A painful reminder: the role of level and salience of attitude importance in cognitive dissonance.

Full Abstract

In his seminal book, L. Festinger (1957) emphasized the role of attitude importance in cognitive dissonance. This study (N = 308) explored whether people's use of dissonance reduction strategies differs as a function of level of attitude importance and whether the personal importance of an attitude is salient. Results showed that level and salience of attitude importance interacted to affect high-choice (HC) participants' tendency to use attitude change and trivialization to reduce dissonance. When HC participants were not reminded of the personal importance of their attitude (i.e., it was not salient), they changed their attitudes equally irrespective of attitude importance, but engaged in greater trivialization with increasing levels of importance. In contrast, when attitude importance was salient, HC participants changed their attitudes less with increasing attitude importance and showed no evidence of trivializing under any level of importance.

Author information

Author/s: Starzyk, Katherine B (KB); Fabrigar, Leandre R (LR); Soryal, Ashley S (AS); Fanning, Jessie J (JJ);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. starzyk(-atsign-)cc.umanitoba.ca

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Personality and social psychology bulletin (Pers Soc Psychol Bull), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Jan; vol 35 (issue 1) : pp 126-37

Dates: Created 2008/12/24; Completed 2009/03/05;

PMID: 19106082, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 3/10/2009, IMS Date: 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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