Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: Does cognitive dissonance factor into pluralistic ignorance?
Prentice and Miller found that, on average, private levels of comfort with drinking practices on campus were much lower than the perceived average. In the case of men, they found a shifting of private attitudes toward this perceived norm, a form of cognitive dissonance. Women, on the other hand, were found to have an increased sense of alienation on the campus but lacked the attitude change detected in men, presumably because norms related to alcohol consumption on campus are much more central for men than for women. Research has shown that pluralistic ignorance plagues not only those who indulge, but also those who abstain: from gambling, smoking and drinking and among some who follow vegetarianism. The latter has found that pluralistic ignorance can be caused by the structure of the underlying social network, not cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance, a theory originally developed by Festinger (1957), is the idea that people experience a sense of guilt or uneasiness when two linked cognitions are inconsistent, such as when there are two conflicting attitudes about a topic, or inconsistencies between one's attitude and behavior on a certain topic. The basic idea of the Cognitive Dissonance Theory relating to attitude change, is that people are motivated to reduce dissonance which can be achieved through changing their attitudes and beliefs. Cooper & Fazio's (1984) have also added that cognitive dissonance does not arise from any simple cognitive inconsistency, but rather results from freely chosen behavior that may bring about negative consequences. These negative consequences may be threats to the consistency, stability, predictability, competence, moral goodness of the self-concept, or violation of general self-integrity.
The term "agnotology" was first coined in a footnote in Proctor's 1995 book, "The Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer": "Historians and philosophers of science have tended to treat ignorance as an ever-expanding vacuum into which knowledge is sucked – or even, as Johannes Kepler once put it, as the mother who must die for science to be born. Ignorance, though, is more complex than this. It has a distinct and changing political geography that is often an excellent indicator of the politics of knowledge. We need a political agnotology to complement our political epistemologies".
A variety of explanations have been offered for the popularity of the Dozens. Its development is intertwined with the oppression African Americans encountered, first as slaves and later as second-class citizens. John Dollard viewed the Dozens as a manifestation of frustration aggression theory, a theory that he helped develop. He hypothesized that African Americans, as victims of racism, have been unable to respond in kind towards their oppressors, and instead shifted their anger to friends and neighbors, as displayed in the strings of insults.
This model, proposed by Latane and Darley, describes five things that must occur in order for a person to intervene:The number of individuals present in the situation requiring help is also a mediating factor in one’s decision to give aid, where the more individuals are present, the less likely it is for one particular individual to give aid due to a reduction in perceived personal responsibility. This is known as diffusion of responsibility, where the responsibility one feels for the person(s) in need is divided by the number of bystanders. Another factor that comes into play is evaluation apprehension, which simply refers to the fear of being judged by other bystanders. Finally, pluralistic ignorance may also lead to someone not intervening. This refers to relying on the reaction of others, before reacting yourself.
In Plato's Gorgias (and in the Protagoras 345c4-e6), Socrates argues that no one does wrong willingly, one of the most famous doctrines to be associated with him. When framed in modern (Western) terms, the implication is that it is ignorance, rather that free individual agency, that is responsible for morally wrong actions.
In a further study, Thornberg concluded that there are seven stages of moral deliberation as a bystander in bystander situations among the Swedish schoolchildren he observed and interviewed: (a) "noticing that something is wrong", i.e., children pay selective attention to their environment, and sometimes they don't tune in on a distressed peer if they're in a hurry or their view is obstructed, (b) "interpreting a need for help"—sometimes children think others are just playing rather than actually in distress or they display pluralistic ignorance, (c) "feeling empathy", i.e., having tuned in on a situation and concluded that help is needed, children might feel sorry for an injured peer, or angry about unwarranted aggression (empathic anger), (d) "processing the school's moral frames"—Thornberg identified five contextual ingredients influencing children's behavior in bystander situations (the definition of a good student, tribe caring, gender stereotypes, and social-hierarchy-dependent morality), (e) "scanning for social status and relations", i.e., students were less likely to intervene if they didn't define themselves as friends of the victim or belonging to the same significant social category as the victim, or if there were high-status students present or involved as aggressors—conversely, lower-status children were more likely to intervene if only a few other low-status children were around, (f) "condensing motives for action", such as considering a number of factors such as possible benefits and costs, and (g) "acting", i.e., all of the above coalesced into a decision to intervene or not. It is striking how this was less an individual decision than the product of a set of interpersonal and institutional processes.
