer. The
second is to minimize the responsibility to discuss it as an addiction,
something that can’t be helped. It wasn’t your fault. The advertisers
forced you to smoke or you felt peer pressure to smoke or your parents
smoked around you all the time. And the third thing to do is to
misattribute their arousal to something else. So instead of saying that
you
feel this physiological arousal because you've done something discordant
with one of your beliefs, you decide that you feel uncomfortable because you
had a late lunch and it’s still with you.
Let’s move on to slide
six. Post-decision dissonance. This is what happens after you’ve had to
make a choice between two things. You have to decide that you made the
right decision in order to reduce this dissonance. Therefore what happens
is you will lower the rating of the other option and raise the rating of
the chosen option. This is called spreading of alternatives. One
example is that you’re given a series of three blenders and told that you
can rate them on a series of how useful they are to you and how well built
and how long you think they will last and so on. Once you’ve made these
ratings, we then tell you that you can choose one of the blenders. Then
you choose the blender that you like, but there may be another blender
that was very close. The second runner up blender. If I then ask you to
rate again the blenders, what I’ll find is that you will rate the ones
that you didn’t choose as lower than the one that you’re taking home.
Let’s move on to slide seven. One persuasion technique that uses ideas of cognitive
dissonance is low balling. This is when you’re quoted a very low price
and then you’re given and you commit to buying the object and then the
price is raised. In many states this is illegal, but was frequently used
prior to that to sell cars. So for example they’d tell you they can give
you the car for $14,900, under $15,000. And so you say yes I think I’ll
take that car. When it comes time to sign the papers after 30 or so
minutes of filling out forms and getting your credit report, you find that
the price is now $16,500. How did the price go up and they discuss
options and other fees and so on that were tacked on. This technique is
called low balling and it works because once you’ve made a commitment, it
would make you feel dissonant if you then backed out of the deal.
Let’s move on to slide eight.
Getting in. Effort justification. A study was done in which
there was a sex discussion group. This was done in the ‘50s and
they only recruited women. Women were asked to come to the lab and
in order to participate in the sex discussion group the next week, they
needed to read some words aloud and half of them read slang
sex words aloud or they read clinical sex words aloud. They then
listened to an audio tape of a very boring discussion group discussing
sex in a very clinical way. Those who had read slang words,
obscene words reported more commitment to the group and still wanted to
attend, even though clearly it was a very boring discussion group.
Effort justification is also why some groups choose hazing. The
more effort it takes to get in somewhere, that is, reading the obscene
words was pretty embarrassing in the ‘50s, especially for a woman in
front of a male experimenter. Then she has to be committed to it
after that and certainly would want to, otherwise she wouldn’t have gone
through the embarrassment or the effort so in order to justify the
effort, you have to believe that we exerted effort for a good cause.
Hazing is one way the groups have people go through a series of trials
and tribulations in order to get into a group and then they are actually
less likely to leave.
Let’s move on to slide nine.
What happens if there’s insufficient justification. Now first of
all we need to discuss the idea that there’s external justification and
internal justification. That is, a reward, even giving money, would be an
example of external justification. Internal justification might be a
sense of pride or a sense of satisfaction at having exerted some effort.
Counter-attitudinal advocacy is one way in which we’ve studied
insufficient justification. Here we study hypocrisy by having individuals
write essays or make positions out loud in front of others or on videotape
in public that are counter to their attitude. Now clearly they don’t have
any external justification for doing this, we’re asking them to do this as
part of an experiment. What we find is that if I have you do this, your
attitude will actually move somewhat because you try to find internal
justification for what you did. However, if I pay you for your
counter-attitudinal advocacy, then you have external justification and
therefore you don’t change your attitude because you did it for the twenty
dollars.
Let’s move on to slide
ten. Ben Franklin Effect is the idea that we like people for
whom we have done a favor. If you’re given an option of three people and
asked which one you will like more; Bob who you loaned some money for
rent, Sue who loaned you money for lunch, or Joe for whom you’ve never
had
any sort of monetary exchange. You’d probably like Bob best, that is, you
like the person that you’ve done a favor for. It has to do with
justifying why you did the favor. You didn’t do the favor because you had
necessarily thought that you would get something in return, but because
you actually like that person. Therefore, we come up with that intrinsic
or internal justification.
