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	<title>Education Articles &#187; cognitive dissonance</title>
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		<title>Cognitive Dissonance</title>
		<link>http://eduarticles.com/cognitive-dissonance-7</link>
		<comments>http://eduarticles.com/cognitive-dissonance-7#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:56:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Psycology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive dissonance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://eduarticles.com/?p=2578</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[http://www.yogateacher.com/text/essays/spring2007.html
yogateacher.com
by Charles MacInerney

Many years ago, a university student seated next to an old man on the train, observed him shuffling rosary beads between his fingers, lips moving in prayer. "Sir, do you still believe in such outdated things?" asked the student. "Why yes, I do. Don’t you?" asked the man. Laughing, the student replied “I don’t believe in such silly things. Take my advice. Throw the rosary out through this window and learn what science has to say".

"Ah yes, science. I have never felt I really understood science. Perhaps with help, someday I will." the man said humbly with some tears in his eyes. A little embarrassed now, the student said "Please give me your address and I will send you some literature to help you on the matter." Louis Pasteur, Director of the Institute of Scientific Research in Paris, presented the young man with a calling card from his coat pocket. On glancing at the card, the student, lowered his head in embarrassment and became silent. Un-attributed story told and retold about Pasteur, paraphrased.

Western psychology has a term called cognitive dissonance which refers to the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two seemingly contradictory thoughts at the same time. Most people attempt to reduce this tension by changing or rejecting one or the other thought in order to resolve the apparent conflict. For example, in the lead story above, the student attempts to resolve the perceived conflict between faith and science, by suggesting that Pasteur throw the rosary beads out the window and turn to science! Most people prefer to feel certain about things. They float through life following the path of least resistance, avoiding cognitive dissonance when ever possible.

It is the greatest scientists and philosophers that do not run from paradox, but instead learn to use it to achieve a deeper and more penetrating understanding of reality. Pasteur held close to science and his rosary. Krishnamurti advocated sitting quietly with your own confusion and fear in order to increase self-awareness. Niels Bohr, the famous physicist, had a horseshoe over his desk. When asked if he really believed that a horse shoe brought luck, Professor Bohr replied, "I am given to understand that it does, whether you believe in it or not."
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		<item>
		<title>Emotional Blackmail, Cognitive Dissonance, the Media &amp; the Middle East</title>
		<link>http://eduarticles.com/emotional-blackmail-cognitive-dissonance-the-media-the-middle-east</link>
		<comments>http://eduarticles.com/emotional-blackmail-cognitive-dissonance-the-media-the-middle-east#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:46:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Psycology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive dissonance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://eduarticles.com/?p=2575</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[http://www.couplescompany.com/features/Politics/CogDiss.htm
couplescompany.com
by Laura dawn Lewis

Emotional blackmail (Demand, Resistance, Pressure Threats, Compliance and Repetition) is not used exclusively in personal relationships.  It is used any time one group or person wants to force its agenda, opinion or will on another.  You’ve probably witnessed it on the job and currently you can study the effects simply by turning on the news.

Each of these tactics has been used extensively by the media and the government in the United States since September 11, 2001 to push the agenda and create agreement within the US population and worldwide.  Commentators like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are masters with this tactic and provide nightly opportunities to study it in action. Former President Bill Clinton knew well how to use emotional blackmail to his advantage.  It is a persuasive tool.  The purpose of emotional blackmail is to control, redirect and ultimately create a state of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is the state of confusion that occurs when facts become twisted into half-truths, colliding with common sense and suddenly you are convinced 2+2 = 5. Your instincts tell you something isn’t right; yet the information you are fed and exposed to counteracts your instincts causing you to doubt yourself. Some refer to this as Orwellian speak, the act of taking antonyms and presenting them as synonyms: War is Peace, Consent is Patriotism, Disagreement is Anti-American or Rights are Weaknesses. These are some of the Orwellian messages Americans are currently sifting through.

