Blog 7: Cognitive Dissonance

Judging from the reading in the textbook, dieting seems to be a very popular example of cog dis. I'm going to be a bit unoriginal and do the same because I have a very good example. Everyone in my group of friends is fairly health conscious. That's not to say we don't get lazy sometimes and ignore the gym for a while, or have ice cream or mini pie parties... But, for the most part, we all try to eat fairly healthy things and be as active as we have time for. There are also extremes within the group. One of my friends is very careful about sugars and carbs, while another eats mostly pasta. It always seems like the pasta friend is hungry and (though she doesn't eat very large portions), she is always up for food- especially italian. The no-carb friend, on the other hand, is always conscious of what she has eaten that day. None of us really need to diet but we all sort of joke about it and so health is always kind of on our minds. There is a sort of expectancy to at least try to be healthy, and if you don't, to feel a little guilty. The pasta friend is always talking about wanting to eat or just having eaten. The no carb friend is always saying, jokingly, "that's not part of the diet." It has become a joke among our group of friends. Because health is important to all of us, this has become our gentle way of helping each other resist certain temptations and stay on track with food and exercise. We also get amusement out of it because everytime we eat, our pasta friend says something about how healthy she has eaten all week. We all turn to give her the "yah right" look and she always responds with "ok, well I did go to taco bell earlier today...twice" or "yah, well I did have Romeo's yesterday, and taquitos." She will then proceed to that she is little, after all, so what's the harm? Or she will mention her health problems and say who cares, I have to enjoy life! All of these (what I would previously have called) rationalizations are examples of ways of reducing cognitive dissonance. People are uncomfortable with inconsistancy (such as eating whataburger daily when trying to eat healthy), (Festinger, 1957), and so they make changes to their attitude or perception of behaviors or consequences of behavior in order to reduce this inconsistancy, (McKimmie et al., 2003 & Gosling et al., 2006). When my pasta friend claims that she has been eating healthily, flat-out ignoring all the whataburger, she is trying to reduce this inconsistancy because it is uncomfortable.


Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Standford University Press.

Gosling, P., Denizeau, M., & Oberle, D. (2006). Denial of responsibility: A new mode of dissonance reduction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 722-733.

McKimmie, B. M., Terry, D. J., Hogg, M. A., Manstead, A. S. R., Spears, R., & Doosje, B. (2003). I'm a hypocrite, but so is everyone else: Group support and the reduction of cognitive dissonance. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 7, 214-224.

Blog 6: Attitude Change

I have a good recent example of psychological reactance, which is people's tendency to protect their freedom by taking steps to reinforce it when it is threatened (Wood & Quinn, 2003). The other day I got in a huge fight with one of my best friends. As all of my girlfriends are very close, like a family, everyone has been pretty upset that my bf and I haven't been speaking. They have all made attempts to talk to each of us and convince us to work things out. At first I got irritated when friend after friend approached me wanting to discuss things. Everyone knew I didn't want to talk about it because I needed time to think. Yet, every friend approached me, asserting that we needed to talk and that I needed to talk with my bf. Although I knew that I would have to work things out at some point, hearing that I must talk about it with anyone made me immediately want to talk about anything but the fight. Everytime a friend brought it up I found myself getting immediately irritated and defensive and responding adamently that I did NOT want to talk about it, even though I have been thinking about it almost non-stop. Then yesterday one of my friends called asking if she could come over later to ask me about spanish homework because we are in the same class. I said sure and when she came over we talked about spanish and a few other things. Before I knew it though we were talking about the fight. This time though, I found myself listening and actually discussing things with her. Because she didn't start out by announcing that we HAD to talk about things, my defenses didn't go up immediately. Because she used "reverse psychology" by claiming to want to talk about spanish, I was able to focus on what she was saying and not on protecting my right to decline to discuss things with her. In other words, unlike my other friends, this friend was able to avoid my psychological reactance by not forwarning me of her argument that I should talk to my bf and work things out. As a result, she was able to convince me and today everything got worked out.


Wood, W., & Quinn, J. M. (2003). Forewarned and forearmed? Two meta-analysis syntheses of forewarnings of influence appeals. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 119-138.

Blog 5: Study of Attitudes

I feel like I grew up with a fairly balanced political and religious background, or at least unique. My mom grew up in a large Irish Catholic family, stop practicing as a young adult and became extremely liberal, and then slowly became conservative throughout my life. My dad was raised in Waco as a fundamentalist Baptist, moved to Austin and became a liberal hippie as soon as he could, and as he aged I think he became more liberal and more of an atheist. Therefore, I feel like I got a taste of most perspectives (plus I still had Catholic and Baptist family members influencing me from either side of the family). Somehow I turned out relatively conservative, and became increasingly conservative when I decided to be baptised Catholic (my mom also returned to the Church). There was great religious and political dichotomy in my family when I was in high school. My dad was a raging liberal and atheist and both my mom and I were fairly avid republicans and Catholics. College, however, changed everything. As supported by past and continuing research (the new Astin study), people tend to become more liberal in college. I sould have been a participant in Newcomb's (1943) study, because, in keeping with his findings, I started out fairly conservative and experienced a very liberal shift in my thinking. Now we just have to wait and see what happens after college! Prior to college, I firmly believed in God, and in the Catholic doctrine (well, most of it), I was not in favor of abortion, the death penalty, premarital sex, etc. Upon starting my college career though, I slowly began to question all of these beliefs. I stopped going to Church mostly because I couldn't find the time and because it seemed like most people didn't go. Then I realized one day that I didn't believe in original sin, and after that it was kind of downhill for Catholicism. After that I began to question my political beliefs. I felt more free to change my mind after deciding I wasn't a Catholic. I will admit, I'm still fiscally conservative and that probably won't change a whole lot. Socially though, I am light years more liberal than I ever could have imagined, and the most I can say spiritually is that I feel like there must be some kind of higher power, but that is pretty much the extent of my faith. So, as predicted by Newcomb, I have experienced a liberal shift in college, and I guess next year I'm supposed to start becoming slightly more conservative again? We'll see...