When individuals encounter new information or new experiences, they categorize the information based on their preexisting attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs. If the new encounter does not coincide with their preexisting assumptions, then dissonance is likely to occur. When dissonance does occur, individuals are motivated to reduce the dissonance they experience by avoiding situations that would either cause the dissonance or increase the dissonance. For this reason, cognitive dissonance is considered a drive state that encourages motivation to achieve consonance and reduce dissonance.
An example of cognitive dissonance would be if someone holds the belief that maintaining a healthy lifestyle is important, but they don't regularly work out or eat healthy. They may experience dissonance between their beliefs and their actions. If there is a significant amount of dissonance, they may be motivated to change their attitudes and work out more or eat healthier foods. They may also be inclined to avoid situations that will point out the fact that their attitudes and beliefs are inconsistent, such as avoiding the gym or not reading health reports.According to cognitive dissonance theory, there are three types of cognitive relationships: consonant relationships, dissonant relationships, and irrelevant relationships. Consonant relationships are when two elements, such as your beliefs and actions, are in equilibrium with each other or coincide. Dissonant relationships are when two elements are not in equilibrium and cause dissonance. Irrelevant relationships are when two elements do not possess a meaningful relationship with one another, they are unrelated and do not cause dissonance.
The predictive dissonance model proposes that cognitive dissonance is fundamentally related to the predictive coding (or predictive processing) model of cognition. A predictive processing account of the mind proposes that perception actively involves the use of a Bayesian hierarchy of acquired prior knowledge, which primarily serves the role of predicting incoming proprioceptive, interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory inputs. Therefore, the brain is an inference machine which attempts to actively predict and explain its sensations. Crucial to this inference is the minimization of prediction error. The predictive dissonance account proposes that the motivation for cognitive dissonance reduction is related to an organism's active drive for reducing prediction error. Moreover, it proposes that human (and perhaps other animal) brains have evolved to selectively ignore contradictory information (as proposed by dissonance theory) to prevent the overfitting of their predictive cognitive models to local and thus non-generalizable conditions. The predictive dissonance account is highly compatible with the action-motivation model since, in practice, prediction error can arise from unsuccessful behavior.
According to research by Altemeyer, right-wing authoritarians tend to exhibit cognitive errors and symptoms of faulty reasoning. Specifically, they are more likely to make incorrect inferences from evidence and to hold contradictory ideas that result from compartmentalized thinking. They are also more likely to uncritically accept insufficient evidence that supports their beliefs and they are less likely to acknowledge their own limitations. Whether right-wing authoritarians are less intelligent than average is disputed, with Stenner arguing that variables such as high verbal ability (indicative of high cognitive capacity) have a very substantial ameliorative effect in diminishing authoritarian tendencies. Measured against other factors of personality, authoritarians generally score lower on openness to experience and slightly higher on conscientiousness.
Social representations should neither be equated with relatively stable collective representations, nor should they be confused with individual, cognitive representations. This has been elaborated by several authors who contributed to the theory: Gerard Duveen and Barbara Lloyd emphasized the articulation of the individual and the collective in micro-genetic processes of socialization, Wolfgang Wagner theorized about the role of action and social interaction in the construction of social representations, and Sandra Jovchelovitch proposed to regard social representations as a space in-between, at the cross-roads between the individual and society that is the public sphere, that links objects, subjects and activities. Most authors agree that social representations are dynamic elements of knowledge that depend on social conflict and dispute to originate and that have a history of elaboration and change over time. Bauer & Gaskell integrate this view in their formal model relating three elements: subjects, or carriers of the representation; an object, activity, or idea that is represented; and a project of a social group within which the representation makes sense. This conceptualisation is known as the toblerone model of social representations.
