Did you know that each year college students spend approximately $5.5 billion on alcohol? This is more than they spend on soft drinks, milk, juice, tea, coffee and books combined. (Drug Strategies, 1999).
Why do college students spend so much money to get drunk at the end of a.
hard week of studying? Is it because there's nothing else to do or is it because drinking relieves problems that the person is trying to avoid?.
In my experiment, I hope to find if drinking actually has an effect on cognitive dissonance and if there's a correlation between how much a person drinks and their dissonance level.
According to cognitive dissonance theory, there is a tendency for individuals to seek a balance between their beliefs, opinions and actions. When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance. In the case of a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior, it is most likely that the attitude will change to accommodate the behavior. If alcohol is added into this equation, will the people that consume it have the same dissonance that.
they would have had if they had not drunk in the first place?.
To determine this I read different periodical articles that dealt with alcoholism and the many different effects drinking alcohol has on behavior. The purpose for each experiment differed, but they all dealt with alcohol and the effects of it on behavior.
Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory is very closely related to many of.
The consistency theories. The first of the major consistency theories, the Balance theory, was proposed by Fritz Heider (1946, 1958) and was later revised by Theodore Newcomb (1953) and Charles Larson (1995). Heider and Newcomb's theories were mostly looking at the interaction between two people (interpersonal) and the conflicts that arose between them. When two people have conflicting opinions or tension is felt between people, it is more likely persuasion will occur.