Cognitive dissonance also occurs in the pairing of unrelated facts to create correlation.  The best of example of this is President Bush’s speech in which he mentioned Iraq and the September 11th attacks in the same sentence. The close proximity of the mentions is designed to create a correlation in peoples’ minds even when the reality is different. By insinuating, people subconsciously take the idea and turn it to a possibility.  Through repetition, the correlation becomes fact based upon misinformation.  In time, the reality is forgotten and the revision becomes the truth.  According to an ABC Poll only 19% of Americans know Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11 nor were any of the hijackers Iraqi. That means over 75% of Americans have bought into the confusion and taken it as fact.
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		<title>Sorry New York Times, cognitive dissonance exists</title>
		<link>http://eduarticles.com/sorry-new-york-times-cognitive-dissonance-exists</link>
		<comments>http://eduarticles.com/sorry-new-york-times-cognitive-dissonance-exists#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:43:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Psycology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive dissonance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://eduarticles.com/?p=2572</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/sorry-new-york-times-cognitive-dissonance-exists-15842.html
scienceblog.com
by coglanglab

Earlier this week, New York Times columnist John Tierney reported a potential flaw in a classic psychology experiment. It turns out that the experimental finding -- cognitive dissonance -- is safe and sound (see below). But first, here are the basic claims:

Cognitive dissonance generally refers to changing your beliefs and desires to match what you do. That is, rather than working hard for something you like, you may believe you like something because you worked so hard for it.

Laboratory experiments (of which there have been hundreds if not thousands) tend to be of the following flavor (quoted from the Tierney blog post). Have someone rate several different objects (such as different colored M&#038;Ms) in terms of how much they like them. From that set of objects, choose three (say, red, blue and green) that the person likes equally well. Then let the person choose between two of them (the red and blue M&#038;M).

Presumably (and this will be the catch) the person chooses randomly, since she likes both equally. Say she chooses the red M&#038;M. Then let her choose between red and green. You would predict that she would choose randomly, since she likes the two colors equally, but she nearly invariably will be the red M&#038;M. This is taken as evidence that her originally random choice of the red M&#038;M actually changed her preferences to where she now likes red better than either blue or green.

The basic problem with this experiment, according to M. Keith Chen of Yale and as reported by Tierney, is that we don't really know that the person didn't originally prefer red. She may have rated them similarly, but she chose red over blue. The math works out such that if she in fact already preferred red over blue, she probably also actually preferred red over green.

Tierney calls this a "fatal flaw" in cognitive dissonance research, and asks "choice rationalization has been considered one of the most well-established theories in social psychology. Does it need to be reconsidered?"
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		<title>Cognitive Dissonance at the New York Times</title>
		<link>http://eduarticles.com/cognitive-dissonance-at-the-new-york-times</link>
		<comments>http://eduarticles.com/cognitive-dissonance-at-the-new-york-times#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:34:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Psycology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive dissonance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://eduarticles.com/?p=2569</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=233
sciencebasedmedicine.org
by Steven Novella

Humans have the very odd ability to hold contradictory, even mutually exclusive, ideas in their brains at the same time. There are two basic processes at work to make this possible. The first is compartmentalization – the ideas are simply kept separate. They are trains on different tracks that never cross. We can switch from to the other, but they never crash into each other.

When contradictory ideas do come into conflict this causes what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” We then typically will relieve cognitive dissonance, which is an unpleasant state, through the second process – rationalization. We happily make up reasons why the two conflicting ideas actually don’t conflict at all. People are generally good at rationalization. It is a supreme intellectual irony that greater intelligence often leads to a greater ability to rationalize with both complexity and subtlety, and therefore a greater capacity to maintain contradictory beliefs.

In fact the demarcation between science and pseudoscience is often determined by the difference between sound scientific reasoning and sophisticated rationalization.

While cognitive dissonance refers to a process that takes place within a single mind, it is a good metaphor for the contradictory impulses of groups of people, like cultures or institutions. I could not help but to invoke this metaphor when reading two editorials published in the same day in the New York Times.

The first article is by Gina Kolata (I wonder if her parents really liked tropical drinks), and is titled: Searching for Clarity: A Primer on Medical Studies. This is an excellent article – I would have been happy to have such an article be published in SBM, in fact.

