Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (eBook)

James M. Olson, Mark P. Zanna (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2015 | 1. Auflage
358 Seiten
Elsevier Science (Verlag)
978-0-12-802435-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Advances in Experimental Social Psychology continues to be one of the most sought after and most often cited series in this field. Containing contributions of major empirical and theoretical interest, this series represents the best and the brightest in new research, theory, and practice in social psychology. This serial is part of the Social Sciences package on ScienceDirect. Visit info.sciencedirect.com for more information. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology is available online on ScienceDirect - full-text online of volume 32 onward. Elsevier book series on ScienceDirect gives multiple users throughout an institution simultaneous online access to an important complement to primary research. Digital delivery ensures users reliable, 24-hour access to the latest peer-reviewed content. The Elsevier book series are compiled and written by the most highly regarded authors in their fields and are selected from across the globe using Elsevier's extensive researcher network. For more information about the Elsevier Book Series on ScienceDirect Program, please visit store.elsevier.com. - One of the most sought after and most often cited series in this field - Contains contributions of major empirical and theoretical interest - Represents the best and the brightest in new research, theory, and practice in social psychology

Mark P. Zanna is a retired University Professor and former Chair of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. He received his BA ('66) and PhD ('70) from Yale University. Professor Zanna's area of research is the psychology of attitudes. Primarily funded over the years by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, he has studied attitude structure and function, attitude formation and change, communication and persuasion (including the persistence of persuasion), and the attitude-behaviour relation. He has also conducted research on (a) overcoming resistance to persuasion, including research on subliminal priming and persuasion, self-affirmation and persuasion, and narrative persuasion, and (b) implicit attitudes (i.e., relatively automatic, intuitive evaluations), including research on aversive racists (i.e., those individuals who test low on thoughtful, conscious measures of prejudice, but high on more automatic, intuitive measures of prejudice) and defensive self-esteem (i.e., those individuals who test high on thoughtful, conscious measures of self-esteem, but low on more automatic, intuitive measures of self-esteem). In the domain of health promotion, he has evaluated a 'safer sex' intervention and tested the subtle effects (e.g., on implicit norms) of movie stars' smoking in feature films. Currently, he is investigating the causes and consequences of negative implicit norms toward females in STEM disciplines. A winner of several career awards for distinguished scientific contribution (D. O. Hebb Award, Canadian Psychological Association, 1993; D. T. Campbell Award, Society of Personality and Social Psychology, 1997; Fellow, Royal Society of Canada, 1999; Inaugural Excellence in Research Award, UW, 2000; Inaugural Distinguished University Professor, UW, 2004; Inaugural Excellence in Graduate Supervision, UW, 2005; Distinguished Scientist Award, Society of Experimental Social Psychology, 2007; K. Lewin Award, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, 2010; Killam Prize Laureate, Canada Council for the Arts, 2011), Professor Zanna has been a consulting editor of the top four journals in social/personality psychology (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Journal of Personality) plus 7 other journals. Currently, he co-edits the Ontario Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology (since 1981) and the Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (since 1991), the two major edited book series in social psychology. He has also been elected to the presidencies of the two major learned societies in social psychology, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (1985) and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (1997). 32 (of 34) of Professor Zanna's doctoral or postdoctoral students have taken academic positions. Six students chaired their respective departments (plus one was the President of a small US college) and 12 others became editors (or consulting editors) of major journals in the field. According to the Web of Science, Professor Zanna's lifetime citations now (February, 2014) exceed 9,500 (h = 50; H = 55). According to Google Scholar, lifetime citations now (February, 2014) exceed 21,200 (h = 74). Finally, Professor Zanna has ranked 12th and 20th worldwide in citations in social psychology textbooks and social psychology handbooks, respectively.

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Chapter Two

A Biosocial Model of Affective Decision Making

Implications for Dissonance, Motivation, and Culture

Shinobu Kitayama1; Steven Tompson    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
1 Corresponding author: email address: [e-mail]

Abstract

Drawing on recent advances in both neuroscience and animal behavior, we propose a biosocial model of affective decision making, which holds that when people face a conflict between two competing behavioral options (e.g., go vs. no-go, approach vs. avoidance), they develop a new affective disposition that resolves the conflict. This newly emerging affect will enable one to select a response while forming the basis for an elaborate cognition that justifies the selected response. The model reconceptualizes cognitive dissonance as fundamentally affective and involving both predecisional and postdecisional components. Furthermore, by postulating both top-down and bottom-up neural pathways to regulate the sensitivity to behavioral conflict, it integrates prior evidence on factors that moderate dissonance, including action orientation, self-affirmation, mortality salience, and culture. It also offers new insights into a disparate set of motivational phenomena including animal behaviors that mimic cognitive dissonance, sunk-cost fallacy, addiction, and ego-depletion. Lastly, the biosocial model has implications for how humans may be affectively and motivationally attached to symbols of culture. Directions for future research are discussed.

Keywords

Affect

Motivation

Dissonance

Affective neuroscience

Cultural neuroscience

Cultural psychology

Social psychology

Ego-depletion

Self-affirmation

Effort justification

1 Introduction

1.1 Behavioral Conflict, Affect, and Motivation

People are conflicted in many different situations. Conflicts can happen when they face important decisions. Conflicts may also happen when they work on a demanding task such as climbing to reach the summit of a mountain. Similar conflicts will also be evident when one is confronting a loss of money, health, or a loved one through gambling, smoking, or using alcohol or illicit drugs. In all these cases, from decision making to mountain climbing, and from gambling to illicit drug use, a conflict arises because the two behavioral options are equally appealing for different reasons, but one course of action (choosing to work for one company; continuing to work on a demanding task or to gamble) precludes the other (choosing to work for the other company; stopping work on a demanding task or giving up gambling).

