PSYC 215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Cognitive Dissonance, Leon Festinger, Attitude Change
27 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
The issue of tuition increases: comes up every time at every university. An issue in social psychology for a number of years: 1 of the interesting topics that came out many decades ago was how attitude change sometimes follows our behaviour. Normal understanding of behaviour is that we are rational beings, we form attitudes and then act. That makes sense and it is an intuitive model of how humans work- used in economics and other ways of understanding human behaviour. In the 50s- they generated research showing that if you get people to act slightly differently, their attitudes change to match their behaviour. Seemed irrational- how should your behaviour influence your ideas about the world. This spawned a lot of research and theories. 1 procedure we use to study this is induced compliance- get someone to do something that they would not otherwise think of doing. Mid-50s: leon conducted an experiment- students did a foreign task.
