An Experimental Overview of Cognitive Dissonance

Leon Festinger, a prominent social psychologist first coined his theory of Cognitive Dissonance in 1957 in his book A Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger, 1957). He suggested that all humans have an inner drive to keep our attitudes and behaviors in harmony and avoid cognitive dissonance when these behaviors are disharmonious. This is a very common mental state that can arise subconsciously in all human beings. An example of this internal moral conflict that has been covered multiple times is the meat paradox. The meat paradox is the apparent disconnection between not wanting animals to suffer yet killing them for food. Because of this strong cognitive dissonance humans tend to rationalize their behaviors and inconsistencies within their attitudes by creating excuses (Dowsett et al., 2018).

A Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance

Festinger believed that cognitive dissonance is an antecedent condition to the ultimate dissonance reduction activity (such as rationalization). It acts in the same way as hunger pushes our innate drive to reduce hunger activity. This comparison makes this concept rooted into our innate biological, psychological and ecological systems. In his book Festinger goes on to explore what leads to cognitive dissonance and the means that people use to reduce their “dissonance drive”. This has important implications for concepts within social and motivational psychology. This theory can be applied to the economic problems of partial reward, delay of reward and effort expenditure. Cognitive dissonance accounts for unexplained data within other theories because it integrates empirical phenomena. Festinger was undoubtedly influenced by psychoanalysis as he believed that the most influential elements that motivated people’s lives were dynamic. People are propelled by motivation, drives and forces in our environment that may be in conflict with forces within their own personalities. These drives are tangible, they are not a preference or impartial, they are a necessity to our psyche.

The Experiment

In 1959 along with Carlsmith, Festinger and his colleagues devised an experiment to prove cognitive dissonance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). This changed multiple assumptions that psychologists had on the nature of decision making. The experiment started with participants having to carry out a very boring and dull task such as turning pegs at fixed intervals. The group was then separated in three groups and two of the groups of participants were asked to talk to another subject (a confederate) to convince that the task was actually really interesting and engaging. Because they had just completed a very boring task, the act of talking positively about it created cognitive dissonance within the individuals. Of these two groups one was paid twenty dollars and the other group was paid one dollar, the third group was not asked to talk to the confederate. The surprising finding of this study was during the debriefing interview. When subjects were asked to rate how negatively they felt about the task at hand, the ones who were paid less money rated the task more positively than the ones who were paid twenty dollars or were in the control group. This shows that the participants who were paid one dollar had to alleviate the cognitive dissonance internally, because they could not use the external excuse that they were paid money to explain the task in a positive light. These participants had much less comfort from their small incentive and were placed in a greater anxious state. The need to reduce dissonance led people to change their attitudes in the direction of their public statements. The participants who were paid twenty dollars had external justifications for their behavior and therefore did not have to internalize their cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going (Cooper, 2019)

A new metanalysis proposed by Cooper brings us a lot of insight into the new theories surrounding cognitive dissonance. The author identifies three important features of cognitive dissonance: (a) it is experienced as a discomfort, (b) it propels people to take actions and (c) people feel more comfortable after the action has been taken. These are undoubtedly paradigms that define cognitive dissonance. Cooper also talks about a “dissonance roadway”. This road to dissonance begins with the realization that we have brought a consequence into our perception that is aversive (a behavior that is unwanted). This is followed by a crucial node where our actions result in unwanted consequences, so we look for responsibility for these negative outcomes. If we are able to put the blame on something external to our selves, for example the 20$ in the Festingers experiment, then we do not experience cognitive dissonance. If the responsibility is within ourselves we then fall pray to cognitive dissonance. This undeniably shows that dissonance only arises with the perfect mixture of aversive consequences and internal responsibility. If responsibility is ambiguous we are usually motivated to see our actions as responsible of others. If we are able to avoid responsibility we may be very well able to avoid cognitive dissonance in total.

Examples of cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance may not always be negative. It has been found that in certain individuals it may be a precursor to creativity, which may be the product or the result of the human cognition being stimulated (Runco, 2011). In depressed individuals cognitive dissonance arises very often and may lead to very grave consequences (Stadler, 2014). It has been found that in religious people existentially threatening stimuli increase religious cognitive dissonance more than in less intrinsically religious individuals (Forstmann & Sagioglu, 2020). It is unquestionable that in our era the advent of climate change and global warming has increased cognitive dissonance in the majority of individuals: not everyone can live a lifestyle that is in line with our beliefs to reduce climate change (Wagner, 2018). Cognitive dissonance has been found to be more present in people who use social media and social networks, victims of domestic violence, people who read online reviews and people who support torture (Jeong, Zo, Lee & Ceran, 2019; Nicholson, 2017; Liang 2016; Houck, 2016). Interestingly brain imaging studies may have found that cognitive dissonance is more present in younger people: they found an interaction effect associated with cognitive conflict in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in young participants but that was missing in elderly participants (Ito et al., 2019).