More often than not, the climbers continue to climb and the gamblers to gamble. Moreover, they often appear to be even more attracted to the endeavor as a result of their desire to discontinue it. For example, the climbers appear to be more attracted than ever to reaching the summit as a result of experiencing the behavioral conflict. Could the climbers be more committed to climbing because they wanted to quit? More paradoxically, in some cases, people appear to be psychologically depleted (much like the climbers who are physically exhausted) after working on a highly demanding task, as if they have used up limited “muscle power” for self-control. Under such conditions, they find other impulses and temptations irresistible and difficult to control (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). Is this effect (called “ego-depletion”) related to the commitment of our climbers? Why are our climbers not “depleted” after having worked so hard to climb?

The thesis advanced in the current article is that the behavioral conflict associated with any demanding task or important decision is highly instrumental in determining subsequent decisions and behaviors, with an assortment of affective and motivational consequences. We propose that humans inherit from nonhuman animals certain brain circuitries that detect behavioral conflict. Once detected, the conflict initiates an active search for incentives associated with one of the response options to select and to pursue. Exactly what incentives are identified depends on what incentives are available and salient. The gamblers may be surrounded by a lot of attractive cues built into any Casino, and, likewise, the climbers may know how breathtaking the view from the summit would be. The gamblers may therefore become addicted to gambling, and the climbers may be more attracted to the endeavor. In contrast, people may be distracted if salient incentives are irrelevant to what they do. In such cases, they may appear being “depleted.” Although some of these phenomena, especially those involving post-decisional increases of commitment, have traditionally been studied under the rubric of cognitive dissonance (Aronson & Mills, 1959), we argue that the relevant brain circuitries responsible for these effects are largely subcortical and thus arguably precognitive. They can best be characterized as affective. We share these circuitries with rodents, birds, and nonhuman primates. The resulting affective dynamic is relevant in understanding the observations made above for the gamblers, the climbers, and the person who has been “depleted.” Moreover, this analysis will shed new light on the nature of all types of both decision making and decision rationalization.

Our thesis is couched initially in terms of cognitive dissonance theory. We will show that the above affective dynamic offers an important insight into a variety of phenomena covered in the dissonance literature of the last half century. Importantly, our analysis will go beyond the traditional confines of dissonance theory. We will use the same theoretical model to understand several different phenomena, including addiction and self-control or the failure thereof. Importantly, the model is open to sociocultural influences and conditioning. This makes it possible to use the model to illuminate how people may be emotionally attached to symbolic systems of culture.

1.2 Dissonance Revolution

Our discussion starts with cognitive dissonance—one of the most prominent topics in social psychology. The central thesis of cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) is that when two beliefs are inconsistent, individuals experience negatively arousing cognitive conflict (called dissonance). Because the dissonance is aversive, the individuals try to reduce it by changing one or the other beliefs. For example, when making a difficult decision, individuals show attitude change that justifies the decision. In this case, individuals who face such a decision are conflicted because not all beliefs are consistent with the decision. For example, they may have beliefs favoring the option that is rejected. The individuals are therefore motivated to reduce the conflict by justifying the decision they have made. The justification is typically achieved by changing their attitudes and beliefs so that the new attitudes and beliefs are consistent with and justify the decision that has been made. Notably, the resulting attitude change can be long lasting (Sharot, Fleming, Yu, Koster, & Dolan, 2012). By nature, then, we may be rationalizing beings, ready to justify what we have done after the fact.

Dissonance theory revolutionized social psychology by emphasizing the role of cognition in social behavior. More importantly, it also provided the first testable framework in which to conceptualize how cognition could be motivated and how the motivated cognition could yield some intriguing forms of social behavior. The theory enabled us, both in and outside of social psychology, to reflect on potentially unflattering aspects of the human mind. Indeed, the influence of dissonance theory went far beyond the field of social psychology. The term dissonance has since become incorporated into the English vernacular.

1.3 Charting the Terrain

As a scientific hypothesis, dissonance theory has been tested with three primary experimental paradigms (Aronson, 1969). First, a free-choice dissonance paradigm tests the degree to which choice leads to attitude change that justifies the choice (Brehm, 1956). By definition, difficult choices involve competing choice options that are almost equally attractive and thus difficult to choose between. The more difficult the choice, the greater dissonance would be expected to be. To reduce the resulting dissonance, the chooser will increase her preference for chosen options and decrease her preference for rejected options. Researchers have also used an effort justification paradigm. When people invest considerable effort to obtain a positive outcome (e.g., climbing a mountain), they supposedly experience dissonance because knowing that one worked so hard is inconsistent with the possibility that the work (e.g., climbing) is valueless (Aronson & Mills, 1959). The individuals typically justify their effort by increasing their commitment to the task. Third, in an induced compliance paradigm, individuals are led to commit an action that contradicts their beliefs or preexisting attitudes. The action therefore produces a conflict with their preexisting attitudes and beliefs. In order to reduce the resulting dissonance, the individuals change their attitudes and beliefs so that they are better aligned with their action (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). These three...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.6.2015
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Allgemeine Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Psychoanalyse / Tiefenpsychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Sozialpsychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Test in der Psychologie
• ISBN-10: 0-12-802435-6 / 0128024356
• ISBN-13: 978-0-12-802435-5 / 9780128024355