Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Racism

Since the field of loving psychology first began its investigating into the phenomenon of racism and prejudice, a issue forth of significant theories have been constructed in an attempt to in effect consider prejudice and provide supposititious insight into the various shipway in which we as a society, man-to-mans, and psychologists be to help diversity this sizable global issue. such social psychological theories admit: Authoritarian Personality Theory, The licking Aggression Hypothesis, Realist Conflict theory, societal Identity Theory, Social scholarship theory, Social Cognition and cognitive interference theory. Each of these theories has provided supposed insight into various unsounded factors that are relevant to the formulation, maintenance, and grimace of prejudice. However, of all the social psychological theories that have attempted to effectively conceptualize prejudice and in so doing develop shipway of reducing its grossly pestilential effects on the individual and society, Festingers (1957) theory of Cognitive Dissonance seems angiotensin-converting enzyme of the close relevant to the clinical applications of working with racial individuals, primarily because the theory provides clinicians with both significant conceptual and practical(a) insight into dickens of the primary election psychological elements that are most relevant to the process of service clients change their racist or prejudicial viewpoints in treatment, viz. the relational process that exists betwixt an individuals cognitions and the behavioral consequences that stick to as a result. \nThe theory of cognitive dissonance, according to Festinger (1957), postulates that pairs of cognitions can be either related or unrelated to mavin another. If two cognitions are related to one another, they are considered then to be either concurring(a) or dissonant. For two cognitions to be consonant one must follow directly from the other; they are considered disson ant if the inverse of one cognition follows from the other....