PSY220H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Cognitive Dissonance, Leon Festinger, Judson Mills
21 Feb 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
People are motivated to justify their own actions, beliefs and feelings. When do they something, they will try to convince themselves (and others) that it was a logial, reasonable thing to do. Those who were forewarned about the symptoms caused by this drug had a sensible explanatino for the symptoms when they appeared. Those who were mislead, had no logical explanation for their behaviour; so they tried to account for their symptoms by convincing themselves that they were either happy or angry, depending on the social stimuli in the environment. When the disaster occurred in a neighbouring village such that the residents in question could feel the tremors but were not in imminent danger, there was an abundance of rumors forecasting impending doom. Why would people invent, believe and communicate such stories: people were terribly frightened, and because there was not ample justification for this fear, they invented their own justifications thus, they were not compelled to feel foolish.