There are many ways that I have identified through the previous literature review to reduce cognitive dissonance. One of the best ways is to rationally change your own attitudes and behaviors in a healthy way to match our internal beliefs. Another way is to study and research new habits and information that outweigh the dissonance without falling pray to confirmation bias. Therapy may also be helpful if the dissonance is so strong that it impairs our every day life, this is unfortunately a reality for people suffering from OCD and PTSD who have to deal with irrational fears that do not match their outer environments.

Implications

As mentioned, the study of cognitive dissonance has implications for many who are suffering from mental health. People who suffer from eating disorders, depression, substance abuse or even diabetes face internal dysregulation. If a diabetic is told to stop eating sugars, but they crave sugars they will immediately be thrown into a state of cognitive dissonance as they are the immediate person responsible for what food they decide to eat (Pansu et al., 2019). It is also important for students to explain the effort justification pursuing education, as immediate results of their hard labor are not immediately rewarded (Lepper & Greene, 1975).

A study title Beyond Reference Pricing: Understanding Consumer’s Encounters with Unexpected Prices identifies the importance of cognitive dissonance in consumer behavior (Lindsey- Mullkin, 2003). They identify three specific behaviors to reduce cognitive dissonance when people are faced with unexpected prices: (a) they use a strategy of continual information: they engage in bias and search for information to support their prior beliefs (such as looking at other retailers or substitute goods), (b) they exert a change in attitude: they might re-evaluate a price by comparing it to external reference-prices or associate pricing to quality and (c) they engage in minimization: by reducing the importance of elements that cause dissonance such as the importance of money, saving, shopping or finding a more efficient deal.

Computer scientists have hypothesized that introducing cognitive dissonance into machine learning may produce a “creative autonomy” of machines ultimately creating a piece of what will become artificial consciousness also known as the synthetic conscious (Jennings, 2010).

Conclusion

There are many ways that I have identified through the previous literature review to reduce cognitive dissonance. One of the best ways is to rationally change your own attitudes and behaviors in a healthy way to match our internal beliefs. Another way is to study and research new habits and information that outweigh the dissonance without falling pray to confirmation bias. Therapy may also be helpful if the dissonance is so strong that it impairs our every day life, this is unfortunately a reality for people suffering from OCD and PTSD who have to deal with irrational fears that do not match their outer environments.

The theory of cognitive dissonance has become widely recognized and used for its influential notions of decision making. Since cognitive dissonance produces stress it has great implications for finding new ways to alleviate stress in a healthy and rational manner.

Works Cited

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Cooper, J. (2019). Cognitive dissonance: Where we’ve been and where we’re going. International Review of

Social Psychology, 32(1). https://doi-org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.5334/irsp.277

Stadler, Anderson. (2014). Are Depressed Individuals More Susceptible to Cognitive

Dissonance? Retrieved from https://uiowa.edu/crisp/sites/uiowa.edu.crisp/files/art8.20.14_3.pdf

Forstmann, M., & Sagioglou, C. (2020). Religious concept activation attenuates cognitive dissonance reduction in free- choice and induced compliance paradigms. The Journal of Social Psychology, 160(1), 75–91. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1080/00224545.2019.1609400

Jeong, M., Zo, H., Lee, C. H., & Ceran, Y. (2019). Feeling displeasure from online social media postings: A study using cognitive dissonance theory. Computers in Human Behavior, 97, 231–240. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.chb.2019.02.021

Dowsett, E., Semmler, C., Bray, H., Ankeny, R. A., & Chur-Hansen, A. (2018). Neutralising the meat paradox: Cognitive dissonance, gender, and eating animals. Appetite, 123, 280–288. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.appet.2018.01.005

Wagner DA. The marketing of global warming: A repeated measures examination of the effects of cognitive dissonance, endorsement, and information on beliefs in a social cause. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences. 2018;78(10-A(E)). http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=psyh&AN=2017-33535- 020&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed April 20, 2020.

