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.

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                                                                      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.

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                                                                         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.

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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.

All The Pieces Matter

Most people tend to be completely oblivious to the impact that a situation can have on the way a person behaves. For example, a person may seem to be very timid and quite when you first meet him/her, but is only acting that way because they are stressed for an exam coming up, or maybe because they are feeling ill. On any other day this person wouldn't stop talking, and actually could be pretty annoying. The fact is, we tend to make personal attributions about a person's behavior first, and we sometimes fail to even consider the situational attributions that could have occurred. This error of not considering the situational attributions is known as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977). We usually draw inferences on other peoples' personalities immediately (Uleman,1987), and if we are not preoccupied, and cognitively busy in any other way, we take the situation into account (Gilbert et al, 1989). Since noticing the effects of a situation on behavior is the only step that takes cognitive effort, we can easily leave it out. Another interesting and important point about this error, is how pervasive it is in Western cultures, as opposed to non-Western cultures. For example, a cross cultural study shows that Indians tend to attribute behavior to the context in which they occurred, as opposed to Americans that attributed the behavior to the dispositions of the individual (Miller, 1984)

Living in two very culturally different countries has definitely shed light on the fundamental attribution error. I was born in the United States, and lived here for most of my life, so I am subject to committing the fundamental attribution error, but in India (where I moved  to when I was 12), as discussed earlier, people tend to take the situation into account. For example, certain teachers would be complete assholes every now and then, and I would assume that they just had a short temper, or maybe even bi-polar disorder. Whenever I would talk about it to my friends, they would attribute it to the situation rather than the teacher themselves, saying that perhaps they were having a bad day, or any number of external factors that could have contributed to their behavior. I didn't realize this at the time, but making the fundamental attribution error could be quite detrimental in the way I see others.

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References


Gilbert, D. T. (1989). Thinking lightly about others: Automatic components of the social inference process. 
          S J. Uleman & J. Bargh (Eds.),Unintended Thought: Limits of Awareness, Intention and Control.     
          New York: Guilford Press.

Miller, J.G. (1984). Culture and the development of everyday social explanation. Journal of Personality 
          and Social Psychology, 46, 981-978.


Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-
          perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279-
          301.
Uleman, J.S (1987). Consciousness and control :The case of spontaneous trait inferences. Personality and 
          Social Psychology Bulletin, 13(3), 337-354. doi: 10.1177/0146728133004

What if...?

What if things had happened differently? Nobody will ever know, but thinking these kinds of thoughts, and playing out past situations that have not occurred is known as counterfactual thinking (Kahneman & Miller, 1986). Counterfactual thinking can be both a positive and negative thing, as if you imagine the situation ending worse than what actually happened, then you would probably feel a sort of relief. However, if you imagine the situation could have ended up better, you would probably feel disappointed or depressed. According to past research, many people's main regret centers include education, career and romance, due to opportunities that we did not capitalize on (Roese & Summerville, 2005).

To give a clear example of counterfactual thinking in effect, another study found that students are more likely to feel regret, when they change a test answer from right to wrong, rather than failing to fix a mistake (Kruger, et al, 2005). Counterfactual thinking can manifest itself in ways that not many people would expect. Medvec et al (1995) conducted a study where the participants ranked the happiness of Olympic gold medal, silver medal, and bronze medal winners (by examining the video of them collecting their medals). It turns out that the bronze medal winners seemed to be much happier than the silver medal winners. This is because the silver medal winners kept wondering what would have happened if they had trained harder.

I'm not sure how often other (normal) people counterfactually think, but I definitely tend to do this a lot. One of the more memorable time that I have done this, is probably when I got into a pretty big argument with one of my friends a while back. Taking account that I was much younger (around 14 years old), and definitely a lot stupider, I still feel that I could have handled the situation a lot better. At the time I definitely thought back on the situation wondering what I could have done in order to prevent the situation. I recall the negative symptoms of this kind of counterfactual thinking, as I felt regret for at least a month after that.

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References

Kahneman, D., & Miller, D.T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological 
          Review, 93, 136-153

Kruger, J., Wirtz, D., & Miller, D.T. (2005). Counterfactual thinking and the first instinct fallacy. Journal of 
        Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 725-735
Medvec, V.H., Madey, S.F., & Gilovich, T. (1995). When less is more: Counterfactual thinking and
         satisfaction among Olympic medalists. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 603-610.

Roese, N.J., & Summerville, A. (2005). What we regret most....and why. Personality and Social
         Psychology Bulletin, 31, 1273-1285

Respect Yourself

Today's presentation called "Healthy Relationships" was quite insightful, and in my opinion a much better presentation than the last (Get Sexy, Get Consent). The presentation, as the title suggests, is about having a healthy relationship with someone. One of the main points that stuck out to me was having respect for yourself, for one main reason. That is, respecting yourself makes disrespect seem a lot more obvious, and you shouldn't stand for that shit. Especially when it's coming from someone that is supposed to respect you, and without that respect, the relationship is most likely not going to end well. Also, another point that was made, was that people have the ability to be both polite and assertive. Though being assertive (at least in my mind) is usually not tied with being polite. This doesn't have to be the case, as in the example that the speaker brought up, if you don't want to do something in particular that your significant other wants to do, you can politely and assertively communicate that you don't want to join. Overall, I would say there were some important and interesting points that were made by the speaker in this presentation, and I am happy to say that I learned something from it.

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Not My Place to Disagree

I've been in plenty of situations where I've tried to get people to like me for whatever reasons. They could have been my boss, teacher, or even just some random person that I just met. Well, I guess most people have, so I'm not that special, but what most people don't realize (except for my social psychology class) is that this is a Self Presentation Strategy (Schlenker, 2003), more specifically it is known as ingratiation (Jones, 1964). Ingratiation, in short, is a strategy that people use, to get others to like them. It is usually used by people on the lower part of the pyramid to people higher up, such as an employee to a boss. Ingratiation can be split into two categories, namely conformity and flattery. Conformity is agreeing with point of view, whether your actually believe it or not, but can also be non-verbal, such as nodding your head. Other non-verbal conformity can include dressing like someone, or matching someone else's behavior to make yourself look better. The next is flattery, which occurs when you compliment another person. Most people love compliments, but when you take it too far they tend to realize that you're full of shit.

Now I would like to think that I don't conform to views that I completely disagree with, but that's just not true. Over last summer vacation, I was staying at my friends' house in California. It was a lot of fun seeing my friends after way too long, and I'm grateful that they gave me a place to stay for 3 whole months. That being said, my friends' parents were very very religious. Obviously I have nothing against people that are religious, but since I am pretty much on the opposite side of the spectrum, I had some completely different views. Since this was the case, every time certain topics or discussions were brought up, I just sat there and nodded my head, not even coming close to speaking my mind on the matter. Never once did I expect I would blindly nod to views I had a completely opposite opinion on, and this probably won't be the last.

References

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

Jones, E.E. (1964). Ingratiation: A social psychological analysis.