12.3 Attitudes and Persuasion — Why Your Brain Lies to Protect Your Ego | Psychology 2e
After this lesson you will be able to…
- Learn the social psychology definition of an attitude as an evaluation of people, ideas, or objects.
- Understand the affective, behavioral, and cognitive components that form an attitude.
- Learn Leon Festinger's definition of cognitive dissonance and its specific trigger.
- Discover how cognitive dissonance causes measurable physiological arousal and brain activation.
- Explore the three ways people resolve cognitive dissonance: changing behavior, changing cognition, or adding new cognition.
- Understand how people value goals more highly if they required significant physical or emotional effort.
- Learn about the 1959 experiment demonstrating how difficult initiations lead to higher group valuation.
- Identify how justification of effort manifests in common scenarios like the IKEA effect, education, and living choices.
- Understand the three variables of persuasion identified by the Yale approach: source, message, and audience.
- Learn how credibility and physical attractiveness of the source influence persuasion.
- Discover how subtlety, sidedness, and timing affect the persuasiveness of a message.
- Understand how self-esteem and age influence an audience's susceptibility to persuasion.
- Learn Petty and Cacioppo's model explaining two routes of persuasion: central and peripheral.
- Understand the central route, which relies on strong arguments, facts, and an analytical, motivated audience.
- Learn about the peripheral route, which uses positive emotions or superficial cues for temporary attitude change.
- A simple analogy to differentiate between the central and peripheral routes of persuasion.
- Understand this persuasion technique where a small request leads to agreement on a much larger one.
- Learn about the 1966 study demonstrating the effectiveness of the foot-in-the-door technique with homeowners.
- Identify how the foot-in-the-door technique is used by teenagers and in retail sales.
- Understand how the foot-in-the-door technique weaponizes our need for consistency and fear of cognitive dissonance.
- Reflect on whether core beliefs are based on logic or elaborate rationalizations from past peripheral choices.
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(0)This lesson dives into the psychology of attitudes and persuasion from Section 12.3 of OpenStax Psychology 2e. We unpack how attitudes are built from ...
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Quiz: Attitudes, Cognitive Dissonance, and Persuasion
FundamentalsAnswer each question based only on what was covered in the video lesson. No outside knowledge is needed — all answers come directly from the material presented.
Practice: Attitudes, Cognitive Dissonance, and Persuasion
PracticeAnswer each question using what you learned in the video lesson. Questions progress from recall and understanding to applying concepts to new scenarios.