Nicholson, S. B., & Lutz, D. J. (2017). The importance of cognitive dissonance in understanding and treating victims of intimate partner violence. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 26(5), 475–492. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1080/10926771.2017.1314989

Liang, Y. (Jake). (2016). Reading to make a decision or to reduce cognitive dissonance? The effect of selecting and reading online reviews from a post-decision context. Computers in Human Behavior, 64, 463–471. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.chb.2016.07.016

Pansu, P., Fointiat, V., Lima, L., Blatier, C., Flore, P., & Vuillerme, N. (2019). Changing behaviors: Using norms to promote physical activity for type 2 diabetes patients. European Review of Applied Psychology / European Review of Applied Psychology , 69 (2), 59–64. https://doi-org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.erap.2019.03.001

Ito, A., Kawachi, Y., Kawasaki, I., & Fujii, T. (2019). Effect of aging on choice-induced cognitive conflict. Behavioural Brain Research, 363, 94–102. https://doi-org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.bbr.2019.01.053

Houck, S. C. (2016). The cognitive dissonance theory of torture perceptions [ProQuest Information & Learning]. In Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering (Vol. 77, Issue 3–B(E)).

Lindsey-Mullikin, J. (2003). Beyond reference price: understanding consumers’ encounters with unexpected prices.

Jennings, K. E. (2010). Developing creativity: Artificial barriers in artificial intelligence. Minds and Machines: Journal for Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy and Cognitive Science, 20(4), 489–501. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1007/s11023-010-9206-y

Lepper, M. R., & Greene, D. (1975). Turning play into work: Effects of adult surveillance and extrinsic rewards on children’s intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31(3), 479–486. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1037/h0076484 

Sofia Wolfson
Emory University
University of Miami

 

The Century of the Individual

The advent of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 is a clear example of the paradigmatic shift occurring in this century. As people stop going to work and become confined to their homes the groups and communities they are a part of start shattering. We are no longer tied to our environments the way we used to be. I am writing from the commodity of my home like many others on this day. But this is not the first time we see this transference from our environments. Students no longer flock to libraries for information, they commonly open databases online. We don’t have to pick up a landline and turn the dial ten times to call our family, we simply have to ask Siri to place the call for us. We do not have to go to multiple stores to look for a special screwdriver, we simply order it online and receive it a couple days later in a insipid box. People of the 21st century have given up the actions that join us together for efficiency and self-service. People feel connected to others more stronger than ever, this is seen with the increasing political polarization of the American Public, where fewer American than ever before belong to the overlap between democrats and republicans but feel more connected to their parties (Dimock, Doherty, Kiley & Oates, 2014). This formation of parasocial bonds with people online, increases the connection to our beliefs whether we agree or disagree with the person in contact (Paravati, Naidu, Gabriel & Wiedemann, 2019). There is conflicting literature on the wellness of people when using social media, while it is a good form of mood regulation when people do not wish to be alone, prolonged use may lead to low identity development and loneliness (Thomas et al., 2020). We are entering a new state of a false collective, where we are present in groups without being physically there, connected to other individuals like us from miles away.

The Age of Individuality on The Internet

When a teenager is allowed to venture on the internet in their critical years of identity development (Erikson, 1964), they form new identities with groups online that they would not necessarily be a part of had the internet not existed. This new kind of identity formation in this virtual environment may very well lead to different consequences. For one, when someone is a part of a group that exists online and they set out for their outside physical environment, they are going to be incongruous with it. When their identity is shaped from the virtual group rather than their physical group they are slowly eroding their connection to the physical world. A good example for this is by looking at students who walked the halls of universities one hundred years ago: students were homogenous they wore muted colors, long trousers and skirts. Now a days, students may be wearing everything from business casual attire to casual sporting clothes with fluorescent colors. We are moving into an era of individualism, people are part of smaller groups whether virtual or tangible. This is seen in the academia, people striving to concentrate in the most detailed and Delphic fields possible. This paradigmatic shift from the collective into a false (virtual) collective produces the individual who is able to find its own niche wherever they are. While before we were congruent with the collective, now we are more and more becoming our own individuals among the collective and the static.

