Leon Festinger was an American social psychologist who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. The rejection of the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior is largely attributed to his theories and research. Festinger is also credited with advancing the use of laboratory experimentation in social psychology, although he simultaneously stressed the importance of studying real-life situations, a principle he practiced when personally infiltrating a doomsday cult. He is also known in social network theory for the proximity effect.
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and its mental toll. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, and values in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that contradicts one or more of those factors. According to this theory, when an action or idea is psychologically inconsistent with the other, people do all in their power to change either so that they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.
In behavioral psychology, reinforcement refers to consequences that increases the likelihood of an organism's future behavior, typically in the presence of a particular antecedent stimulus. For example, a rat can be trained to push a lever to receive food whenever a light is turned on. In this example, the light is the antecedent stimulus, the lever pushing is the operant behavior, and the food is the reinforcer. Likewise, a student that receives attention and praise when answering a teacher's question will be more likely to answer future questions in class. The teacher's question is the antecedent, the student's response is the behavior, and the praise and attention are the reinforcements.
Elliot Aronson is an American psychologist who has carried out experiments on the theory of cognitive dissonance and invented the Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative teaching technique that facilitates learning while reducing interethnic hostility and prejudice. In his 1972 social psychology textbook, The Social Animal, he stated Aronson's First Law: "People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy", thus asserting the importance of situational factors in bizarre behavior. He is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to have won all three of its major awards: for writing, for teaching, and for research. In 2007, he received the William James Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science, in which he was cited as the scientist who "fundamentally changed the way we look at everyday life". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Aronson as the 78th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He officially retired in 1994 but continues to teach and write.
James Merrill Carlsmith was an American social psychologist perhaps best known for his collaboration with Leon Festinger and Elliot Aronson in the creation and development of cognitive dissonance theory. He also worked extensively with Mark Lepper on the subject of attribution theory. With Jonathan L. Freedman and David O. Sears he wrote the textbook, Social Psychology.
Content theory is a subset of motivational theories that try to define what motivates people. Content theories of motivation often describe a system of needs that motivate peoples' actions. While process theories of motivation attempt to explain how and why our motivations affect our behaviors, content theories of motivation attempt to define what those motives or needs are. Content theory includes the work of David McClelland, Abraham Maslow and other psychologists.
The overjustification effect occurs when an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a task. Overjustification is an explanation for the phenomenon known as motivational "crowding out". The overall effect of offering a reward for a previously unrewarded activity is a shift to extrinsic motivation and the undermining of pre-existing intrinsic motivation. Once rewards are no longer offered, interest in the activity is lost; prior intrinsic motivation does not return, and extrinsic rewards must be continuously offered as motivation to sustain the activity.
Attitudes are associated beliefs and behaviors towards some object. They are not stable, and because of the communication and behavior of other people, are subject to change by social influences, as well as by the individual's motivation to maintain cognitive consistency when cognitive dissonance occurs—when two attitudes or attitude and behavior conflict. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of affective and cognitive components. It has been suggested that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node. Thus, by activating an affective or emotional node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined.
Self-determination theory (SDT) is a macro theory of human motivation and personality that concerns people's innate growth tendencies and innate psychological needs. It pertains to the motivation behind people's choices in the absence of external influences and distractions. SDT focuses on the degree to which human behavior is self-motivated and self-determined.
Motivation crowding theory is the theory from psychology and microeconomics suggesting that providing extrinsic incentives for certain kinds of behavior—such as promising monetary rewards for accomplishing some task—can sometimes undermine intrinsic motivation for performing that behavior. The result of lowered motivation, in contrast with the predictions of neoclassical economics, can be an overall decrease in the total performance.
System justification theory is a theory within social psychology that system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function. It proposes that people have several underlying needs, which vary from individual to individual, that can be satisfied by the defense and justification of the status quo, even when the system may be disadvantageous to certain people. People have epistemic, existential, and relational needs that are met by and manifest as ideological support for the prevailing structure of social, economic, and political norms. Need for order and stability, and thus resistance to change or alternatives, for example, can be a motivator for individuals to see the status quo as good, legitimate, and even desirable.
The effort heuristic is a mental rule of thumb in which the quality or worth of an object is determined from the perceived amount of effort that went into producing that object. In brief, the effort heuristic follows a tendency to judge objects that took a longer time to produce to be of higher value. The more effort invested in an object, the better it is deemed to be. This is especially true in situations where value is difficult to assess or the evaluator lacks expertise in the appraisement of an item. People use whatever information is available to them and effort is thought to generally be a reliable indicator of quality.
Self-justification describes how, when a person encounters cognitive dissonance, or a situation in which a person's behavior is inconsistent with their beliefs (hypocrisy), that person tends to justify the behavior and deny any negative feedback associated with the behavior.
Effort justification is an idea and paradigm in social psychology stemming from Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. Effort justification is a person's tendency to attribute the value of an outcome they put effort into achieving as greater than the objective value of the outcome.
Identification with the Aggressor is one of the forms of identification conceptualized by psychoanalysis. Specifically, it is a defence mechanism that indicates taking the role of the aggressor and their functional attributes, or imitating their aggressive and behavioral modality, when a psychological trauma brings about the hopeless dilemma of being either a victim or an abuser. This theoretical construct is also defined as a process of coping with mental distress or as a particular case of zero-sum game.
Cognitive evaluation theory (CET) is a theory in psychology that is designed to explain the effects of external consequences on internal motivation. Specifically, CET is a sub-theory of self-determination theory that focuses on competence and autonomy while examining how intrinsic motivation is affected by external forces in a process known as motivational "crowding out."
The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification in 1970 led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University In this study, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time. During this time, the researcher left the child in a room with a single marshmallow for about 15 minutes and then returned. If they did not eat the marshmallow, the reward was either another marshmallow or pretzel stick, depending on the child's preference. In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational attainment, body mass index (BMI), and other life measures. A replication attempt with a sample from a more diverse population, over 10 times larger than the original study, showed only half the effect of the original study. The replication suggested that economic background, rather than willpower, explained the other half. The predictive power of the marshmallow test was challenged in a 2020 study.
Learned industriousness is a behaviorally rooted theory developed by Robert Eisenberger to explain the differences in general work effort among people of equivalent ability. According to Eisenberger, individuals who are reinforced for exerting high effort on a task are also secondarily reinforced by the sensation of high effort. Individuals with a history of reinforcement for effort are predicted to generalize this effort to new behaviors.
Self-persuasion is used to explain one aspect of social influence. This theory postulates that the receiver takes an active role in persuading himself or herself to change his or her attitude. Unlike the direct technique of Persuasion, Self-persuasion is indirect and entails placing people in situations where they are motivated to persuade themselves to change. More specifically what characterizes a self-persuasion situation is that no direct attempt is made to convince anyone of anything. Thus, with self-persuasion, people are convinced that the motivation for change has come from within, so the persuasion factors of another person's influence is irrelevant. Therefore, Self-persuasion is almost always a more powerful form of persuasion than the more traditional persuasion techniques. Self-Persuasion, also has an important influence in Social judgment theory, Elaboration Likelihood Model, Cognitive Dissonance and Narrative paradigm.