Kolata begins with the story of beta carotene and cancer; of how the basic science, the animal studies, and the population-based data all looked as if beta carotene would significantly decrease cancer risk. Then came the large, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials that showed not only does beta carotene not protect against cancer it may increase risk a little. She uses this as a jumping off point to talk about the different types of clinical evidence, and why it is important to control for variables.

The focus of her article gets it just right – all the fuss is about trying to figure out what actually works, as reliably as possible. Basic science tells us about possible mechanisms of action. Animal studies give us confidence that a treatment is safe and promising enough to invest in human research. Population-based studies can be helpful, but they are preliminary because it is impossible to foresee all possible confounding factors. For example, perhaps people who take beta carotene supplements, or eat more fruits and vegetables, take care of themselves better in general.

RCTs (randomized controlled trials) are the gold standard because they keep all variables beetween compared groups the same except for the one variable – the treatment – that is being studied.

I was pleasantly surprised when Kolata then went a step beyond just laying out the advantages of RCTs. For the first time in a mainstream outlet that I have personally seen, she relates the importance of prior probability. She even talks about Bayes Theorem – analyzing a claim based upon prior probability and the new data. This is specifically what we advocate as science-based medicine and distinguishes SBM from evidenced-based medicine (EBM), which does not consider prior probability.

In this section she primarily quotes Dr. Steven Goodman from Johns Hopkins:

But if one clinical trial tests something that is plausible, with a lot of supporting evidence to back it up, and another tests something implausible, the trial testing a plausible hypothesis is more credible even if the two studies are similar in size, design and results. The guiding principle, Dr. Goodman says, is that “things that have a good reason to be true and that have good supporting evidence are likely to be true.”
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		<title>War &amp; Cognitive Dissonance In America</title>
		<link>http://eduarticles.com/war-cognitive-dissonance-in-america</link>
		<comments>http://eduarticles.com/war-cognitive-dissonance-in-america#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:29:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Psycology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive dissonance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://eduarticles.com/?p=2563</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[http://www.nolanchart.com/article5094.html
nolanchart.com
by Christopher Billings

Being a non-religious skeptic with Libertarian views, I have had an interesting lifetime exploring cognitive dissonance in America. Cognitive dissonance is the feeling of uncomfortable tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time.

Since childhood I have questioned many so-called American ideals and analyzed the reality of these ideals. It started in grade school with the Vietnam War. Being born in 1966, I started school in the heat of the Vietnam War. Many think that children don't have an understanding of war, but I tell you from experience that I knew all too well what war was about. When my parents watched the evening news, I knew exactly what was going on. When the death toll was reported, it saddened me greatly.

In addition to this reality, we were still in the cold war and desperate drills cowering under desks were a regular occurrence. Even at that age, I knew it was futile to cower under a desk if a nuke was deployed. But all students were supposed to be comforted that all of this warfare was proper and justified, and this idea was propagated by the daily pledge of allegiance. From day one, I interpreted this as propaganda and manipulation from the government. I may not have seen through their veil, had it not been for the "under god" part. But as an active, young fossil collector, with a working geological knowledge of the Earth's history, I knew it was propaganda. Not that I understood that word, but I understood the concept. They wanted me to believe that it was OK to sacrifice my life for the supposed good of the country, when I turn 18. They wanted me to agree with whatever they said needed to be done, no matter how many people die. It was and is totally ludicrous. But this is what citizens have been trained to think, by governmental indoctrination.

Fast forward to my graduating high school and being harassed by military recruiters, again and again. They have told lies and false promises and unfortunately, it's getting even worse. But the reason for this is obvious...the government wants to keep the war machine going...but most people don't like to die or have their children die in warfare. Thus some of the best salespeople in the country work as recruiters, slamming people into military conflicts. I really have to question their morality, or do they just have a bad case of cognitive dissonance? I mean many of the young people they recruit, will die for just "another" damn war. The only explanation I have is that recruiters must know that war means possible death but they either deny (or accept) this (cognitive dissonance) or are so hardened that they don't care.
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Cognitive Dissonance and Public Commitment</title>
		<link>http://eduarticles.com/cognitive-dissonance-and-public-commitment</link>
		<comments>http://eduarticles.com/cognitive-dissonance-and-public-commitment#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:27:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Psycology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive dissonance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://eduarticles.com/?p=2560</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[http://ezinearticles.com/?Cognitive-Dissonance-and-Public-Commitment&#038;id=293095
ezinearticles.com
By Kurt Mortensen

Public commitments and dissonance go hand in hand. Even when we feel an action is not right, we still go through with it if we have publicly committed to such a course of action.