The Outrage Machine

Each moral word used in a tweet increases it’s virality by 20 percent (Brady, 2019). Kahneman believes that the affect heuristic, judging the correctness of a claim based on our emotional reactions to it, is the most important heuristic in every-day life. When people are exposed to constant appeals to emotions on the internet they are unconsciously being polarized by their beliefs. When social network algorithms push for emotionally packed claims people are unknowingly falling prey to a cascade, a chain reaction of beliefs being confirmed and reconfirmed until there is nothing that can disprove them. Algorithms want people to see what they are concordant with so they will stay on their website. The more people stay on their website the closer they get to their new “identity” and the further away from people who are incongruent with their selves. Does this mean we will be happier as the only information presented to us does not challenger our beliefs? Not necessarily. There is a dark future ahead. Nikolas Badminton, a world- renowned futurist found at a statistically significant level that 33% of those who spend more than 4 hours online per day had been treated for depression, another 33% had been treated for anxiety and another 31% were self-identified narcissists. This algorithmically-guided behavior has produced a hunger for acceptance from online users creating an alarming turning point for society. Does this mean that we will all become micro-narcissists trying to prove others that we are better, all whilst cultivating unhealthy amounts of anxiety and depression while we fail to do so? With all bad behaviors, counter-behaviors arise to protect the individual. However, when it is no longer in our power to determine what we want to see but up to a profit maximizing algorithm, we may fail to beat the machine.

It is also important to note the rise of memes in popular online culture. Memes are units of cultural transmissions where a truth value is not required. They are spread by emotional selection through emotions like happiness or disgust. They can be anything from a picture of a cat with a funny text on top of it to a behavior that is imitated from person to person within a culture. Memes create a bridge between the individual and the collective, where we as individuals decide to react the same way as everyone else to one of these units of cultural transmission.

The Era of Info Overload

Another alarming aspect of social media is the mass proliferation of information evolving beyond our control. There is the creation of “attentional bottlenecks” which limit our choices based on fear, peer pressure and global groupthink according to Dr. Hills of the University of Warwick (Hills, 2018). He identifies four biases of “cognitive selection” affecting our beliefs online. The first is negative bias, where we overshare negative information even if it is not accurate. This is similar to the media paradox, where media focuses on rare events, making us afraid of things that are the least risky and least afraid of things that are most risky (Ruscio, 2000). The second is belief- consistent bias (similar to confirmation bias), to cope with the gargantuan amounts of information we favor what is consistent with our beliefs, which leads to groupthink. Groupthink can be very harmful as people tend to ignore any and all new information that is incongruent with their beliefs, even if it is beneficial or life-saving. This has huge implications on a global scale as terrorist groups can emerge from online vacuums as well as far reaching political ideologies. The third bias is social bias, where we sacrifice any other kinds of information for “social information”. This may lead to groups finding the fastest solution to problems rather than the best one because of the ease it gets to us with social media. Finally, predictive bias, increases the speed with which our System I processing works. We are biologically engrained to look for patterns, when we are exposed to increasing amounts of information, we find more and more patterns even if they are incorrect. This has implications for academics, as we see now with the replication crisis, where many patterns have been proved to be false after years of believing they were true.

In this new era of information overload we are forced to decided what we think is real and what can heal us. This has consequences for therapy as we have to pick among so many different theories and practices which can be overwhelming, but the future means collectivizing and acknowledging individual differences. It is a tricky balance but it has to happen on the individual level as we are the ones making these decisions.

Global Warming

The best solutions for global warming should be found within the individual rather than the collective. Top down approaches do not seem to work as much as an innate shift of our own personal consciousness. This is why the importance of valuing the individual in a healthy manner may be the only way to find a solution. A model created to discern individuals attitudes towards global warming found that people who experienced first-hand fluctuations in weather (such as warmer summers and colder spring time) were more likely to perceive the existence of global warming (Shao, Garand, Keim & Hamilton, 2016). This is important to note because it shows how the change has to come from the individual’s experience rather than the collective telling them that this threat exists. Another study has found that mindfulness through Buddhist meditation increases the belief in global climate change and pro-environmental outcomes (Panno, 2018). The consequences of mindfulness are many, from increased compassion to better mental functioning. A lesson can be taken from these findings, even though the person is part of a collective practicing these skills, the change and actions come from the individual within the collective. The teachings on how to combat global warming should come from the group and personally devised from the individual. However, as we enter an era of more and more smaller groups, further apart from each other, who is going to show the people what is right and what is wrong?

There have been many distinctions found across cultures which may show the different processes that affect our externalities towards our environment. For example, Ngöbe communities from Panama attribute agency to an ecocentric protoype (focusing on nature and the earth as a whole) whereas American college students ascribe agency to complex artifacts (belongings for example) (Ojalehto, Medin & Garcìa, 2017). If everyone believed in animism following the ecocentric prototype we would probably never litter again. This difference in frameworks may be the answer to fix this negligence towards our environment. By changing the frameworks of what we believe by using methods beyond western practices we may be able to reduce the probability of societies collapsing due to climate change.

