If our beliefs and behavior were always consistent, all of our cognition would be in harmony. But this is not practical. Every adult knows that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, yet they continue to smoke. Most of us over indulge in a favorite food (Pizza, chocolate) although we know it is not healthy to do. The question that arise is, how is it, that people can hold inconsistent cognition?
One reason is many of our cognition never come into contact with each other. Some of our behavior is mindless. Because we do not think about our actions, we are unaware that they are inconsistent with our beliefs (Triandis, 1980). For instance, the cigarette smoker often lights up without consciously thinking about the act. Another reason is, though two attitudes are inconsistent, each may be related to several other consonant attitudes. To change one, would create new inconsistencies. So, people tolerate some inconsistency to avoid others. But when the inconsistency is too high to tolerate, people attempt to change their inconsistent acts or behaviors.
A cognition is an individuals' perceptions of personal attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. Robert perceives himself as someone who believes in god and follows gods teachings. These two cognition go together. Many of his attitudes are consistent with what he perceives as gods teachings. For example: he has negative attitude towards "adultery'', murder and pre-marital sex. Thus, Robert's behavior is consistent with his attitudes.
Consistency among a person's cognition is wide spread. If you have liberal political values, You favor assistance programs for the poor. The observation that most people's cognition are consistent with one another implies that individuals are motivated to maintain that consistency. These consistency theories hypothesize that if in consistency develops between cognitive elements, people are motivated to restore harmony between elements. The three important cognitive-consistency theories are:
~ Balance Theory
~ Congruity Theory
~ Cognitive-Dissonance Theory
One important consistence theory is balance theory, which was formulated by Heider (1958) and elaborated by Rosenberg and Abelson (1960). Consider the following statement: I am going to vote for Mr. Smith, he is in favor of reducing taxes. Balance theory is concerned with cognitive systems. This system contains three elements -the speaker, P, another person (candidate Mr. Smith), 0, and an impersonal object (taxes), X.
According to balance theory, two types of relationship may exist between elements. Sentiment relations refer to sentiments or evaluations directed towards objects and people. A sentiment may be either positive (liking, endorsing) or negative( disliking, opposing), symbolized as + or- . Unit relations refer to the extent of perceived association between elements. For example, a positive unit relation may result from ownership , a social relationship (such as friendship or marriage )or causality. A negative relation indicates dissociation, like that between ex -spouses or members of groups with opposing interests. A null relation exists when there is no association between elements.
Balanced system can be depicted as a triangle. (see figure 5.l(a)). Balanced theory concerned with the elements and their interrelations from P's viewpoint.
In this example, the speaker favors reduced taxes, perceives Mr. Smith as favoring reduced taxes intends to vote for Mr. Smith. This system is balanced. A balanced state is one in which all three sentiment relations are positive or in which one is positive and other two are negative.
Another example is, you oppose prostitution as a legalized profession and political candidate Mr. Balu favors legalizing the prostitution. Then, your cognition would be balanced if you disliked Mr. Balu (see figure 5.l(b ))
According to balanced theory, an imbalanced state is one in which two of the relationships between elements are positive and one is negative or in which all three are negative. Figures 5.2 , a & b contains imbalanced relations. In the figure 5.2(a), your friend, whom you like, dislikes the way you dress . This is an imbalanced state. "when no balanced state exists, then forces towards this state exists, then forces towards this state will arise" (Heider, 1946). This principle predicts that you will start disliking your friend, you will start disliking your clothes, or you will try to get your friend to like your clothes, if one of these three changes occurs, the system will be tn a state of balance. Consider the figure 5.2(b). Someone whom you dislike hates. the IAS, which you also dislike. By analogy with the maxim. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," you should like the IAS, but you don't with no positive bond anywhere in the three relations, attitude change simply cannot be predicted by Heider's system.
All balanced triads have zero or two minus signs, a quick way to determine whether a triad is balanced is to multiply its three signs. A positive product signifies balance, a negative product imbalance.
One problem with this theory is that all bonds are treated as if they were equally important and therefore equally susceptible to change in order to restore balance. However, in most triads, the bonds are not equally strong. For example, if a husband and wife disagreed over what vegetable to cook for dinner, a divorce would not be the probable outcome. Their feelings about "what vegetables to cook" are less strong than their feelings about each other. Balance theory makes no statement regarding the durability, importance or magnitude of the bonds.