The more public our stand, the more reluctant we are to change it. A now famous experiment conducted in 1955 by Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard demonstrates this principle. A group of students were divided into three groups. Each group viewed some lines and had to estimate their length. The students in the first group had to privately write down estimates, sign their names to it, and hand it in. The second group of students also had to privately write down their estimates on a Magic Writing Pad. They could lift the plastic cover on their notepad and their figures would instantaneously disappear. The third group of students did not write down their estimates but just kept them privately in their minds. Not surprisingly, even when new information was presented contradicting their estimates, the students who had written down their estimates, signed their names to them, and handed them in remained the most committed to their choices, while those who had never committed anything to writing were the most readily swayed to change their responses

Procedures, customs, and traditions are often specifically established for the purposes of creating psychological commitment. Consider fraternity initiations, military boot camps, political rallies, protest marches, and demonstrations. When we make our vows, beliefs, statements, or endeavors public, we feel bound to them. We can back out on commitments and claims we've made public, but we will pay a psychological and emotional price. What's more, the more public we made those commitments, the greater the emotional price tag will be.
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		<item>
		<title>The cognitive dissonance of conflicted care</title>
		<link>http://eduarticles.com/the-cognitive-dissonance-of-conflicted-care</link>
		<comments>http://eduarticles.com/the-cognitive-dissonance-of-conflicted-care#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:23:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Psycology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive dissonance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://eduarticles.com/?p=2557</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[http://www.thedoctorweighsin.com/journal/2007/6/14/the-cognitive-dissonance-of-conflicted-care.html
thedoctorweighsin.com
Brian Klepper, PhD

A few days ago the New York Times ran yet another article exploring the deep financial conflicts in oncology drug prescribing. This one described two facts.

First, even though Medicare has limited the profits of oncologists who prescribe drugs, Medicare’s total cancer care expenditures keep rising because oncologists have found new treatments and procedures to bill for.

Second, the rules guiding Medicare reimbursement for cancer and drug rebates are complex, compromising the financial abilities of some oncologists – particularly those in smaller practices – to administer drugs to their patients. As a result, those patients often must receive the drugs in more costly and possibly less-friendly hospital settings.

Over the last year, the Times has been on this topic like white on rice. Last month it ran an article on conflicts in anemia drugs, which demonstrated just how much money was available to doctors who prescribe them. A just-fired practice administrator of a six-oncologist group in the Pacific Northwest presented the Times with papers from Amgen. They showed that, over the past year, physicians in that practice had written $9 million in prescriptions for the two anemia drugs Aranesp and Epogen. Amgen returned the favor with $2.7 million in "rebates." These numbers work out to $1.5 million/physician in prescriptions, with returns of $450,000 (30%) per physician and profits of $300,000 (20%). The Times also ran a chart showing that dosing levels in the US, where rebates that encourage more prescriptions are standard practice, are as much as three times higher than in other countries where the rebates aren’t permitted. (Whether outcomes are better here is not clear.) These drugs were only two of many that oncologists prescribe, and there are rebates associated with many of those others as well. Of course, oncologists also make money, though far less, for actually being doctors.
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		<item>
		<title>Thoughts on Cognitive Dissonance</title>
		<link>http://eduarticles.com/thoughts-on-cognitive-dissonance</link>
		<comments>http://eduarticles.com/thoughts-on-cognitive-dissonance#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:20:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Psycology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive dissonance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://eduarticles.com/?p=2554</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/community/modules.php?name=News&#038;file=article&#038;sid=17
rastafarispeaks.com
By Ayanna

"…humans have a deep abiding need in their psyche to be consistent in our attitudes and behaviors; we want to feel in agreement and unified in thought and action. Inner harmony sounds good to everyone, and so it was Festinger's view that when we feel a disharmony, or dissonance, within ourselves, between two factors, we strive to decrease this tension by either changing our original thought, giving strength to the opposing thought, or letting go of the behavior. All three techniques are in the name of decreasing dissonance because it is threatening to experience such a large crack in our rationale that dissonance often creates" (colorado.edu)

While I agree with the conditions that cause people to experience this phenomenon, I must say I do not think they have got it absolutely right. Festinger insists that in order to minimize or erase the tension created by cognitive dissonance, humans either change or modify their original thoughts to accommodate the new information or abandon the old ideas completely.

