The Scientist and the Humanist by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

9

SELF-PERSUASION WHEN IT MATTERS TO SELF

Attitude Importance and Dissonance Reduction After Counterattitudinal Advocacy

Michael R. Leippe and Donna Eisenstadt

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

Among many more exciting and flattering words, important often comes to mind for us when we think about Elliot Aronson. To be sure, this is partly because Elliot is a hugely important social scientist who has made important contributions to basic social-psychological knowledge, and has applied it to solving important social problems. But important also connects with two other defining qualities of his work and ideas. As the first to openly recognize the essential involvement of the self-concept in cognitive dissonance, Elliot led the way to understanding the critical role of attitude importance (to the self) in the arousal and disposition of dissonance. And, by repeatedly pointing his research programs and methodology at everyday behaviors and attitudes and real-world applications to social issues, Elliot championed the idea that social-psychological research should be important in terms of relating to actual lives, and to producing outcomes—changes in behavior—that have visible effect sizes.

Yet a certain irony arises from these two pillars of importance: We should apply our science to important matters, but the more important the attitude or social behavior we might like to change, the more difficult it will be to change it through dissonance-based techniques. Elliot identified targets with tough hides as important to go after and identified a critical reason—importance to the self—why the hides are tough and why dissonance-reducing techniques may be too weak to penetrate those tough hides.

Unfortunately, there has been all too little research on the relation between attitude importance and dissonance, and what research there is offers some mixed results. We will look closely at the matter in this chapter, and present some of our own relevant studies. First, we must trace how Elliot’s thinking about self-consistency figures into the attitude-importance factor in dissonance, and also identify the social influence domain and corresponding dissonance-inspired attitude change technique that will be our focus, and why. That would be counterattitudinal advocacy.

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