Individuality Through Technologies

The industrial revolution (4.0) that came with the internet has ended. We are entering a new era where technology is intermixed with the individual. No longer are things mass produced for everyone, each and every individual can pick and choose the color or the model they want. Another key example if individuality within technologies are brain-machine interfaces, where computers are connected directly to neurons in the brain. This is what Elon Musk is attempting to do with his company ‘Neuralink’. Brain-machine interfaces are expected to help people with neurological disorders by restoring sensory and motor function through small flexible electrode threads that can be neurosurgically inserted into specific brain regions (Musk, 2019). While this is the goal for now, in the near future, my guess is 2040, these interfaces will become more available to the general public and will then be used for multiple other reasons. Not only will we be able to send inputs into the brain to restore motor functioning, outputs will be given back to the machine. This means that we will be able to change our environment without taking any physical actions. For example, when we flip a switch there are feedback loops going to and from our motor neurons and back to our central nervous system. When you remove this whole loop and allow for actions to only happen from our CNS, engaging only sensory neurons (such as our optical nerve) and excluding motor neurons (the ones in our hand to flip the switch) a multitude of biological changes may happen over time. We may become dependent solely on our brains to do work. Writing and calculators will become unnecessary. Search engines will be engrained in our brains, not only will students not need to go to the library or open their computer to do research, all they will have to do is imagine and select what they need without even opening their eyes. Patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases will also be able to walk again the moment we teach our neurons to fix themselves or even be transplanted. When we allow artificial intelligence to learn the mechanisms of our brain we will be able to personalize our own algorithms and to create solutions using the power of computers that we now have at Google.

Nanotechnology is key in modifying our brains. But what about our bodies? As technologies become available to societies, people will take them into their own hands and adapt them for themselves. What we are already seeing nowadays with people inserting microchips into their hands for easier identification, soon will become transplanting whole organs and body parts to better serve our lives. Artists for example, may decide to exchange one of their hands for a robotic prosthesis to allow for easy use of different media. As technologies trickle down and become affordable, we will quickly see a transformation of these technologies to conform to peoples personal needs. Whether for the best or the worst we are entering the cyborg age, where machines and humans become one.

The Conscious “Individual”

The entrance of machine learning into psychology will definitely bring about a greater understanding of the brain and ultimately consciousness. Consciousness is what defines the individual as it is the main difference that determines the reality of our existence. It is of very great probability than we will unlock the secrets of consciousness using AI in the next century. Computer scientists are scrambling to create machine consciousness, also known as synthetic consciousness. Along with them philosophers debate if it can actually be implemented and how. Theoretical neurobiologist Bernard Baars (Baars, 1998) suggests that there are specific main functions that the machine conscious has to achieve, such as: definition & context setting, adaptation & learning, editing, prioritizing & access control, decision-making, executive function, analogy-forming function, metacognitive and self-monitoring function, auto programming and self-maintenance. Now, if this is ever achieved we will have arguably created a new sentient being. This will revolutionize our world and will probably be the beginning of the next paradigmatic shift after the one of individualization I believe we are in now. I would like to speculate that the next paradigm will follow a very big exploration about the truth of our reality, not only that of the individual but also of the collective. If humans will be able to create a prototype of consciousness without unlocking the mysteries of our own, there will be a huge crisis. To create consciousness without understanding how we ourselves are conscious, creates cognitive dissonance at the societal level. Many questions will be raised, and lots of actions will have to be taken. If different types of consciousness exist, then do they differ between animals, plants, objects, machines and societies? Neuroscientists currently believe that consciousness is generated through the neural correlates of consciousness which are neural changes that correlate with someone’s specific experience. That is very similar to memes as they are also correlates that explain a culture’s specific experience. Therefore the understanding of the collective conscious may also be unveiled as machine and human consciousness unfold.

There will always be cynics who reject science, but such a drastic change may create an even larger polarization, where more and more people will reject any and all science. There will be groups that reject machines and medicine, others who only reject machines and others that reject neither. I am worried for the first group, who will sacrifice all science because of the ever more new, controversial and cutting edge technologies

Individualized Therapy

As we enter the middle of the century more and more longitudinal studies will be released about the long term effects of anti-depressants and ADHD medicine used on children. New studies have shown that certain medications permanently alter peoples brains (Wang et al., 2013). As parents scramble to find new ways to treat their children without harmful medicine they will turn to treatments that are beyond western biomedicine such as integrational healing and psychedelics. This change is already happening with mindfulness being implemented in CBT therapy. As these techniques become more prominent we will see an even greater shift into patient-centered healthcare or individualized approaches that value the individual. This can be done by producing drugs that are adjusted to fit someone’s genetic code so that there is the least possible amount of gene drug interactions. This is already done today with Genesight, as it provides a psychotropic test to see if drugs have meaningful interactions with DNA that may harm a patient (Genesight, 2020). As big pharmaceutical companies try and maximize their profits, and interests move from patients to money they will resist this patient-centered care. This is because they are trying to fit the model that one drug fits all, as a panacea for a mental illness lowers research and production costs. Health should not function this way. Doctors through-out history were known to treat patients at home, entering their environments and knowing their families at heart. If we can retool medicine to approach a patients problem with a solution unique to them then that will revolutionize medicine totally beyond what it currently is.

We are moving into a more individualistic era, where individuals are accepted to be part of our communities even if they are not part of our small groups. Our individual differences are prized and we are more than ever accepting the abnormal to be normal, whether it is in psychology or fashion. Our individuality is exponentially growing, I do not know until this phenomenon will last, but hopefully it will not end with the sanguineous revolutions that we have seen, because humans will not be alone anymore.

Works Cited

Dimock, M., Doherty, C., Kiley, J., & Oates, R. (June 12th, 2014). Political Polarization in the American Public. Pew Research Center: Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping the World. doi:202.419.4372

Paravati, E., Naidu, E., Gabriel, S., & Wiedemann, C. (2019). More than just a tweet: The unconscious impact of forming parasocial relationships through social media. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice. https://doiorg.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1037/cns0000214

Thomas, V., Balzer Carr, B., Azmitia, M., & Whittaker, S. (2020). Alone and online: Understanding the relationships between social media, solitude, and psychological adjustment. Psychology of Popular Media. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1037/ppm0000287

Erikson, E. H. (1964). Childhood and society, 2nd ed. Chapter 7, W. W. Norton. Brady, W. J. (2019). A model of moral contagion in online social networks [ProQuest

Information & Learning]. In Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering (Vol. 80, Issue 3–B(E))

Badminton, N. (2020, April 02). Future of Life in America - Digital Obesity and Mental Health. Retrieved May 04, 2020, from https://nikolasbadminton.com/future-of-life-in-america- digiital-obesity-mental-health/

University of Warwick, Psychology. (2018, December 6). Mass proliferation of information evolving beyond our control, says new psychology research [Press release]. Retrieved May 4, 2020, from https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/mass_proliferation_of/

Ruscio, J. (2000). Risky business: Vividness, availability, and the media paradox. Skeptical Inquirer, 24(2), 22-26. [Reprinted in Nisbet, L. (Ed.) (2001). The gun control debate: You
decide (pp. 167-174). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.]

Shao, W., Garand, J. C., Keim, B. D., & Hamilton, L. C. (2016). Science, scientists, and local weather: Understanding mass perceptions of global warming. Social Science Quarterly, 97(5), 1023–1057. https://doi-org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1111/ssqu.12317

Panno, A., Giacomantonio, M., Carrus, G., Maricchiolo, F., Pirchio, S., & Mannetti, L. (2018). Mindfulness, pro-environmental behavior, and belief in climate change: The mediating role of social dominance. Environment and Behavior, 50(8), 864–888. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1177/0013916517718887

Ojalehto, Bethany l., Medin, D. L., & García, S. G. (2017). Grounding principles for inferring agency: Two cultural perspectives. Cognitive Psychology, 95, 50–78. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.04.001

Musk, E. (2019). An integrated brain-machine interface platform with thousands of channels. BioRxiv The Preprint Server for Biology. doi:10.1101/703801

Baars, Bernard (1988), A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-30133-6

Wang, G., Volkow, N. D., Wigal, T., Kollins, S. H., Newcorn, J. H., Telang, F., . . . Swanson, J. M. (2013). Long-Term Stimulant Treatment Affects Brain Dopamine Transporter Level in Patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. PLoS ONE, 8(5). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063023

Genetic Testing: Personalized Treatments. (n.d.). Retrieved May 05, 2020, from https://genesight.com/endtrialanderror/?creative=352940689885

Sofia Wolfson
Emory University
University of Miami