Quotes from Eddie Harmon-Jones

Moreover, dissonance-evoking situations have been found to evoke a general negative affect without also evoking increased self-directed negative affect (Elliot & Devine, 1994) or decreased state self-esteem (E. Harmon-Jones, 2000a).

But at the same time, the humanist in me was always a bit troubled by the rather bleak, rather unappetizing picture the theory painted of the human condition—forever striving to justify our actions after the fact.

To show actual avoidance of dissonant information, it is necessary to make comparisons against a neutral baseline.

That is, when I said above that dissonance theory made clear predictions at its core, what I implicitly meant by at its core were situations in which the person's self-concept was at issue.

In fact, extracted from the metatheory, the central element of Festinger's theory boils down to this: A person can experience an unpleasant state of arousal (state of dissonance) that can be quantified by a ratio (the dissonance ratio; see Chapter 2, this volume, for further explanation) and is reduced when this ratio decreases. Cognitions are relevant and taken into consideration only to the degree that they allow for composing this ratio.

Self-Consistency One of the first revisions proposed was the self-consistency interpretation of dissonance (Aronson, 1968, 1992). It is based on the idea that situations that evoke dissonance do so because they create inconsistency between the self-concept and a behavior. Because most persons have a positive self-concept, persons are likely to experience dissonance when they behave in a way that they view as incompetent, immoral, or irrational.

Dissonance theory and research also played a pioneering role in a second way. By highlighting the often paradoxical and even self-defeating ways that humans frequently deal with the world, dissonance theory was the first comprehensive model to focus our attention on the landscape of human irrationality and the genesis of suboptimal judgments and behaviors.

simple conveying of information to rational people.

But whatever the case may be, the arousal can only be reduced by two principal kinds of processes. These processes serve to make the act less problematic. Some processes affect the commitment to the act and reduce this commitment, and other processes reduce the total amount of dissonance by changing one or several existing cognitions or by producing new ones.

This type of measure was in perfect conformity with Heider's premises, which viewed the cognitive universe as a scene contemplated by the perceiver and that satisfied, to a greater or lesser degree, his or her preference for balance (Heider, 1958).

The original statement of cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) proposed that discrepancy between cognitions creates a negative affective state that motivates individuals to attempt to reduce or eliminate the discrepancy between cognitions

Using a slightly different procedure, other research has suggested that, when the counterattitudinal actions do not cause aversive consequences, attitude change does not occur

For example, dissonance occurs in non-human animals (e.g., Egan, Bloom, et al., 2010; Egan, Santos, et al., 2007), suggesting that the metacognitive structure of self is not necessary.

Self-perception theory (Bem, 1967, 1972) argues that dissonance effects were not the result of motivation to reduce the psychological discomfort produced by cognitive dissonance but were due to a nonmotivational process whereby persons merely inferred their attitudes from their behavior and the circumstances under which the behavior occurred.

alternative explanations must prevent us from concluding that cognitive discrepancy is not necessary or sufficient to create dissonance.

However, these past theorists and researchers instead proposed that feelings of personal responsibility for aversive outcomes were necessary to produce dissonance effects.

That is why the dissonance-reduction process may result in greater inconsistency among other cognitions. Therefore, the reduction of the ratio, which for us remains the unconditional objective of the dissonance-reduction process, in no way implies that there is consistency among the cognitions that it contains.

In fact, the 1960s were to prove a rich source of experiments showing that the primary reward effect of dissonance in forced-compliance situations is observed only if the participants are allowed to choose whether to perform the requested act.

In contrast, people with high, well-grounded self-esteem would not use derogation of the victim as a way to reduce their dissonance; rather, they would be more likely to take responsibility for their actions and try, in some way, to make amends for their cruel behavior.