Premium
A Goal‐Priming Approach to Cognitive Consistency: Applications to Judgment
Author(s) -
Chaxel AnneSophie,
Russo J. Edward,
Wiggins Catherine
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of behavioral decision making
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.136
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1099-0771
pISSN - 0894-3257
DOI - 10.1002/bdm.1874
Subject(s) - consistency (knowledge bases) , priming (agriculture) , psychology , cognition , cognitive psychology , preference , wishful thinking , task (project management) , process (computing) , social psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , statistics , mathematics , germination , management , neuroscience , economics , biology , operating system , botany
A fundamental criterion of judgment is consistency among beliefs. To augment traditional methods for studying cognitive consistency, we treat it as a goal and present a priming method for increasing its activation. Three studies use three criteria to validate the method: an increase in the biased evaluation of incoming information, speed in a lexical decision task, and participants' direct reports of greater goal activation. The method is then used to verify the role of the consistency goal in three diverse judgment phenomena. Priming cognitive consistency increases the search for postdecisional supporting information (selective exposure to information), the agreement between preference and prediction (the desirability bias or wishful thinking), and the adjustment of a socially unacceptable implicit attitude to conform to the corresponding explicit attitude. One conclusion is that the cause of these phenomena is not only motivated reasoning (driven directionally by a desired outcome) but also the purely cognitive and nondirectional process of simply making beliefs more consistent. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.