Let’s move on to slide
eleven. Self discrepancy theory is based on the idea that everyone has
an ideal self and an ought self. The ideal self is what you ideally would
like to be. The ought self is what you should be or what maybe others think
you should be, so your ideal self may be very different from what your
mother believes your ideal self should be. Therefore your mother’s idea
of your ideal self is your ought self. We also have promotion goals and
prevention goals. Promotion goals are those goals that try to promote
something; promoting health by running as opposed to a prevention goal by
preventing weight gain by running. You know the promotion goals are
much more
likely to be followed and achieved than prevention goals. Because we tend
to approach positive things, that is, we might approach being healthy. We
also can avoid negative things, that is avoid being overweight therefore
using a prevention goal. But approaching positive is much more likely
than avoiding negatives. Self-discrepancy comes from the difference
between your ideal self or your ought self and your actual self. If there’s
a lot of discrepancy between your ideal and actual self, that is you are
nowhere near what you thought your ideal self should be, then you’ll be
more negative in terms of mood and maybe even self-esteem. Thinking about
the discrepancy between your ideal and actual self, heightens self focus
and may lead to self-consciousness. People who do this frequently
comparing themselves now to what they thought they would be often find
that they have an increased self-consciousness and maybe even some
anxiety.
Let’s move on to slide
twelve. Self-enhancement. In order to feel better about ourselves, we
often choose situations in which people do well. For example, if you
don’t swim or never learned to swim or simply can’t swim, then you’re
probably going to choose situations that don’t involve swimming in order
to feel better about yourself. In addition we like to inflate our
contributions to joint efforts, especially when those efforts are
successful. So when you’re asked to fill out a form asking how much of a
group project that you did, almost everyone reports that they did well
more than their fare share and clearly this can’t be true. There’s only
100% of the efforts that was exerted, therefore somebody had to be
over-inflating their contributions. High self-complexity shows more
stable self-esteem. We’ve discussed this already, that is, the more
domains from which you evaluate yourself, the more self-complex you are,
the more stable your self-esteem will be, until your one area can be made
up with success in another.
Let’s move to slide
thirteen. Self-completion theory. This is the idea that you try to find
validation for the threatened and the valued part of self. Instructor
evaluations may be one way in which instructors do this. That is you’re
trying to find an evaluation for different parts of the self by having
others validate for you both the threatened and the valued parts of self.
Let’s move on to slide
fourteen. Self-evaluation maintenance theory. The idea here is that a
close other who outperforms us on a personally relevant task or skill
may be threatening, especially if that relevant task or skill is very
personally relevant to us. If it’s not, then we converge. For example,
if you are not musical at all and your best friend is a concert pianist,
when they win awards for doing that, you BIRG, that is, bask in
reflected glory. Bring up the fact that your friend is very good at this
and do so frequently, making sure everyone knows that you have a great
pianist as a friend. However, if it’s a personally relevant task, that is
you’re both concert pianists, then you may have to distance yourself from
that close other when they win or outperform you in some way in order to
maintain your self-evaluation. They can also reduce relevance of the
task, so if our best friend who’s a concert pianist outplays us at some
concert, we might decide that that concert wasn’t important or that
playing the piano is only one part of what you do and in fact you have
many other things that you’re talented at. The other thing and least
likely thing is that you improve your own performance, so when your best
friend outperforms you at a concert, you simply practice more and try to
improve your own performance so that it will not happen again.
Now let’s move to the last
slide, slide fifteen. Self-verification. We’ve discussed this already, it’s the idea that we need to have our self-concept validated by
others and when choosing relationship partners, we engage in
self-verification. That is, we try to find a partner who has a similar
self-concept or concept of us that matches our self-concept. So if we
have a very negative self-concept, we find someone who will reinforce that
and say yes you are fairly worthless. But if you have a high or positive
self-concept, we’ll also need someone to validate that self-concept and
look for a partner who tells us how great we are.
This concludes lesson
four. Thank you very much.
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