My Time is Worth More Than a Dollar!

Have you ever done something that totally goes against your attitudes or beliefs? Well, you're not alone, because people tend to perform behaviors that they feel are totally "not them". This happens so frequently in fact, that this phenomena is now one of the most widely studied in the field of social psychology. This is known as cognitive dissonance theory, which occurs when people have thoughts that are inconsistent with their beliefs, and as a result faces psychological and physiological tension that they strive to reduce (Festinger, 1957). One of the main ways people solve this tension is by changing their attitudes.

There are three dissonance paradigms in which cognitive dissonance can occur in people. First is induced compliance which occurs when someone convinces us to perform a behavior that is not in alignment with our attitudes, but this can only happen when the person feels that they have a say in the matter (Festinger, 1957). For example, we won't feel the dissonance if an authority figure is commanding us to perform the behavior, as then we would just convince ourselves that it was due to the situation that were forced in. The interesting part about induced compliance is that a mild reward is more powerful than a larger award (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). The exact opposite of this effect is known as insufficient deterrence, where mild punishments have a larger effect on attitude change than severe punishments. The second paradigm is known as effort justification which in general states that people come to love what they have suffered for (Aronson & Mills, 1959). For example, if I invest a lot of money in buying a car or a house, I will convince myself that I love it no matter how shitty it may actually be. The last paradigm is post-decision dissonance which occurs when we choose one of two options that we both want (Brehm, 1956). The way we deal with this dissonance is by over valuing the positives of the option we chose, and undervaluing the positives of the option we didn't choose.

We all know that everyone goes through dissonance at some point, some creating more sever tension than others. One of the times that really sticks out to me occurred when I was a freshman in college. I tried smoking cigarettes, and though I enjoyed the process of socializing with my friends, it created severe tension as I knew the entire long list of negative side effects that will inevitably occur. Because of this, I couldn't think about anything else, and I inevitably stopped smoking, as the attitudes I had were far to strong.

Word Count: 436

                                                                      References
Aronson, E. & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of 
            Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 177-181

Brehm, J.W. (1956). Post-decision changes in desirability of alternatives. Journal of Abnormal and Social 
           Psychology, 52, 384-389

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA.

Festinger, L. & Carlsmith, J.M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of 
             Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203-210. 

Too Many Words

People may have strong attitudes about certain views, and attitudes about other things that are not nearly as strong. Either way, there are methods of persuasion that can be implemented in order to change a person's attitude, but there are several factors that are involved that have to be considered. The main factor to consider when trying to persuade someone is the way in which they process the information that you are trying send them. People tend to use a process called elaboration (Greenwald, 1968), which can be defined as thinking about and teasing apart an argument, to varying degrees. According to the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), there are two major routes that people take when processing information, which are the central route, and the peripheral route respectively. People that take the central route to persuasion usually focus on the actual content of the message, and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses to the argument at hand. However, when people are not concerned and/or are otherwise busy, they tend to take the peripheral route to persuasion, and instead focus on the superficial cues that are presented to them. These cues can range from being body language to the length of the material. No matter what the case, the central route gives us a much better understanding of the argument contained in persuasive communication.

It might be a bold claim, but I would like to think that I take the central route to persuasion over the peripheral route. This may be due to my relatively recent understanding of research methods that I have gained over my college years, but overall I tend to look for statistics and the reporting of evidence when articles make claims, as opposed to looking at a long article and assuming that it has to be right. Especially when it comes to making important decisions, such as which president I'm going to vote for, I believe that taking the central route is crucial, as making decisions off of mindless cues is pointless. Taking the previous example (though I would consider myself to be more liberal than conservative), when making my decision to vote for president, I definitely took some of the time out of my day to really look into the different policies that each candidate promised to adopt. I also looked at the track records of both the candidates, especially that of President Obama, in order to see if their previous statements held any validity.

Word Count: 411

                                                                         References

Greenwald, A. G. (1968). Cognitive learning, cognitive response to persuasion, and attitude change. In A. G.
Greenwald, T. C. Brock, and T. M. Ostrom (Eds.), Psychological foundations of attitudes (pp. 147-
170). New York: Academic Press

Petty, R.E., & Cacioppo, J.T. (1986). Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes 
         to attitude change. New York: Springer-Verlag

Silence

I decided to choose being extremely introverted for a day in order to observe the reactions of the people, especially my friends’ reactions to this change in my behavior. I chose this particular dimension because I consider myself usually to be very outgoing and outspoken. One of the main reasons for this is because I would consider my self-monitor (Snyder, 1987) to be on the higher end of the spectrum, and because of this I have many different groups of friends that I would say I am close to, many of which probably don’t even know of the others’ existence, therefore there were many different reactions that I could record. Changing this particular dimension would mean that I went a day being very quiet, and not talking a lot even to my close friends, which goes against my self-concept as I am definitely schematic for these traits (Markus, 1977). Since for most of the day I was dealing with people that I am close to. I was seeking self-verification (Swann, 1987), which made me able to be introverted for such a long time.

