Author Question: Apart from its effect on the study of attitude change, describe how the advent of Festinger's ... (Read 166 times)

folubunmi · **on:** Jun 22, 2018

Apart from its effect on the study of attitude change, describe how the advent of Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory impacted our understanding of conditioning. What type of conditioning is most impacted by cognitive dissonance findings?

In which model (conditioning or dissonance) is cognition viewed as a non-observable cause of behavior (and why is that important)? Describe the differing predictions the two approaches would make for Festinger's experiment, referring in detail to aspects of the induced-compliance 1/20 paradigm.

Question 2

Discuss the role of learning in attitude formation.

What will be an ideal response?

Eazy416 · **Reply #1 on:** Jun 22, 2018

Answer to Question 1

Answer:
Festinger and Carlsmith's experiment demonstrated that people changed their attitudes more with less of an inducement (1, compared to 20). Instrumental conditioning model would (incorrectly) predict that people would change their attitude more in the 20 condition of the experiment (than the 1 condition)--20 is a bigger reward, after all Instrumental conditioning would argue that there was no cognition and that people unthinkingly responded to rewards and punishments. Festinger's theory showed that complex cognitive operations were occurring on the way to attitude change, and that they were indeed observable.

Answer to Question 2

Answer:
Answer should include each of the following points:
- classical conditioning learning associations between stimuli
- subliminal conditioning learning can occur even when we are not consciously aware of the conditioning stimulus
- instrumental conditioning associating a behavior or attitude with a reinforcement or reward
- observational learning learning by watching someone else
- all of these types of learning may be involved with attitude formation and with media exposure (TV). Observational learning is the most directly involved with media exposure.