Sunday, September 18, 2011

As with several others, after reading the article on cognitive dissonance, I was left rather confused. I have heard of cognitive dissonance in previous Psychology classes, but I found the meaning of this article was rather scrambled. The definition of cognitive dissonance itself was easy to understand and grasp, but once the authors started going into examples and trying to explain the experiments, the confusion began. The example of the flood is almost absurd to me; I see the connection between the thought of the flood and cognitive dissonance because on the day the flood was supposed to come, it hadn't, but they believed it would. The absurd part to me is that they actually believed that such a catastrophic flood could be predicted so narrowed to a certain date. The experiment involving the Intro to Psych students at Stanford really helped explain cognitive dissonance to an understandable level. In the first sentence under 'An Experimental Investigation" the authors stated that they created dissonance by inducing the students to say something that intentionally went against their personal belief. After reading that entire section, I understood the article a lot better, but still feel that the meaning is still a little scrambled and confusing because of the other examples given.

3 comments:

  1. I agree that pieces of this article and the understanding of cognitive dissonance was confusing. I really thought I understood what it mean when the author compared it to hunger and food, but once I read the experiment at the end I was confused again.

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  2. I agree with the fact that the article was a bit confusing. After I was done reading it for the first time, I found myself saying, "ok, so what did I just read?"

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  3. So from what I gather and have learned in the past, cognitive dissonance is the feeling that you get after you have not achieved a goal. It's a bad feeling and you would do anything to get rid of it. I still cannot believe that the people in the experiment stuck together and stayed throughout the experiment. After the first flood did not happen, I would have been gone.

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