Implementing this change was not easy for me, but after a couple of hours through the day I got the hang of it. At the start of the day I knew what I was supposed to be doing, but I didn’t really know how to go about it doing it. I would have conversations with my roommate or my neighbors, and I would try to convince myself that this is not the type of situation that I could be introverted, when in reality this trait would be evident in every part of daily life. As I began to realize this, I slowly started to become more and more shy, stopped talking so much, and by 11:00 AM I was almost completely silent. For example, by the time one of my classes came around (a class that I usually participate in regularly) I didn’t say a word until the professor started to call me out and ask me questions. Even then I would try to answer her questions in the least amount of words possible, and in what might as well be whispers. She probably thought I was having a bad day.

Other than my professor, almost all my friends noticed my change in behavior. After my initial interactions with my friends, when I was trying to get into character, I immediately started to switch gears. I also started to implement changes to my non-verbal behaviors, such as looking down when I walk, as opposed to looking straight, and taking faster and shorter steps, in order for the introvertedness to be more apparent. At lunch, I was eating at a table with my friends and I did not start or participate in any discussion whatsoever. They were quite confused by this, and in the corner of my eye I could see them trading strange looks as I continued to stare at my food. A couple of time they asked me what was wrong as they assumed that I was extremely stressed and/or had something on my mind.

I usually play FIFA (a soccer game) daily, with another group of friends, and as you might imagine,it usually gets very loud and competitive. This time however, I tried to say as little as possible which resulted in a very interesting gaming session. What is usually a profanity fest was instead a room filled with the sound of awkward silence, as I just sat there playing and not saying a word. I’m not too sure how they interpreted my change in behavior. I mean, they couldn’t have attributed it to stress as I was nonchalantly playing a videogame with them for an hour. Either way, they definitely took notice and didn’t know how to respond.

Before getting into the role, I have to admit I was pretty nervous because I anticipated the task to be much harder than it actually was. Thankfully that day I didn’t have much work to do for my classes, as studies have shown that under cognitive load, it is very hard to change self-presentation strategies (Schlenker, 2003). As mentioned earlier, it took me a few hours to fully be introverted, and even after I got into character I felt it difficult to maintain at first. At the end of the day, however, I got used to being passive and I felt that I could keep going if I had to (thankfully I didn’t). At the end of the day I was able to return back to being my normal self in an instant, because as much as I got used to playing someone else, I really wanted to go back to being me.

I would say that I learned quite a bit about myself and human behavior after this experience, especially about the relationship between the self-monitor and whether or not a person is extroverted or introverted. The way I see it, the higher a person’s self-monitor is the easier it is for them to be extroverted, and vice versa. I personally favor being extroverted as it makes it easier to form plenty of different close relationships which in my opinion leads to a much greater and more diverse social life. Though some people may say that this trait means that I am “fakey” or something along those lines, I just see it as being extremely adaptive to various situations, and is much more beneficial than it is negative.

From this experience I learned that the self-concept can be changed with time and effort. The self concept is always changing with experience (cite) and even though I was changing a trait that I was particularly schematic for, after a while I would start to find myself introverted. Even though I feel this is the case, because the trait that I was manipulating was so important to my self-concept, I was able to change back with ease, which goes to show that important traits are probably much harder to fully change than those that are not. I would also go as far to say that those with low self-monitors will have a much harder time trying to change traits that are important to them.

Word Count: 1042

References
Markus, H. (1997). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality 
and Social Psychology, 35, 63-78.

Schlenker, B.R. (2003). Self-presentation. In M.R. Leary & J.P. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self and  
identity (pp.492-518). New York: Guilford.

Snyder, M. (1987). Public appearances/private realities: The psychology of self-monitoring. New 
York: Freeman.

Swann, W.B., Jr. (1987). Identity negotiation: Where two roads meet. Journal of Personality and 
Social Psychology, 53, 1038-1051.