I think Festinger has greatly underestimated the human WILL to blindness. In my observation, most people try to invalidate the informant or the information itself in order to keep their 'sanity' intact. Another paper speaks of 'mode 2' thinkers (www.propaganda101.com), those who respond to logical arguments with emotional ones. They use emotional thinking and arguments to attempt to counter and invalidate the conflicting truth. They play on their own existing fears and those of others to attempt to get them to come over to their side; the fewer people who accept the new information, the easier it is to invalidate.

Another flaw in the theory (as far as I have read thus far) is that it appears to theorize in a vacuum without taking into account the sociological and economic conditions that may cause reactions to cognitive dissonance to differ. I think a level of comfort and privilege assists in the rejection of conflicting information. Not only are privileged ones used to having their opinions, ideas, ideologies be the standard and the unchallenged, but they sometimes may have more to lose psychologically and materially by accepting conflicting ideas that challenge the status quo from which they benefit.

When one is comfortable, one is more willing to discredit the incoming information, because it is the source of dissonance. Privileged ones do not like to accommodate, to accept their own wrongs or to let go of ideologies that held them high. The U.S is a classic example of this. More Americans believe their President because they have more to lose by accepting that not only is he a liar, but that their way of life is a lie. They have more to lose psychologically (as far as they see it) by realizing that their great society was built and continues to be fed by racism and exploitative capitalism. Even further than simply accepting the lies of one man, it is near impossible for them to accept the lies of a national ideology that has held them superior. Other whites are often not too far from this regardless of their nationality.]]></description>
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		<title>Cognitive dissonance (Web only)</title>
		<link>http://eduarticles.com/cognitive-dissonance-web-only</link>
		<comments>http://eduarticles.com/cognitive-dissonance-web-only#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:15:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Psycology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive dissonance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://eduarticles.com/?p=2551</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[http://www.eyemagazine.com/critique.php?cid=366
eyemagazine.com
By Rick Poynor

In an age of ubiquitous publicity, it can be hard to experience a cultural event without preconceptions. When we see an exhibition or film, or pick up a novel, we usually have at least some idea of what we are about to encounter, gleaned from reviews, previews, interviews and promotional copy. This careful preliminary sampling makes perfect sense when our time and money are at stake. It does, of course, rule out the possibility of being caught unawares by a message and having to find your bearings without external aids.

Sometimes, though, advertising and design can be the source of cognitive dissonance precisely because they are not the main event. This happened to me recently at a showing of Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, about the Dutch resistance in the Second World War. Waiting for the film to start, the audience was suddenly confronted on screen by the statement: ‘Globalisation can only work where tastes can be globalised, where we’re ready to accept less difference, less variety.’ These words were accompanied by an insistently rhythmic metallic hiss, creating an oppressive feeling of urgency and tension.

My immediate assumption was that the language of the anti-globalisation protesters had been co-opted to sell jeans or trainers and that the punchline would soon make this clear. As the ‘commercial’ continued, this seemed unlikely. It was surprisingly wordy: a miniature essay broken down into screen-sized captions, which jittered anxiously above gritty backgrounds surrounded by darkness. Each phrase presses closer and closer before a new one replaces it. The slogans, which cast black shadows, look like warning signs hanging on a vertical bar, as though the words are being crucified, and the mood is heavy and menacing – almost apocalyptic. The claustrophobic intensity suggests invasion and colonisation.

Part of the way through, a deeper note sounds, full of foreboding, and the sentences give way to a series of points: ‘Security is not liberty. Wealth is not freedom. Control is not strength.’ Confirmation that this is no ordinary ad comes at the end where it says: ‘Martin Firrell, public artist for Curzon Cinemas’. Curzon runs five art-house cinemas in the London area, and Firrell, an artist based in the city, is renowned for text pieces like this. Even for those who don’t know his projects, the moment of stimulating perplexity has passed.

