Quotes About Cognitions

Human knowledge is not a mere collection, but a structure; it is a single body of interrelated cognitions.

Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.

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.

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.

Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other, such as "Smoking is a dumb thing to do because