Eric Mandelbaum

May have missed a call from Doug Zongker

there was some discussion on here recently about the scientific legitimacy of cognitive dissonance research. as someone who has spent years investigating this literature, i wanted to make a thread to explain why pessimism is not justified by careful inspection of the evidence

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Well yes I would not call having associations anything like prejudice either…but the main issue there imo is with the idea that associations were doing much at all in the first place

Not valid in what way? (I don't think there's any single way of measuring prejudice--I'm not even sure what it would mean). I would've thought IA measures are just other ways of tapping into attitudes (which can correlate with each other more or less closely)

Wait, implicit attitude measures? They exist. What are you now critical of? The idea that IAs are the root cause of all prejudice?

eg attribution theory, placebo effects, the ncc's of inconsistency, vicarious dissonance... Just bc a counterattitudinal essay task didn't clearly show freedom of choice! (But maybe Bem's self-perception theory is still cool?) That said, I still haven't had a chance to read the paper! I will asap

Man if this is enough for you to add cognitive dissonance to the list, I wonder if you also feel the same way about self-affirmation theory, the spreading of alternatives, balance theory, effort justification, selective exposure, and loads of work on consistency, nvm its explicit use elsewhere...

the next step of figuring out the individual and cultural differences in this, and separating these judgments from aversion to ambiguity, need for closure, cultural differences in deferences to authority...

It tries to both validate the scale and take shots at consistency and from 30,000 feet it looks good and then you look closer and start wondering things like wait wtf does the foot in the door paradigm have to do with consistency? And then start wondering if this scale is good, why isn't there...

people what did they have to change their view of the mind on bc of the replication crisis (I'm real fun). I think it's surprising how few things actually come up. Maybe CEOs were powerposing themselves into oblivion, but even if you believed in PPs, what followed from it (outside hilarity)?

It also has many decades of good findings. Even after all the malarkey, what findings did you really believe in that you've lost belief in because of the replication crisis? For myself, almost everything that was bad science was not something I was surprised had to go. At parties I often ask...

Just retaught the Cialdini 95 last week and...I was surprised by it. In my memory it was much more of a challenge for inconsistency than it was upon re-reading.

The counterattitudinal essay paradigm is just one very small part of the theory. Social psychology has had decades of introducing new theories (or new names for old theories) the mechanics of which presuppose the consistency theorizing in dissonance. That is where the theory's strength derives from

(Also the amount of effects explicable by dissonance generally far outweighs the paradigm looked at here, which is why I think the dialectic is a bit strange on this discussion in general, though I have enjoyed this back and forth )

I think this is a deep and interesting question. Can you say more about individual differences for consistency? Is it the Cialdini PFC scale you have in mind or geography of culture findings or something else?

(Or whether monkey’s have an LoT and also avoid inconsistency…). But also since you’re wondering about the classic effects it makes me wonder if you are also skeptical of the spreading of alternatives variations?

the same idea is ofc extended elsewhere (the idea being we want to be consistent, and have justification of our behaviors). So...maybe chill?

it *replicated the counterattitudinal effect!*. It just didn't replicate the forced/free choice moderator. That is interesting! Why and when feeling free affects choice matters but nonetheless the central posit--inconsistency driving attitude change (Festinger's not Cooper's) was replicated. And..

Church of the True World (Hardyck & Braden 1962), Ichigen No Miya (Takaaki 1972), BUPC (Balch 1997), Millerites (Melton 1985), Universal Link (Melton 1985), Rouxists (Van Fossen 1985). And as for the failed replication...

I have no doubt that there is much shadiness in WPF. I mean, the whole set up is bonkers. But it does seem to hold outside of it (eg) Jehova’s Witness (Zygmunt 1970), Institute for Applied Metaphysics (ibid) Lubavich Hasidim (Dein 1997) Unarians, (Tumminia 1998) Chen Tao (Wright 1998),...

WPF is more of a story than science, but when you look at other (more well studied) cases, the same idea holds (e.g., the articles on what happens to the Lubavitch post Schneerson's death [for the London community and the work of Simon Dein])

This is all p misleading IMO. I just saw this link so haven't read it yet (but will, though I also think lots of the retweets of this haven't read it as well, given its provenance). I don't see how this counters (eg) Dawson 1999 which goes through 13 millennial cults and finds 12 show the effect 1/n

Number of homeless students in NYC hits record high, new report finds Nearly 1 in 7 NYC public school students were homeless at some point last year.

Greatest city in the world breaking new records! gothamist.com/news/number-...

Such cool work!

Fantastic researcher, open-minded thinker, dedicated mentor, and one of the absolute nicest people in the field.

So good that it's 'Supernormal' which is the normalist. Nothing more normal than drawing upon a publicly available data set of 793 sex dolls

just more evidence why that doctrine has gotta go

Jake gives me a normal running total and it’s always going like 0 for 15. I was due