The action-based model of dissonance and recent advances in neuroscience suggest that commitment to action should cause greater relative left frontal cortical activity. An induced compliance experiment was conducted in which electroencephalographic activity was recorded following commitment to action, operationalized with a perceived choice manipulation. Perceived high as compared to low choice...

The potential for conflicting information to be transmitted by different alerting systems is growing as these systems become more pervasive in operations. Newly-introduced alerting systems must be carefully designed to minimize the potential for and impact of alerting conflicts (or dissonance), but there is little formal understanding to aid this process. One example of alert proliferation is t...

Motivational interviewing is an approach based upon principles of experimental social psychology, applying processes such as attribution, cognitive dissonance, and self-efficacy. Motivation is conceptualized not as a personality trait but as an interpersonal process. The model deemphasizes labeling and places heavy emphasis on individual responsibility and internal attribution of change. Cognit...

When people behave immorally according to their own standards, they feel bad. Rational people may therefore engage in less of an immoral activity than would he in their material self-interest. Despite this fact, I show that increasing people’s distaste for being immoral can increase the level of immoral activities. This can happen because of the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance:...

Experimental design can be tricky to get right. A very potent illustration of this point is found in Chen and Risen’s recent identification of a logical flaw in a number of past free choice experiments studying the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance[4]. This illustration is unique in many ways. First, the mistake is subtle yet elementary; in the simplest of the affected experiments, ...