Another problem is, it is difficult to know exactly what constitutes balance. Sometimes, one's opinion of another person or an object has both positive and negative aspects. If the P-0 bond is ambivalent, is there balance? The Jack of a clear definition of the homeostatic state is a most serious problem in cognitive consistency theory.
The consistency theory proposed by Osgood and Tannenbaum ( 1955) is congruity theory which deals with attitude change caused by communication. This theory is cognitively more parsimonious to evaluate related concepts in a similar manner. If person B advocates policy X, it is easier for me to have the same opinion of B and X than to have the same opinions of them. Then, my evaluations of B and X will tend to migrate towards each other. This is the principle of the theory.
Suppose the subject is shown a press release indicating that liberal politician (+ 3) supports very severe punishment (-1). This situation is "incongruous ". Congruity is achieved by movement of the subject's evaluations of the politician and the nature of punishment toward each other.
The most important principle of this theory is that the less polar item moves more. The item closer to the neutral point moves farther towards the polar item then the polar item moves towards the neutral item for instance, liberal person would evaluate the liberal politician less favorably and severe punishment more favorably. A counter intuitive predication is made when a highly polar source supports a less polar item of the same sign. For example, if your best friend (+3) says she likes classical music(+ 1), congruity theory would predict that you would like classical music more and your friend a little less.
Osgood and Tannenbaum have added correction factors to increase the accuracy of the predictions. One is a correction for "incredulity". Suppose you were to read that the government (+ 3) is in favor of double the income tax (-3), you may doubt whether the government has said that, since no politician interested in reelection would dare to do such a thing. So, you would not lower your opinion of the government. The wider the disparity between the source and the opinion attributed to that source, the greater the chance for incredulity. The wider the disparity, the greater the "incredulity correction, which lowers the amount of opinion change predicted by the original equation.
Despite, the modifications made to this theory, it has not received a great deal of attention.
Another major consistency theory is the cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance results when a person maintains two inconsistent cognition. Cognitive dissonance is an aversive state and like hunger or thirst it must be reduced. When a person experiences cognitive dissonance, he or she is motivated to reduce it, thereby returning to a state of cognitive consonance. Festinger, the proponent of this theory states that dissonance has that same energizing properties as other motives, such as hunger or frustration.
The concept of dissonance can be classified from this example: suppose you realize that you are a heavy smoker and you are also aware that smoking has been shown to cause cancer, these thoughts are dissonant. The theory says that dissonance must be reduced by one of the following methods-modifying one or both of the cognition, changing the perceived importance of one cognition, adding cognition or denying that the two cognition are related to each other. (see figure 5.3).
There are certain situations in which dissonance commonly occurs-after a decision, when one acts in a way that is inconsistent with his beliefs, exposure to information and social support.
Whenever a decision is made, the negative aspects of the chosen alternative and the positive aspects of the rejected alternative are sources of dissonance. Dissonance can be reduced by increasing the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and decreasing the attractiveness of the rejected one. This can be illustrated from the following examples. Andrea, a student was offered two part-time jobs -working in the library with flexible working hours and a cashier's job in a restaurant but she has to work on Friday and Saturday nights. Both the jobs are located near the campus. The advantage of working in the library in flexible hours an easier work and that of the cashier's job is more pay and the opportunity to meet people. Andrea chose the restaurant job but is experiencing dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is a state of psychological tension induced by dissonant relationships between cognitive elements. In the above example, although cognition are consistent with her decision, two other dissonant cognition are creating psychological tension. The magnitude of dissonance experienced depends on the proportion of elements that are dissonant with a person's decision. In Andrea's case, there are three consonant and only two dissonant cognition, so she will experience moderate dissonance.
The magnitude is also influenced by the importance of the elements. she will experience less dissonance if it is not important that she has to work every Friday and Saturday, more dissonance if an active social life on weekends is important to her.
Dissonance is an uncomfortable state and to reduce this dissonance, the theory predicts that Andrea will change her attitudes. She can either change the cognitive elements or change the importance associated with the elements. Since she chose the job and made a commitment to work weekend nights, Andrea can change importance of a cognition. She can emphasis the importance of one ·of the consonant cognition and deemphasis one of the dissonant cognition. Although she would prefer to be able to go out on weekends, this is less important as the cashier's job will allow her to meet people.