Later research was focused more on refining the hypothesis, rather than on denying its correctness. In one of the earlier studies, following the publication of Dollard et al.'s book, Pastore argued that the hypothesis should distinguish between arbitrary and non-arbitrary situations, as non-arbitrary situations decrease the aggressiveness of response. In this study, participants from a sample of 131 college students were presented with the verbal description of two types of situations, arbitrary and non-arbitrary. One of the arbitrary situation examples was being intentionally passed by the bus driver, while waiting at the correct bus stops. A non-arbitrary situation was described in one of the examples as being passed by the bus, while it was specifically marked as heading for a garage. The study results suggested that arbitrariness of the situation is an important factor in eliciting aggressive behavior in frustrating situations, with arbitrary situations inducing more aggression.
According to Qingwen, "the impact of television portrayals of minorities is significant because of the ability of television images to activate racial stereotypes and the power exerted by visual images". Non-Hispanic white Americans who lack real life contact with Hispanic or Latino individuals are forced to rely heavily on television and film, their only source of exposure to this ethnic group, as the foundation of perceiving Hispanic and Latino individuals. If nearly all of the few representations of these individuals are negatively stereotyped, non-Hispanic white individuals are likely to carry this perception into real life, embedding that stereotypical image of Hispanic and Latino individuals into their conscience. Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory gives insight into how these stereotypical character representations are carried into the real world, pointing to the way in which individuals' perceptions are limited to what they have experienced. Those who lack real life contact with the stereotyped individuals are unable to counter the television portrayals of this ethnic group with a more realistic, less negative image.
This practitioners' study suggests that the "bystander effect" can be studied and analyzed in a much broader fashion. The broader view includes not just a) what bystanders do in singular emergencies, b) helping strangers in need, when c) there are (or are not) other people around. The reactions of bystanders can also be analyzed a) when the bystanders perceive any of a wide variety of unacceptable behavior over time, b) they are within an organizational context, and c) with people whom they know. The practitioners' study reported many reasons why some bystanders within organizations do not act or report unacceptable behavior. The study also suggests that bystander behavior is, in fact, often helpful, in terms of "acting on the spot to help,"and "reporting" unacceptable behavior (and emergencies and people in need.) The ombuds practitioners' study suggests that what bystanders will do in real situations is actually very complex, reflecting views of the context and their managers (and relevant organizational structures if any) and also many personal reasons.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge argue that the religions growing around the world tend to exhibit these same features. World religions—and Christianity, in particular—are growing fastest where they are: competing with other religious alternatives, unsupported by state governments, and entirely dependent upon popular interest. Writing against the fear that the growth of religion will increase warfare and strife, Micklethwait and Wooldridge argue that a democratic and pluralistic culture would help minimize these dangers while maximizing the benefits of religion. Finally, while the authors suggest that Islam too could be modernized and introduced to a pluralistic culture, they suspect that Islam is less amenable for this transition than Christianity.
Siddiqui coined the term "cocktail ideology" to characterise the cultural profile of the Bangladeshi people in the 21st century. A "cocktail ideology", combining the retrogressive interpretation of religion and tradition with vulgar elements of the so-called modernity, has emerged in many developing countries since the 1960s and the population of Bangladesh, among other developing courtiers, reflects uneasy and tense co-existence of these two components. Women and middle-aged men are, in general, the bearers of tradition and religious orthodoxy, while the younger generation tends to carry the flag for "decadent modernity". It has been found that the poor tend to be more affected by this "cocktail ideology" than any other class of society.
Frustration–aggression hypothesis, otherwise known as the frustration–aggression–displacement theory, is a theory of aggression proposed by John Dollard, Neal Miller, Leonard Doob, Orval Mowrer, and Robert Sears in 1939, and further developed by Neal Miller in 1941 and Leonard Berkowitz in 1969. The theory says that aggression is the result of blocking, or frustrating, a person's efforts to attain a goal.
