engleski

When incopmetence leads to cognitive coherency

The study was designed to examine the idea that incompetence in a certain area, such as certain types of social relations, will lead to trying to be more cognitively consistent in that area. By "consistency" we intend the person's manifesting higher correlations among attitudes or intended future behaviors pertinent to the area of functioning. The issue of interest was the advantage of sexual relations outside an ongoing relationship. (1) We devided the sample in two, according to their amount of past experience in this issue, and (2) we gave half of them an active role, and the other half a passive role, in confronting the issue. Then we created two extreme groups: The "competent" group had past experience and took an active role during the study, in the sense of re-writing the idea. The other extreme group ("incompetent") had no experience with the idea and had a passive role in their exposition to the idea. We found the following differences: (1) The correlation between liking the idea and agreeing with it was significantly higher for the incopmetent than for the competent group. (2) The correlation between favorability (liking+agreeing) and intended future use was again higher for the incompetent group than for the competent one. (3) Finally, the correlations between favorability and intended behavioral change followed the same pattern. The results thus indicate that a sense of insecurity in an area, based on lack of experience and on one's passive role in the area, leads to the person's creating strong coherencies among the cognitive aspects of that same area.

competence; consistency; favorability; intention

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