Firrell operates in an area of public art made prominent in the 1980s by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer – Holzer’s sharp-edged ‘truisms’, for instance, have been displayed on public signs everywhere from Times Square to Piccadilly Circus. But neither artist holds any copyright on the use of slogans to communicate in public spaces. The device is basic to all forms of advertising and there is no reason why it shouldn’t be turned to any use a communicator can think up and find an outlet for. Firrell has a background in advertising and he used to be a brand consultant with the Martin Firrell and William Maugham Partnership.

Whether the Curzon project is effective communication in this setting is open to question. For anyone with concerns about these issues, it offers useful encouragement; it is good to know that others feel the same way, and support from an ‘official’ source carries some weight. If there really were audience members who had never previously thought about globalisation, terrorism and the need for difference to maintain a healthy society, then a portentous announcement lasting just a couple of minutes can only take them so far.
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		<item>
		<title>Cognitive Dissonance Theory &amp; HIV/AIDS Prevention</title>
		<link>http://eduarticles.com/cognitive-dissonance-theory-hivaids-prevention</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:11:48 +0000</pubDate>
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				<category><![CDATA[Psycology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive dissonance]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[http://stanford.wellsphere.com/hiv-aids-article/cognitive-dissonance-theory-hiv-aids-prevention/37271
wellsphere.com
by Dr. David Wessner

Beyond the obvious physical symptoms associated with AIDS, there are many psychological and social implications surrounding this debilitating disease that we don’t often consider. Mass media efforts and expensive awareness campaigns have done a good job at spreading information to the general public, however, these programs have not been highly successful in reducing risky sexual behavior. Talking about sexuality and proper protection is a topic very uncomfortable to many people, even in today’s world, and this is the reason why many people fail to practice safe sex despite the vast knowledge about how this disease is transmitted. Additionally, a perplexing phenomenon exists among individuals outwardly preaching safe sex, but in reality, not using protection in their own sex lives. This type of insensible behavior is particularly prevalent among sexually active college students, who are aware of the risks and severity of AIDS, but proportionately, very few of them actually use condoms. Recently, several social psychologists have examined this hypocrisy by researching the effects of cognitive dissonance theory on safer sex practices.

Cognitive dissonance theory has been an integral component of social psychology for nearly 50 years, and according to this theory, dissonance arises when a person possesses two contradictory beliefs, or when a person’s attitude conflicts with an action that they chose to perform. This clash between attitude and behavior results in feelings of discomfort, and subsequently the conflicted individual strives to change either their beliefs or behavior to reduce this tension. Hypocrisy is considered a special type of cognitive dissonance, produced when a person decides to promote a behavior that in actuality, they do not practice. Several experiments have been conducted in an attempt to apply this theory to AIDS prevention.

Elliot Aronson was the major contributor to this field of research, and his original study (1991) placed young college students in the role of a HIV prevention educator, who is asked to advocate condom-use to others, but hypocritically does not use condoms in their own sex life. Half the students were asked to compile a list of their past failures to use condoms, when they had deemed it to be too awkward or impossible to do so. Each subject was then asked to compose a speech about the dangers of AIDS and the importance of using condoms for every sexual encounter. The students were quite willing to take on this role, believing it was a good idea to encourage sexually active people to use protection. Then, some of the students recited their speech in front of a video camera, after being informed that this tape would be played in a high-school sex-education class. This produced a high level of dissonance in the subjects. They were now preaching condom-use to others, but hypocritically had failed to practice this at earlier points in their lives. In order to remove this dissonance, the subjects would have to change their attitude to bring it in line with the position they were advocating. Essentially, they’d have to start practicing what they preached. Sure enough, Aronson’s results supported this hypothesis, and after the conclusion of the experiment, the students were far more likely to purchase condoms, which were available on a display table outside the experimental room. Several months later, Aronson followed up with these same students, and they reported that they were regularly using condoms and practicing safer sex.
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