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Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance has been widely recognized for its important and influential concepts in areas of motivation and social psychology. The theory of dissonance is here applied to the problem of why partial reward, delay of reward , and effort expenditure during training result in increased resistance to extinction.The author contends that a state of impasse exists within learning theory largely because some of its major assumptions stand in apparent opposition to cetain well-established experimental results. The book puts forward a new theory that seems to reconcile these data and assumptions. This new theory can account for data with which other theories have difficulty: it integrates empirical phenomena that have been regarded as unrelated, and it is supported by the results of experiments designed specifically to test its implications. These experiments are fully described in the text.… (more)
User reviews
I can’t believe what some science contributors advocate; it looks like some kind of Simon Cowell extravaganza to communicate science - make it glitzy and we'll all be experts in quantum mechanics? Perhaps it would be more instructive if some effort was put into understanding the psychology of how the non-scientific amongst us process such information.
One of the fundamental problems facing those endeavouring to disseminate any form of factual data is one of cognitive dissonance. For example, the conflation of astrology with science and a belief in the equivalence of their methodology.
It is immensely tiresome to read that it is all the fault of scientists that the general public has a poor understanding of its various disciplines. It turns scientists into villains, and naysayers into victims fighting to defend their version of the "truth" against the deceitful and malign intelligence of the experts.
I find it hilarious that the deniers go on and on about "how consensus isn't science" and yet starting from the 90s the deniers were the ones complaining that "the verdict is still undecided". Hence the scientific community, in many independent, peer-reviewed, ways showed that climate scientists agree on one side of the climate change coin more than the other. So the term "consensus".
The deniers really want their cake and eat it too.