Decisions: What Justifies Murder In Modern Society

After reading chapter five I noticed cognitive dissonance throughout a large portion of the book. Cognitive dissonance was described in class as being a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. A good example of this was found on page 182 where the author writes about how we all tell our self that African Americans “deserve” all of this even though we know, but do not want to acknowledge that white Americans are less likely to be convicted of the same crime done by blacks. Cognitive dissonance applies here because we know that this mass incarceration is not fair or morally right to do, however, our behavior does not try to stop it from happening. Instead of doing what our beliefs say is right we try to convince ourselves that it is the African Americans fault that they are

    Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is full of oppositions.  The most obvious is the juxtaposition of darkness and light, which are both present from the very beginning, in imagery and in metaphor.  The novella is a puzzling mixture of anti-imperialism and racism, civilization and savagery, idealism and nihilism.  How can they be reconciled?  The final scene, in which Marlow confronts Kurtz's Intended, might be expected to provide resolution.  However, it seems, instead, merely to focus the dilemmas in the book, rather than solving them.

Leon Festinger shared his brilliance with the world when he, opposing all previous psychological behaviorist work, created the Cognitive Dissonance Theory. In his own words, he quickly sums up this quite complex theory: "If you change a person’s behavior, his thoughts and feelings will change to minimize the dissonance" (Groenveld, 1999, p.1). In order to decode this dense statement, we must first be aware that Festinger held to be true that humans have a deep abiding need in their psyche to be consistent in our attitudes and behaviors; we want to feel in agreement and unified in thought and action. Inner harmony sounds good to everyone, and so it was Festinger’s view that when we feel a disharmony, or

In Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, the cultural collisions illustrates the struggles Marlow experiences as he questions the nature of evil in humanity.

For many years, there has been a debate of whether or not the death penalty is morally justified. This debate has centered on whether humans have the right to take the lives of other human beings and has long divided people politically and socially. People who are in favor of the death penalty believe that, “Intentionally taking the life of an innocent human being is so evil…the perpetrator forfeits his own right to life”(Pojman, 232). Pojman is unambiguous about murderers as evildoers who do not deserve to live. On the other hand, people who are against the death penalty believe that it is morally wrong to take anyone’s life even if that person committed a heinous crime. The consequences of each position may determine its feasibility.

There can be many explanations for why an employee would call in sick to work when he or she is not really sick. One reason could be explained through the attribution theory. The attribution theory explains the behavior like this can be explained by attributing it to either the employee’s internal disposition or to an external situation. The employee’s internal disposition could be that the employee always seems to have a bad attitude to his or her job duties and that his or her personality is pessimistic or lazy. The employee’s external situation could be that he or she has a manager who is constantly micro-managing them, which makes them unhappy at work, or the employee has a coworker who is their counterpart who is slacking at work. The employee may have to work harder at the job than the other employee to get their collective tasks completed. This may lead to the employee calling out sick because of his or her internal disposition – they are just lazy and do

When determining a course of action regarding the topic of my choosing for this paper, the ideals behind cognitive dissonance allowed for me to put to paper for the very first time, a topic that I believe fulfills the requirements of the assignment, and one that bears great presence in my life. As some may have gathered throughout our tenure in this course, I am mother to my nine beautiful children. Though I despise the formalities attached to assignment of titles, attention must be paid toward the fact that I have two stepsons, Dominick & Zachary – ages seven and six. I have always harbored an oppositional stance toward the idea of referring to them, or parenting them in a fashion as though they are

The show, ChoreoProject, was presented by sjDanceco and presented various types of dance performances from classical to contemporary works. The piece that I enjoyed from this show was Cognitive Dissonance. In this dance piece, Erwin Columbus both choreographed and was the dancer. Erwin Columbus used music from Kerry Muzzey for his piece. In Cognitive Dissonance, he told a story of himself having negative, inconsistent thoughts and his journey of fighting off those thoughts from his mind. With fast and dramatic movements along with intense music, Columbus was able to grasp my attention and teach me how it feels to have negative, inconsistent thoughts that can negatively control one's body.

Cognitive Dissonance is a tense discomfort that we get when we realize that we have made a mistake or have committed hypocrisy. There are several different ways that we get rid of cognitive dissonance, some of them include a change in behavior, denial, and excuse making. In this essay I will discuss cognitive dissonance, its consequences, and how to solve the problem of excuse making in our society.

“If I chose to do it or say it, I must believe in it.” asserts the psychologist Leon Festinger (as cited in Psychology: Eighth Edition in Modules, 2007, p.731). When we become aware that our actions contradict our attitudes, we tend to revise our attitudes. This statement fits Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory that asserts that we act to reduce discomfort or dissonance, an unpleasant tension, we experience when two of our thoughts or cognitions are inconsistent. Mkimmie, et al. (2003) investigated the impact of social support on cognitive dissonance arousal in their experiment, “I’m a Hypocrite, but So Is Everyone Else: Group Support and the Reduction of Cognitive Dissonance.” The psychologists aimed to test the impact of social

As people, we often presume that the actions displayed by a person are piloted through their individual thoughts and opinions, however, the cognitive dissonance theory (CDT) shows that this is not always the case. Labeled by some as an action-opinion theory, the theory of cognitive dissonance explains how people are compelled to commit actions contrary to their beliefs. The basic principle behind action-opinion theories is that these

People have the tendency to only see what they want to see sometimes, but why? Seeing or hearing something that does not match up with one’s views or morals can lead to cognitive dissonance. According to Thibodeau and Aronson (1992) this is particularly true if a person hears something that can lead to them themselves being personally responsible for a negative event. The thought of causing something they know to be negative doesn’t coincide with their need to be good and right. People typically like to believe that their views and they themselves are right, and any objection to either of these things can be interpreted by the person as they themselves being bad.

action at any given point? These are all questions that I will attempt to answer

In psychology, we are learning about the human mind and how we respond to situations, as well as other people in our environment. One concept psychologists are still trying to understand is why do we feel the need to justify actions, thoughts, or ideas that we have that are different from others’? Why are we afraid of failure and not very accepting of being wrong? The class was previously assigned to read an article of two psychologists’ views on these issues and try to explain what strives these behaviors.

In the ________ dissonance research paradigm, participants typically do something that they ordinarily would avoid (e.g., say something that is not true, write a counter intuitive essay) and are provided a good or poor reason for having done so.