Newcomb, T. M. (1943). Personality and social change: Attitude formation in a student community. Ft. Worth, TX: Dryden Press.

Demonstrate A Concept: False Consensus Effect

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdt1h8reVHA

I chose to demonstrate the false consensus effect by asking a few of my friends how they feel about several social issues and how many people they would estimate agree with them. Before I explain the false consensus effect and how this video is an example, let me first summarize the content of the film clip:

1st Question Asked: Are you pro-choice?

Respondent: Chloe
Answer: Yes
Estimate % pro-choice: 65-75%


Respondent: Rachel
Answer: No
Estimate % pro-choice: 35%


Respondent: Katie
Answer: Yes
Estimate % pro-choice: 65%


Respondent: Nina
Answer: No
Estimate % pro-choice: 20%


2nd Question Asked: Do you believe in God?


Respondent: Nina
Answer: Yes
Estimate % believe: 90%


Respondent: Katie
Answer: Yes
Estimate % believe: 65%


Respondent: Chloe'
Answer: Yes
Estimate % believe: 65%


Respondent: Rachel
Answer: Yes
Estimate % believe: 85%


3rd Question Asked: Do you agree with the death penalty?


Respondent: Rachel
Answer: No
Estimate % agree: 30%


Respondent: Chloe'
Answer: Yes
Estimate % agree: 70%


Respondent: Katie
Answer: Yes
Estimate % agree: 68%


Respondent: Nina
Answer: No
Estimate % agree: 25%


(Krueger, 2000)


The false-consensus effect is one of the two problems that can occur when using the availability heuristic. It describes the human tendency to overestimate how many people have the same attrbutes, opinions, and behaviors (Kruger, 1998; Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). When it comes to opinions on social issues such as abortion, God, and the death penalty, the false consensus occurs when people who support abortion estimate than many others also support abortion, as well as when people who do not support the death penalty estimate that many others do not support the death penalty. The questions I asked in the video clip demonstrate this concept well. As Chloe' and Katie were pro-choice and in support of the death penalty, they predicted that the majority of the US population is also pro-choice and in support of the death penalty. In contrast, Nina and Rachel, who were not pro-choice and not in support of the death penalty, predicted that the minority of the US population is pro-choice and in support of the death penalty (meaning that they estimated that the majority of the population held beliefs similar to their own). The false consensus effect is an interesting phenomenon and is quite easily demonstrated, as seen by this example.



Krueger, J. (1998). On the perception of social consensus. Advances in Experimental and Social Psychology, 30, 163-240.

Krueger, J. (2000). The projective perception of the social world: A building block of social comparison processes. In J. Suls & L. Wheller (Eds.), Handbook of social comparison: Theory and research (pp. 323-351). New York: Plenum/Kluwer.

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279-301.

Blog 4: Prejudice, Stereotypes, Discrimination

Up until college I of course always belonged to a group of friends, but none were as close as the group I have now (we'll call them the SU group). The girls I spend time with now are like my sisters. Compared to friends I've had in the past, this group really feels like the group I'm meant to be with. These feel like "my people" whereas friends from the past feel like someone else's "people." I've had trouble identifying exactly what I was feeling and I think the description of ingroups and outgroups sums it up nicely. An ingroup is "a group with which an individual feels a sense of membership, belonging, and identity" (pg. 135). This is exactly how I feel about my present group of friends, as described above. An outgroup on the other hand, is "a group with which an individual does not feel a sense of membership, belonging, or identity" (pg. 135). For example, I have a group of friends from the school I went to up until 8th grade- we'll call them the MF (Marble Falls) group. I have always had plenty of fun with the MF group and can hang out with them and talk and enjoy myself. However, I never feel like I'm really at home with them or that I really belong. When I'm upset, or I need advice, or I want to share some exciting news, I don't call someone from the MF group, I call one of my closest friends (from the SU group). This is because the SU group is my ingroup of friends and any other group of friends, including the MF group, is an outgroup for me.

I've also experienced the outgroup homogeneity effect, which is "the tendency to assume that there is greater similarity among members of outgroups than among members of ingroups" (pg. 135), (Linville & Jones, 1980). That is to say, it is much easier for me to distinguish individuals within my SU group of friends than it is within the MF group. When I think of the MF group, I can generate one general picture to represent all members of the group. Of course, this is relative to the SU group, to whom I am very close. I do still see individuals within the MF group, and much more so than within a group with which I am not friends at all, but I do not make individual distinctions as easily as for the SU group. When I think of the SU group, I cannot possible generate one picture to represent everyone; all I can see is one individual after another and they are each very unique.


Linville, P. W., & Jones, E. E. (1980). Polarized appraisals of out-group members. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38, 689-703.