Eddie Harmon-Jones - Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology

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Electronic edition published 2019.

ISBN: 978-1-4338-3077-8 (electronic edition).

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harmon-Jones, Eddie, editor.

Title: Cognitive dissonance : reexamining a pivotal theory in psychology / edited by Eddie Harmon-Jones.

Description: Second edition. | Washington, DC : American Psychological Association, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018043486 (print) | LCCN 2018044132 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433830778 (eBook) | ISBN 1433830779 (eBook) | ISBN 9781433830105 (pbk.) | ISBN 1433830108 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Cognitive dissonanceCongresses.

Classification: LCC BF337.C63 (ebook) | LCC BF337.C63 C64 2019 (print) | DDC 153.4dc23

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record is available from the British Library.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0000135-000

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills

Judson Mills

Jean-Leon Beauvois and Robert-Vincent Joule

Eddie Harmon-Jones and Cindy Harmon-Jones

Bertram Gawronski and Skylar M. Brannon

Ian McGregor, Ian R. Newby-Clark, and Mark P. Zanna

Elliot Aronson

Joshua Aronson, Geoffrey Cohen, and Paul R. Nail

Joel Cooper

Stephen J. Read and Brian M. Monroe

Keise Izuma and Kou Murayama

Patricia G. Devine, John M. Tauer, Kenneth E. Barron, Andrew J. Elliot, Kristen M. Vance, and Eddie Harmon-Jones

Leon Festinger (1954)

Leon Festinger (1987)

Judson Mills

CONTRIBUTORS

Elliot Aronson, University of California, Santa Cruz

Joshua Aronson, New York University, New York

Kenneth E. Barron, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA

Jean-Leon Beauvois, Universit de Nice, France

Skylar M. Brannon, University of Texas at Austin

Geoffrey Cohen, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

Joel Cooper, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Patricia G. Devine, University of WisconsinMadison

Andrew J. Elliot, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

Bertram Gawronski, University of Texas at Austin

Cindy Harmon-Jones, The University of New South Wales, Australia

Eddie Harmon-Jones, The University of New South Wales, Australia

Keise Izuma, University of Southampton, United Kingdom

Robert-Vincent Joule, Universite de Provence, France

Ian McGregor, University of Waterloo, Canada

Judson Mills, University of Maryland, College Park (deceased)

Brian M. Monroe, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Kou Murayama, University of Reading, United Kingdom, and Kochi University of Technology, Japan

Paul R. Nail, University of Central Arkansas, Conway

Ian R. Newby-Clark, University of Guelph, Canada

Stephen J. Read, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

John M. Tauer, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN

Kristen M. Vance, United States Air Force (retired)

Mark P. Zanna, University of Waterloo, Canada

FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION

This is more like what I had in mind could easily be what Leon L. Festinger would have said about this volume had he lived to see it. He would not have been referring to the two appendices that report his own wordsthe first being his early, unpublished formulation of dissonance theory, the second, his comments on the state of dissonance theory 30 years after its publication. In earlier comments about the state of social psychology, after having been away from the field for several years, he had said, in effect, Its not exactly what I had in mind.

This is a volume that Leon Festinger surely would have loved to see. It presents a variety of ideas and clever research from a collection of investigators located in Canada, France, and Japan, as well as in the United States, and almost all intended to produce a better understanding of the phenomena of cognitive dissonance. Whereas the common thread is dissonance theory as first stated by Festinger, the common concern starts with the assumption that the theory must be taken seriously. From that point, these chapters fan out into a diverse array of suggestions, propositions, qualifications, and additions for the original theory.

This book contains the medication required for all those people who, quite rightly, became bored with dissonance theory in the later 1960s or early 1970s. The present collection demonstrates clearly and convincingly that the problem was not with the theory but rather with the research that was largely confined to conceptual replications of some of the major implications of the theory. Although the issues addressed in some of the chapters have been around for several years (e.g., the role of the self in the instigation of dissonance and the role of aversive consequences), even in those cases there are new and revealing programs of research reported.

What we also find in this new volume are attempts to make the theory more precise in certain respects, a summary of an ambitious research program centered on the justification of behavior, and a report of carefully crafted research to reveal dissonance arousal due to discrepancy between perception and behavior in the absence of negative consequences. There is as well a contribution that takes up the issue of multiple modes of dissonance reduction and how they are determined and interact, and then, for more formal and general points of view, there are two contributions on mathematical formulations that help to place dissonance processes in a larger conceptual context.