認知的 不均衡이 記憶에 미치는 影響에 對한 硏究

Abstract

In 1957, Leon Festinger presented "The Thecry of Cognitive Dissonance" which arates that a person has a tendency to have cognitive consonance or balance within his cognitive elements. Here, what Festinger calls cognitive elements represents a person's perception, knowledge, belief, about himself and his environment and also a person's opinion and attitude toward himself and his environment. In this theory Festinger treated cognitive dissonance as a motivating state to reduce dissonance. He stated that when a person is in cognitive dissonance, he will use a variety of mechanisms to achieve cognitive consonance and to avoid dissonance between his cognitive elements. The present study attempted to examine the effects of cognitive dissonance on a person's memory. The hypothesis of this study is as follows : "When a person learns dissonance increasing materials together with cissonance reducing materials, he will learn(or recall) the latter type of learning materials more easily than the former type of learning materials." In this study the subjects were divided into two groups. One is experimental group which was composed of 87 smokers(college students) and the other is control group composed of 29 non-smokers. Two kinds of learning materials, made of statements that say either bad or good comments on the smoking behavior were prepared. The 14 statements(7 consonant statements, 7 dissonant statements to the smoker) were presented orally to the subjects by means of tape recorder and the subjects were asked to recall withing 4 minutes what they heard. By analyzing the results, we found out that there was a significant difference between the recalled number of dissonent and consonant statements in experimental group while there was no such difference in control group. Thus, this experiment confirmed the hypothesis and also the Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory when adopted to memory situation were accepted.