Milton Rokeach's dogmatism scale was an early attempt to measure pure authoritarianism, whether left or right. The scale was carefully designed to measure closed-mindedness without regard to ideology. Nevertheless, researchers found that it correlated with British political conservativism. In a similar line of research, Philip Tetlock found that right wing beliefs are associated with less integrative complexity than left wing beliefs. People with moderate liberal attitudes had the highest integrative complexity in their cognitions.
The bystander effect is a specific type of diffusion of responsibility—when people's responses to certain situations depend on the presence of others. The bystander effect occurs when multiple individuals are watching a situation unfold but do not intervene (or delay or hesitate to intervene) because they know that someone else could intervene, and they feel less responsibility to do so. This is directly caused by the diffusion of responsibility, as it is shown that individuals are much less likely to intervene in a situation when he or she knows others are watching; thus, the responsibility for helping is spread among the group of bystanders, and each bystander does not feel a strong responsibility to do so, so no one helps.
"The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans", is a book on the phenomenon of growing political polarization in the United States. Levendusky finds that while a small number have become more extreme over time, most contemporary Americans maintain relatively similar views to those in previous generations. What has changed is the way people sort themselves into parties. Previously, many liberals identified as Republicans and many conservatives identified as Democrats. More recently, the parties have become more ideologically pure and encouraged people to think of themselves in that way as well. Thus, voters have been "sorting" into Democrats and Republicans and eliminated much of the middle ground that existed in previous generations.
A common source of confusion around inclusive fitness theory is that Hamilton's early analysis included some inaccuracies, that, "although corrected by him in later publications", are often not fully understood by other researchers who attempt to apply inclusive fitness to understanding organisms' behaviour. For example, Hamilton had initially suggested that the statistical correlation in his formulation could be understood by a correlation coefficient of genetic relatedness, but quickly accepted George Price's correction that a general regression coefficient was the more relevant metric, and together they published corrections in 1970. A related confusion is the connection between inclusive fitness and multi-level selection, which are often incorrectly assumed to be mutually exclusive theories. The regression coefficient helps to clarify this connection:
The action–motivation model proposes that inconsistencies in a person's cognition cause mental stress, because psychologic inconsistency interferes with the person's functioning in the real world. Among the ways for coping, the person can choose to exercise a behavior that is inconsistent with his or her current attitude (a belief, an ideal, a value system), but later try to alter that belief to be consonant with a current behaviour; the cognitive dissonance occurs when the person's cognition does not match the action taken. If the person changes the current attitude, after the dissonance occurs, he or she then is obligated to commit to that course of behaviour.
Disconfirming evidence can lead to cognitive dissonance on the part of these individuals, and lead them to deliberately or unconsciously attempt to resolve dissonance by ignoring, discounting or even destroying the evidence. Once any steps are taken to justify the decision that the accused is guilty, it becomes very difficult for the official to accept disconfirming evidence, and this can continue during appeals, retrials or any other effort to revisit a verdict.
This type of cognitive dissonance occurs to a person faced with making a difficult decision, wherein there always exist aspects of the rejected-object not chosen, which appeal to the person making the choice. The action of deciding provokes the psychological dissonance consequent to choosing X instead of Y, despite little difference between X and Y; thus, the decision "I chose X" is dissonant with the cognition that "There are some aspects of Y that I like." Moreover, the study "Choice-induced Preferences in the Absence of Choice: Evidence from a Blind Two-choice Paradigm with Young Children and Capuchin Monkeys" (2010) reports similar results in the occurrence of cognitive dissonance in human beings and in animals.
The reduction of the psychological stress of cognitive dissonance is a function of the magnitude of the dissonance caused by the existential inconsistency, between two contradictory beliefs held by the person; or by the contradiction between the person's beliefs and an action he or she has taken. Two factors determine the degree of psychological dissonance caused by two conflicting cognitions or by two conflicting actions: