Animal Sentience: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling
Citation
Zentall, Thomas (2017) Cognitive dissonance or contrast? It could be both. Animal Sentience 12(6)
Thread
Thomas R. Zentall, Cognitive dissonance or contrast?
Abstract
My target article suggested that cognitive dissonance may be accounted for by a simpler mechanism: contrast. Whether contrast can explain all cognitive dissonance effects is an empirical question, but it is always useful to try to distinguish simpler mechanisms from more complex cognitive ones. The insistence that cognitive dissonance is a human-only process quite different from contrast may be a self-serving means of justifying the exploitation of animals.