This article presents a new model for understanding the role of the self in cognitive dissonance processes. We focus on the controversies among three major theories of how cognitions about the self mediate dissonance processes: Self-consistency (Aronson, 1992), Self-affirmation (Steele, 1988), and the New Look perspective (Cooper & Fazio, 1984). It is argued that each of these contemporary revi...

This research challenges the presumption that reading online reviews solely affect reader attitudes toward a prospective decision. Instead, readers may strategically select and read reviews after a decision. This research advances and tests hypotheses proposing that: (1) post-decision readers select decisionsupportive reviews earlier and more frequently; and (2) the reviews they read affect the...

We explored the emotional and attitudinal consequences of personal attitude-behavior discrepancies using a religious version of the hypocrisy paradigm. We induced cognitive dissonance in participants (n = 206) by making them feel hypocritical for advocating certain religious behaviors that they had not recently engaged in to their own satisfaction. In Experiment 1, this resulted in higher level...

This paper presents a recurrent neural network model of long term attitude change resulting from the reduction of cognitive dissonance. The model uses Contrastive Hebbian Learning (CHL) to capture changes in weight strength among cognitions resulting from dissonance reduction. Several authors have presented recurrent network models of dissonance reduction that capture the constraint satisfactio...

The way that incidental affect impacts attitude change brought about by controlled processes has so far been examined when the incidental affective state is generated after dissonance state induction. We therefore investigated attitude change when the incidental mood occurs prior to dissonance state induction. We expected a negative mood to induce systematic processing, and a positive mood to i...

BACKGROUND The vascular hypothesis of multiple sclerosis (MS), called chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI), and its treatment (known as liberation therapy) was immediately rejected by experts but enthusiastically gripped by patients who shared their experiences with other patients worldwide by use of social media, such as patient online forums. Contradictions between scientific in...

BACKGROUND Greece has the highest smoking rates (in the 15-nation bloc) in Europe. The purpose of this study was to investigate Greek smokers' intention and appraisal of capability to quit employing the theoretical frameworks of Decisional Balance (DB) and Cognitive Dissonance (CD). METHODS A cross-sectional study including 401 Greek habitual smokers (205 men and 195 women), falling into four...