Miklos Kurthy, Eugen Fischer, Karina Schumann, James Andow and Jonah Koetke
Affiliation: University of East Anglia, University of East Anglia, University of Pittsburgh, University of Manchester, University of Pittsburgh,
Category: Psychology
Keywords: care for consistency, epistemic virtues, thinking and reasoning
Date: Friday 5th of September
Time: 15:30
Location: GSSR Plenary Hall (268)
View the full session: Causal & Theoretical Reasoning
According to mainstream social psychology, analytic philosophers are not alone in obsessing about having consistent beliefs. At least since Leon Festinger (1957) established the cognitive dissonance paradigm, psychologists have credited people with a general preference for holding beliefs which are consistent with each other. However, the consensus has been questioned by social psychologists arguing against such a general preference independent of epistemic and motivational factors (Kruglanski et al., 2018), as well as cognitive psychologists providing evidence for the persistent co-representation of conflicting beliefs (Barlev et al., 2018). In line with these challenges, we suggest that care for consistency (CFC) is a stable trait that varies between individuals, which we conceptualise as a multidimensional trait that includes tendencies (i) to be sensitive to and consider the consistency of one’s beliefs, (ii) to be concerned about inconsistencies, and (iii) to be motivated to make efforts to modify beliefs in order to overcome belief conflicts. Roughly speaking, to have high CFC means to display these tendencies even with regard to beliefs with low credence and little interest or personal relevance, whereas having low CFC means to display them only for strongly held beliefs of considerable interest and personal relevance. This hypothesised trait is markedly different from familiar concepts like preference for consistency (Cialdini et al., 1995), which concerns the preference for consistency between words and actions and for being perceived as consistent, or need for cognitive closure (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996), which primarily concerns one’s ability to live with ambiguity.
We present two preliminary studies and one main study that seek to provide evidence for the reality of this trait as an individual level variable while controlling for epistemic and motivational factors. The main study has two main stages. In the first stage, participants rate individual statements in terms of strength of (dis)agreement) and personal importance. In the second stage, they are presented with the same statements as part of more-or-less inconsistent statement pairs and are asked to rate the degree to which the statements are inconsistent, their own unease about the inconsistency, and their desire to modify or reconcile their beliefs. We aim to demonstrate that (i) sensitivity to inconsistency, (ii) concern about it, and (iii) motivation to resolve it varies systematically across individuals. We use multiple linear regression models to examine whether the CFC-related outcome variables measured in the second stage can be predicted by the variables pre-measured in the first stage. Our prediction is that the inclusion of an individual-level variable will significantly improve the predictive value of the models, providing evidence for the reality of CFC as a trait. A simultaneously administered self-report measure allows us to assess the accuracy of people’s self-assessment of this trait. The data from the main study is currently awaiting analysis. Results will be presented at the conference.
References Barlev, M., Mermelstein, S. & German, T.C. (2018). Representational coexistence in the God concept: Core knowledge intuitions of God as a person are not revised by Christian theology despite lifelong experience. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25, 2330–2338. Cialdini, R. B., Trost, M. R., & Newsom, J. T. (1995). Preference for consistency: The development of a valid measure and the discovery of surprising behavioral implications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 318–328. Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press. Kruglanski, A. W., & Webster, D.M. (1996). Motivated closing of the mind: “Seizing” and “freezing”. Psychological Review, 103(2), 263–283. Kruglanski, A. W., Jasko, K., Milyavsky, M., Chernikova, M., Webber, D., Pierro, A., & Di Santo, D. (2018). Cognitive consistency theory in social psychology: A paradigm reconsidered. Psychological Inquiry, 29(2), 45–59.