Year: 2008
Type: book-review
Abstract: The contens of his book consist of nine essays, each an evaluation of the method ological and theoretical issues of cognitive consistency and its relationship to moti vation.The leading chapter is by W. J. McG uire, 'The Current Status of Cognitive Consistency Theories'.The following papers are: E. Sjnger's 'Motivation for Con sistency'; S. F eldman's 'Motivational Aspects of Attitudinal Elements and their Place in Cognitive Interaction'; E. A ronson's 'The Psychology of Insufficient Justi fication: An Analysis of Some Conflicting Date'; M. J. Rosenberg's 'Some Limits of Dissonance: Toward a Differentiated View of Counter-Attitudinal Performance'; R. P. Abelson and D. Kanouse's 'Subjective Acceptance of Verbal Generalizations'; M. F ishbein's 'The Relationship Between Beliefs, Attitudes and Behavior'; K. E. Weick's 'Task Acceptance Dilemmas: A Site for Research on Cognition'; and A. Pepitone's 'Some Conceptual and Empirical Problems of Consistency Models'.These complete the book.As these titles should indicate, this is a book for the social psychologist, and while the papers are all good (I particularly recommend McG uire's and Pepitone's), there is considerable overlap and redundancy.Consistency, dissonance, search for order, disorder and chaos are potentially unifying themes about which one might expect an interdisciplinary approach.Un fortunately, this hoped-for approach is not to be found in this book.Thus while the contributions are all high in quality, they have a provincial flavor that only the social psychologist will readily appreciate.This reader was disappointed to find that in almost all the discussions of cognition, the brain was almost totally ignored except for some reference to the work of Olds and Milner as these relate to moti vation.There is much on cognition, but nothing on the organism in which this all goes on.Even in the final paper, Pepitone discusses whether the motivation for consistency is based on cognitive or social considerations omitting any organismic considerations of either a neural or avolutionary sort.To this extent, whatever the book's quality of papers, it will have only a small appeal.Ralph L. Holloway, Jr., New York F. Unterharnscheidt, D. Jaciinik and H. G ott: Der Bulkenmangcl
Source: Brain Behavior and Evolution
DOI: 10.1159/000125814
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4243577023