Another source from which dissonance occurs is, when a person behaves in a way that he is inconsistent with his attitudes. Such situations may involve forced compliance, i.e pressures on a person to comply with a request to engage in counter attitudinal behavior. For instance, subjects were asked to perform a boring task. On finishing the task, a subject was told that the experimenter who would normally tell the next subject was absent. The subject was asked whether he would kindly do it. Half the subjects were offered $50 to tell the next subject that the task was fun, half were offered $100. You have been bored and now you are telling the fellow student, the task is of fun. These are dissonant cognition. However, if offered $1000, you should experience little dissonance. Festinger called the Rs. 100 subjects the "forced compliance group". The cash "forces", the subject to comply with the experimenters request. On the other hand, those who were offered $50 experienced more dissonance because they did not have the justification for lying provided by large amount money. These subjects could not deny they lied, so they reduced dissonance by changing their attitude; for example by increasing their liking for the task and the experiment.
Thus, subjects in the high incentive ($100) condition experienced little dissonance and rated the task and experiment negatively, where as those in the low-incentive (Rs. 50) condition experienced more dissonance and rated the task and experiment positively.
If one is in.a state of dissonance because one has been told something discrepant with one's own opinion, one can reduce the dissonance by seeking out new consonant information and avoiding new dissonant information. However, if one is experiencing a very large amount of dissonance, it is easier to seek out the small amount of additional dissonant information needed to change his mind than to accumulate the large amount of consonant information.
Festinger emphasized that a person would make efforts to strengthen his consonant cognition and reduce dissonant ones by seeking social support. If other persons holding the same opinion can be cited, one's own opinion seems more sensible. If persons holding the opposing opinion can be discredited, there dissonant ideas can be disregarded.
The theme of consistency theories is that when a person's cognition are in a conflicting or inconsistent relation with one another, the person is motivated to reduce that conflict. The important cognitive consistency theories are balance theory, congruity theory and cognitive-dissonance theory.
Heider's balance theory, often called "the p-o-x theory", provides a helpful analysis of our attitudes toward communicators and their communicants. The consistency theory proposed by Osgood and Tannenbaum deals with attitude change caused by communication. The basic principle of dissonance theory is that cognitive dissonance results when a person maintains two inconsistent cognition. This dissonance can be reduced by changing one's action, seeking support for one's cognition, or rejecting as unimportant or immaterial any dissonant cognition.
One reason is many of our cognition never come into contact with each other. Some of our behavior is mindless. Because we do not think about our actions, we are unaware that they are inconsistent with our beliefs (Triandis, 1980). For instance, the cigarette smoker often lights up without consciously thinking about the act. Another reason is, though two attitudes are inconsistent, each may be related to several other consonant attitudes. To change one, would create new inconsistencies. So, people tolerate some inconsistency to avoid others. But when the inconsistency is too high to tolerate, people attempt to change their inconsistent acts or behaviors.
COGNITIVE-CONSISTENCIES THEORIES
A cognition is an individuals' perceptions of personal attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. Robert perceives himself as someone who believes in god and follows gods teachings. These two cognition go together. Many of his attitudes are consistent with what he perceives as gods teachings. For example: he has negative attitude towards "adultery'', murder and pre-marital sex. Thus, Robert's behavior is consistent with his attitudes.
Consistency among a person's cognition is wide spread. If you have liberal political values, You favor assistance programs for the poor. The observation that most people's cognition are consistent with one another implies that individuals are motivated to maintain that consistency. These consistency theories hypothesize that if in consistency develops between cognitive elements, people are motivated to restore harmony between elements. The three important cognitive-consistency theories are:
~ Balance Theory
~ Congruity Theory
~ Cognitive-Dissonance Theory
BALANCE THEORY
One important consistence theory is balance theory, which was formulated by Heider (1958) and elaborated by Rosenberg and Abelson (1960). Consider the following statement: I am going to vote for Mr. Smith, he is in favor of reducing taxes. Balance theory is concerned with cognitive systems. This system contains three elements -the speaker, P, another person (candidate Mr. Smith), 0, and an impersonal object (taxes), X.
According to balance theory, two types of relationship may exist between elements. Sentiment relations refer to sentiments or evaluations directed towards objects and people. A sentiment may be either positive (liking, endorsing) or negative( disliking, opposing), symbolized as + or- . Unit relations refer to the extent of perceived association between elements. For example, a positive unit relation may result from ownership , a social relationship (such as friendship or marriage )or causality. A negative relation indicates dissociation, like that between ex -spouses or members of groups with opposing interests. A null relation exists when there is no association between elements.
BALANCED SYSTEM
Balanced system can be depicted as a triangle. (see figure 5.l(a)). Balanced theory concerned with the elements and their interrelations from P's viewpoint.
