• Insufficient Justification 
• Effort Justification 
• Justifying Difficult Decisions 

• a numerical scale used to assess people's attitudes that includes a set of possible answers and that has anchors on each extreme.
• 1=never ----> 7=always 

• external justifications is not sufficient to explain behavior 
• Festinger and Cartsmith, 1959 ---> "cognitive dissonance"  

•  Examined self-justification in children.
• In this experiment, children were left in a room with a variety of toys, including a highly desirable toy steam-shovel, Upon leaving the room, the experimenter told half the children that there would be a severe punishment if they played with that particular toy and told the other half that there would be a mild punishment. 
• Later, when the children were told that they could freely play with whatever toy they wanted, the ones in the mild punishment condition were less likely to play with the toy, even though the threat had been removed. The children who were only mildly threatened had to justify to themselves why they did not play with the toy. 
• The degree of punishment by itself was not strong enough, so the children had to convince themselves that the toy was not worth playing with in order to resolve their dissonance.

•  Looked into the consequences of making a choice in post-decision dissonance. 
• Participants in experiment rated several objects on desirability; experimenters manipulated the level of dissonance by having participants choose between two objects either close or distant in rated desirability. 
• After participants chose an object and read dissonant or consonant information about the two objects, they had to re-rate the objects.

• Results showed that participants re-ranked the chosen object as more desirable and disregarded the negative information. When dissonance was high (objects closely rated), participants had to justify their choice of object more than those who had to choose between objects not closely rated by re-evaluating the object as more desirable than their initial impression.

• (Bargh and Williams, 2006)
• impressions
• attitudes
• behavior
• goal pursuit

• Chaiken, 1980
• model of persuasion that maintains that ther are two different routes of persuasion: systematic and heurisitc 

• Festinger and Carlsmith set up an ingenious experiment which would allow for a direct test of cognitive dissonance theory versus a behavioral/reinforcement theory.

• Jason Mitchell, 2008

• "Social Cognition is special." 
• "Thinking about others= thinking about self"
• "Social Cognition is our default"

• Muzafer Sherif (1936)
• dealt with conformity that lies further along implicit-explicit continum---conformity that is less automatic and reflexive 
• interested in how groups influence the behavior of individuals by shaping how reality is perceived 

• People primarily attend to superficial aspectis of the message that are tangential to its substance
• Individual relies on the simple, implicit communication heuristicsm, or "rules of thumb", to justify attitude change! 
• length of message, how expert the communicator seems

• People think carefully and deliberately about the content of the message 
• Logistics and cogency (how convincing the argument is, of the arguments contained in the message

• Russell Fazio
• measure the accesibility (degree in which the attitude is ready to become active in the individual's mind, giving thought and behavior) of the attitude 
• Fazio and colleagues measure accessibility by timing the response to the attitude question

• Triggered by factors that:

-Reduce our motivation

-interfere with our ability to attend to the message

carefully

• an attitudinal function that serves to alert us to rewarding objects and situations we should approach and costly ir punishing objects or situations we should avoid 

• automatic behaviors 
• low time/motivation

• bolstering our identity and self-esteem by taking note of important elements of out identity such as our important values 

• function of:

-strength of source (status, confidencem expertise, relationship with you

-immediacy of source (soon, closeness to you)

-number of source; more=more influence until affect 

plateau

• function that enables us to maintain cherished beliefs about ourselves by protecting ourselves from awareness of our negative attributes and impulses; from facts that contradict our cherished beleifs or desires. 
• terror-management theory 

• negative arousal
• impression management theory (only public attitudes change)
• self-affirmation theory (role of self-enhancing motivation)
• self-perception theory (arousal is NOT necessary)

• nonconscious
• unintentional 
• involuntary
• effortless
• relied on when not motivated or able ro think 

• postive vs. negative 
• explicit vs. implicit  
• basis of attitude 
• strength of attitude 

• the infuence of other people that results from taking their comments or actions as a source of information about what is correct, proper, or effective 

• the tendency of a stationary point of light in a completely darkended enviornment to appear to move 

• the tendency to change ways we act, think, feel to fit in with surrounding people/situations norm

• to ward off anxiety we feel when thinking about our own demise, we find refuge in cultural worldviews and values; in doing so we hope part of us will survive death

• investigated dissonance using an effort justification paradigm. 
• Female participants, who were joining a discussion group about the psychology of sex, had to go through a mild initiation--reading aloud sex-related words, or had to go through a severe initiation by reading aloud explicit sec words 
• Participants, those who went through severe initiation rated both categories much higher than both the control and mild initiation groups. 
• Female participants had to justify the effort and humiliation they experienced to enter the group, they rated the group as more attractive than the other conditions.

• High correspondence between attitude, measure and behavior
• Consistent components/bases of attitudes 
• weak situation
• strong attitude
•  -firsthand information
• accessible attitude
• - strong + accesibly often correlate 

• Controlled behaviors 
• time/motivation 

• Increased liking for something that resulted from lots of effort 
• Aronson and Mills, 1959

• aversive emotional state
• aroused whenever people experience inconsistency between two cognitions; behavior too! 

• Group Size; positive correlation between size of group and increased level 
• Expertise and Status; special expertise-->greater status
• Culture; interdependent cultures =more concern with relations to others and fitting broader social context
• Gender; women taught to be interdependetn; likely to conform
• Anonymity
• Difficulty (or ambiguity) of the task; "right" thing= unclear, we are inclinded to rely on others for guidance 
• interpretative context of disagreement; 

• Leon Festinger, 1957
• the theory that inconsistencies between a person's thoughts, sentiments, amd actions create an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that leads to efforts to restore consistency 

• the desire to avoisd the disapproval, harsh judgements, and other social sanctions (barb, ostracism) that others might deliver 

Implicit

• IAT 
• Self Esteem examples?

*issues 

LaPiere (1994)

Richard aPiere is best known for his article 1934 article "Attitudes Versus Actions" that appeared in the journal Social Forces.

• LaPiere spent two years traveling the United States by car with a couple ofChinese ethnicity. 
•  Visited 251 hotels and restaurants; turned away 1x .
• LaPiere mailed a survey to all of the businesses they visited with the question, "Will you accept members of the Chinese race in your establishment?" 
• "Yes", "No", and "Depends upon the circumstances"- available  Of the 128 that responded 92% answered No.
•  The study was seminal in establishing the gap between attitudes and behaviors.

Schema

a knowledge structure consisting of any organized body of stored information

• person, self, event, etc.