Belief, Affect, and Cognitive Dissonance During Repeated Information Exposure: Testing the Sequential Information Integration Model

Abstract

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most frequently cited theories in social psychology (Cooper, 2007) and has been studied in many communication contexts. Although there are many situations in which people need to repeatedly reduce dissonance concerning the same focal belief or behavior, the vast majority of dissonance studies have focused on single instances of dissonance (McGrath, 2017). This dissertation addresses the question of how beliefs and affect change in response to sequentially induced cognitive dissonance. Belief change is frequently studied as a mode of dissonance reduction (Vaidis & Bran, 2018). Information integration theory states that belief change is a function of the scale value (valence) and weight of each piece of information in a message, and that belief change in response to multiple pieces of information is a weighted sum of the valence of the pieces of information (Anderson, 1971; Anderson & Farkas, 1973). Using the sequential information integration model (SIIM; Chung & Fink, 2016; Chung, Fink, Waks, Meffert, & Xie, 2012), this 2 (statement type: justification vs. vote recall) x 2 (evaluation order: evaluation/affect vs. affect/evaluation) within- and between-subjects online experiment tested the effect of sequential induction of dissonance, via repeated exposure to incongruent information, on evaluations of candidates in a hypothetical congressional election. This study, which included 227 participants based in the U.S., replicated key findings from previous studies on belief trajectories, lending further support to the SIIM and illustrating the strength of decision justification as a mechanism for resisting belief change over time. It also found that people respond to negatively valenced messages, compared to positively valenced messages, with greater psychological discomfort and less positive affect even when both types of messages are counterattitudinal. Finally, this research found that people may continue to experience psychological discomfort until finding an effective way to reduce their dissonance. This dissertation replicates, in part, previous SIIM studies and offers insight into the question of how beliefs and affect change in response to sequentially induced cognitive dissonance.