In this example, the speaker favors reduced taxes, perceives Mr. Smith as favoring reduced taxes intends to vote for Mr. Smith. This system is balanced. A balanced state is one in which all three sentiment relations are positive or in which one is positive and other two are negative.
Another example is, you oppose prostitution as a legalized profession and political candidate Mr. Balu favors legalizing the prostitution. Then, your cognition would be balanced if you disliked Mr. Balu (see figure 5.l(b ))
IMBALANCED SYSTEM
According to balanced theory, an imbalanced state is one in which two of the relationships between elements are positive and one is negative or in which all three are negative. Figures 5.2 , a & b contains imbalanced relations. In the figure 5.2(a), your friend, whom you like, dislikes the way you dress . This is an imbalanced state. "when no balanced state exists, then forces towards this state exists, then forces towards this state will arise" (Heider, 1946). This principle predicts that you will start disliking your friend, you will start disliking your clothes, or you will try to get your friend to like your clothes, if one of these three changes occurs, the system will be tn a state of balance. Consider the figure 5.2(b). Someone whom you dislike hates. the IAS, which you also dislike. By analogy with the maxim. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," you should like the IAS, but you don't with no positive bond anywhere in the three relations, attitude change simply cannot be predicted by Heider's system.
All balanced triads have zero or two minus signs, a quick way to determine whether a triad is balanced is to multiply its three signs. A positive product signifies balance, a negative product imbalance.
CRITICISM OF THE THEORY:
One problem with this theory is that all bonds are treated as if they were equally important and therefore equally susceptible to change in order to restore balance. However, in most triads, the bonds are not equally strong. For example, if a husband and wife disagreed over what vegetable to cook for dinner, a divorce would not be the probable outcome. Their feelings about "what vegetables to cook" are less strong than their feelings about each other. Balance theory makes no statement regarding the durability, importance or magnitude of the bonds.
Another problem is, it is difficult to know exactly what constitutes balance. Sometimes, one's opinion of another person or an object has both positive and negative aspects. If the P-0 bond is ambivalent, is there balance? The Jack of a clear definition of the homeostatic state is a most serious problem in cognitive consistency theory.
CONGRUITY THEORY
The consistency theory proposed by Osgood and Tannenbaum ( 1955) is congruity theory which deals with attitude change caused by communication. This theory is cognitively more parsimonious to evaluate related concepts in a similar manner. If person B advocates policy X, it is easier for me to have the same opinion of B and X than to have the same opinions of them. Then, my evaluations of B and X will tend to migrate towards each other. This is the principle of the theory.
Suppose the subject is shown a press release indicating that liberal politician (+ 3) supports very severe punishment (-1). This situation is "incongruous ". Congruity is achieved by movement of the subject's evaluations of the politician and the nature of punishment toward each other.
The most important principle of this theory is that the less polar item moves more. The item closer to the neutral point moves farther towards the polar item then the polar item moves towards the neutral item for instance, liberal person would evaluate the liberal politician less favorably and severe punishment more favorably. A counter intuitive predication is made when a highly polar source supports a less polar item of the same sign. For example, if your best friend (+3) says she likes classical music(+ 1), congruity theory would predict that you would like classical music more and your friend a little less.
Osgood and Tannenbaum have added correction factors to increase the accuracy of the predictions. One is a correction for "incredulity". Suppose you were to read that the government (+ 3) is in favor of double the income tax (-3), you may doubt whether the government has said that, since no politician interested in reelection would dare to do such a thing. So, you would not lower your opinion of the government. The wider the disparity between the source and the opinion attributed to that source, the greater the chance for incredulity. The wider the disparity, the greater the "incredulity correction, which lowers the amount of opinion change predicted by the original equation.
Despite, the modifications made to this theory, it has not received a great deal of attention.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE THEORY
Another major consistency theory is the cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance results when a person maintains two inconsistent cognition. Cognitive dissonance is an aversive state and like hunger or thirst it must be reduced. When a person experiences cognitive dissonance, he or she is motivated to reduce it, thereby returning to a state of cognitive consonance. Festinger, the proponent of this theory states that dissonance has that same energizing properties as other motives, such as hunger or frustration.
The concept of dissonance can be classified from this example: suppose you realize that you are a heavy smoker and you are also aware that smoking has been shown to cause cancer, these thoughts are dissonant. The theory says that dissonance must be reduced by one of the following methods-modifying one or both of the cognition, changing the perceived importance of one cognition, adding cognition or denying that the two cognition are related to each other. (see figure 5.3).
