Unit 7 Assignment (PSY102 Fundamentals of Psychology II)

UNIT 5 ASSIGNMENT 2

Unit 5 Assignment – Paper Outline Assignment

CeTreiva Whitmore Lockett

Post University

PSY101 – Fundamentals of Psychology

Professor Stephen Eder

August 1, 2021

Comments

Feedback to Learner8/2/21 5:49 PM

Hi Cetreiva!

Excellent outline!  You touch on a wide range of issues that affect cognitive dissonance.  It is a challenging topic to consider, but you have done a good job of summarizing its major points.  I look forward to reading the final paper!

1. Introduction

1. Topic sentence: The mind is conflicted with one’s beliefs or values and will try to reduce the feeling of discomfort and conflict by altering attitudes and beliefs. Emotions impact attitudes in a variety of ways that include primary and secondary cognition in ways that involve one’s limitation of breadth thinking that affect individual’s attitude through relatively simple mechanism that lead to change in a way that aligns with the valency of the emotion (Petty & Brinol, 2015).

1. Emotions may be utilized to support a proposal if they are linked to the advocacy's merits, or they can be used to skew thinking if the emotion comes before. Although several theories have delved further into these underlying processes, none have managed to bring them all together in a single framework.

1. The most difficult aspect of change is changing one's attitude, as some people find it extremely difficult to change their ideas. Smokers are one of the finest instances of this. They may have been a long-time smoker or have just been smoking for a few months or years when they enroll in a research study that reveals numerous new information regarding the dangers of smoking, such as lung cancer.

1. People will also try to defend their decision to lessen the dissonance caused by the conflict. 

1. Theme 1: Attitude and belief influence on persuasion

1. Topic Sentence: People may try to use rationalization to alleviate dissonance caused by a loss of self-control that promotes persuasion rather than behavior.

1. There are two types of justification: external and internal. When discordant conduct occurs outside of the individual, external justification occurs, while internal justification occurs when there is no external justification and the dissonance is reduced by altering something about oneself (Itzchakov, Uziel, & Wood, 2018).

1. The thought of justification triggers the need to make explanations for an action to make it appear more acceptable to oneself than it actually was. Just because someone's perspective has changed doesn't mean they've altered their behavior (Itzchakov, Uziel, & Wood, 2018).

1. Situational forces do not necessarily influence attitudes and thoughts, but they can be deliberately modified by one's own free will. Variables that improve the relevance of one's attitude through thinking, elaborative processing, or personal significance of the attitude object have a corresponding influence on belief retrieval, development, and change.

1. The majority of the time, but not always, behaviors reflect pre-existing ideas and attitudes. Beyond attitude, a variety of variables can affect behavior, including assumptions about oneself and others, monetary considerations, social influences (what peers and community members say and do), and comfort.

1. Since social psychology is still in the early stages of understanding the various mechanisms involved, changing attitudes does not always include the same psychological processes as changing behavior. The moderators of behavior change aren't necessarily the same as the moderators of attitude change.

1. Theme 2: How attitudes and conduct impact one another.

1. Topic sentence: Attitudes may influence a person's conduct in either a favorable or bad way.

1. Some people's attitude-behavior gap is simply one indication of their lack of self-control in many other areas of life (Redondo, & Puelles, 2017).

1. In the lack of scientific proof, intuition implies that the attitude-behavior divide is linked to other personal inconsistencies.

1. Individuals who place a higher value on their own attitudes and feelings are more inclined to act on those attitudes, and so attitude and action are intertwined. Furthermore, when people feel more responsible for their own acts rather than being part of a group, their attitudes and conduct are more consistent.

1. People may, for example, change their attitudes in order to better match them with their actions. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon in which a person experiences difficulties as a result of competing thoughts or beliefs. People may modify their attitudes to mirror their other ideas or real behaviors in order to relieve psychological strain (Petty & Brinol, 2015).

1.  As a result, when people pay more attention to their own attitudes and feelings, they are more inclined to act on them, and so attitude and behavior are intertwined. When people feel more responsible for their own acts rather than being part of a group, their attitudes and conduct are more consistent.

1. Theme 3: Education, training and experiences influence on attitudes, beliefs, and behavior

1. Topic Education, training and personal or professional experience influence positive attitudes on people

1. Educational and training decreases students blaming attitudes and beliefs, which encourage myths. It also improves their screening behavior, according to the findings. Professional experience predicts screening behavior when paired with indirect personal experience, while direct personal experience does not have effect on individual’s attitude (Postmus et.al, 2011).

1. Learning is a method of substantiating, examining, and validating truths through a planned activity, a model of dynamic action, or an action plan. It is an experience-organizing and self-organizing activity for the creation and reconstruction of one's own bio-psycho-social-cultural uniqueness.

1. From the standpoint of the subject-object connection, the issue of attitude may be understood. The subject has a variety of interactions with the object (Postmus, 2011). In such interactions, the subject does not appear consistently, but rather differentiates itself in response to various objects.

Conclusion

1. Topic sentence: Cognitive dissonance goes hand in hand with changing attitudes because when our prior attitudes clash with our new actions, we typically adjust our attitudes to align with our new actions to eliminate the sense of discord.

1. Summary of main conclusions: Cognitive consistency is one way to avoid this since it maintains everything in balance and prevents conflict and pain. When someone is experiencing dissonance, they try to alleviate it in one of three ways: altering one of their cognitions, defending their decision, or adding cognitions to the circumstance.

References

Itzchakov, G., Uziel, L., & Wood, W. (2018). When attitudes and habits don’t correspond: Self-control depletion increases persuasion but not behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 75, 1-10.

Petty, R. E., & Briñol, P. (2015). Emotion and persuasion: Cognitive and meta-cognitive processes impact attitudes. Cognition and Emotion, 29(1), 1-26.

Postmus, J. L., McMahon, S., Warrener, C., & Macri, L. (2011). Factors that influence attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of students toward survivors of violence. Journal of Social Work Education, 47(2), 303-319.

Redondo, I., & Puelles, M. (2017). The connection between environmental attitude–behavior gap and other individual inconsistencies: a call for strengthening self-control. International research in geographical and environmental education, 26(2), 107-120.