SOURCES OF DISSONANCE
There are certain situations in which dissonance commonly occurs-after a decision, when one acts in a way that is inconsistent with his beliefs, exposure to information and social support.
Post Decisional Dissonance:
Whenever a decision is made, the negative aspects of the chosen alternative and the positive aspects of the rejected alternative are sources of dissonance. Dissonance can be reduced by increasing the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and decreasing the attractiveness of the rejected one. This can be illustrated from the following examples. Andrea, a student was offered two part-time jobs -working in the library with flexible working hours and a cashier's job in a restaurant but she has to work on Friday and Saturday nights. Both the jobs are located near the campus. The advantage of working in the library in flexible hours an easier work and that of the cashier's job is more pay and the opportunity to meet people. Andrea chose the restaurant job but is experiencing dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is a state of psychological tension induced by dissonant relationships between cognitive elements. In the above example, although cognition are consistent with her decision, two other dissonant cognition are creating psychological tension. The magnitude of dissonance experienced depends on the proportion of elements that are dissonant with a person's decision. In Andrea's case, there are three consonant and only two dissonant cognition, so she will experience moderate dissonance.
The magnitude is also influenced by the importance of the elements. she will experience less dissonance if it is not important that she has to work every Friday and Saturday, more dissonance if an active social life on weekends is important to her.
Dissonance is an uncomfortable state and to reduce this dissonance, the theory predicts that Andrea will change her attitudes. She can either change the cognitive elements or change the importance associated with the elements. Since she chose the job and made a commitment to work weekend nights, Andrea can change importance of a cognition. She can emphasis the importance of one ·of the consonant cognition and deemphasis one of the dissonant cognition. Although she would prefer to be able to go out on weekends, this is less important as the cashier's job will allow her to meet people.
Counter Attitudinal Behavior :
Another source from which dissonance occurs is, when a person behaves in a way that he is inconsistent with his attitudes. Such situations may involve forced compliance, i.e pressures on a person to comply with a request to engage in counter attitudinal behavior. For instance, subjects were asked to perform a boring task. On finishing the task, a subject was told that the experimenter who would normally tell the next subject was absent. The subject was asked whether he would kindly do it. Half the subjects were offered $50 to tell the next subject that the task was fun, half were offered $100. You have been bored and now you are telling the fellow student, the task is of fun. These are dissonant cognition. However, if offered $1000, you should experience little dissonance. Festinger called the Rs. 100 subjects the "forced compliance group". The cash "forces", the subject to comply with the experimenters request. On the other hand, those who were offered $50 experienced more dissonance because they did not have the justification for lying provided by large amount money. These subjects could not deny they lied, so they reduced dissonance by changing their attitude; for example by increasing their liking for the task and the experiment.
Thus, subjects in the high incentive ($100) condition experienced little dissonance and rated the task and experiment negatively, where as those in the low-incentive (Rs. 50) condition experienced more dissonance and rated the task and experiment positively.
Exposure to Information :
If one is in.a state of dissonance because one has been told something discrepant with one's own opinion, one can reduce the dissonance by seeking out new consonant information and avoiding new dissonant information. However, if one is experiencing a very large amount of dissonance, it is easier to seek out the small amount of additional dissonant information needed to change his mind than to accumulate the large amount of consonant information.
Social Support:
Festinger emphasized that a person would make efforts to strengthen his consonant cognition and reduce dissonant ones by seeking social support. If other persons holding the same opinion can be cited, one's own opinion seems more sensible. If persons holding the opposing opinion can be discredited, there dissonant ideas can be disregarded.
Criticism :
The theory of cognitive dissonance has been criticized heavily. The major criticism is that no one can be sure when two cognition are dissonant with each other. Another problem is, it is difficult to predict which method a person will adopt in order to reduce dissonance.SUMMARY
The theme of consistency theories is that when a person's cognition are in a conflicting or inconsistent relation with one another, the person is motivated to reduce that conflict. The important cognitive consistency theories are balance theory, congruity theory and cognitive-dissonance theory.
Heider's balance theory, often called "the p-o-x theory", provides a helpful analysis of our attitudes toward communicators and their communicants. The consistency theory proposed by Osgood and Tannenbaum deals with attitude change caused by communication. The basic principle of dissonance theory is that cognitive dissonance results when a person maintains two inconsistent cognition. This dissonance can be reduced by changing one's action, seeking support for one's cognition, or rejecting as unimportant or immaterial any dissonant cognition.