Page 462 - Deep Learning

Notes to Pages 305–308 445

formulations that were prominent at the height of the movement (Abelson et al.,
1968) have since faded (Abelson, 1983).
35. “The presence of [cognitive] dissonance gives rise to pressures to reduce or elimi-
nate the dissonance” (Festinger, 1957/1962, p. 18).
36. In the early 1980s, studies by Caramazza, McCloskey and Green (1980), Clement
(1982), Halloun and Hestenes (1985), McCloskey (1983) and others established
that people in general and physics students in particular operate with an intuitive
physics that is similar to the physics of the 14th-century scholar Jean Buridan
(Clagett, 1959, Chaps. 8–10; Robin & Ohlsson, 1989). Due to the belief that
the content of students’ intuitive theories impact their learning (Champagne,
Gunstone & Klopfer, 1985), identifying their misconceptions in a wide range
of science topics became a growth industry in empirical research. For example,
Bishop and Anderson (1990), Demastes, Settlage and Good (1995) and Lawson
and Thompson (1988) tried to carry out this project with respect to genetics and
natural selection; see Driver, Guesne and Tiberghien (1985) for a collection of
studies on other subject matters. The enterprise of identifying misconceptions
became so popular that the Pfundt and Duit (1991) bibliography contains over
2,000 entries. Comins (2001) provides a readable discussion of misconceptions
in the context of science education.
37. Abelson (1959), Chinn and Brewer (1993), Darden (1992) and Kelman and
Baron (1968). See also Cameron, Jacks and O’Brien (2002) for a related list of
five mechanisms for resisting persuasive communications. Jacks and Cameron
(2003) provide some evidence as to the relative prevalence of the different
dissonance-reducing mechanisms.
38. The basic concept behind bolstering is that the magnitude of cognitive disso-
nance is a function of the proportion of dissonant elements. This opens up the
possibility of reducing dissonance, not by dealing with the contradiction that
gave rise to it but by adding information that changes the relation between the
number of consonant and dissonant elements. Although this idea is clearly
expressed and exemplified in Festinger (1957/1962), he did not name it or single it
out as a special cognitive mechanism. The label “bolstering” appears to have been
introduced by Abelson (1959), although he credits Festinger with the concept.
39. Festinger (1957/1962, pp. 48–54).
40. For recent work on bolstering and other resistance mechanisms, see Cameron,
Jacks and O’Brien (2002), Jacks and Cameron (2003), and Tavirs and Aronson
(2007).
41. Common sense might assume that accurate information about an ethnic or racial
group would be sufficient to eradicate incorrect prejudices about the members of
that group. The most direct source of information is interaction with members of
the group in question. Hence, intergroup contact should be effective in reducing
prejudice. This intergroup contact theory was codified by Gordon W. Allport in The
Nature of Prejudice, originally published in the 1950s, and restated in more precise
form four decades later by Pettigrew (1998). Social psychologists have studied the
exact conditions under which intergroup contact has the expected effect. As the
theory of resistance through peripheral change would predict, one of those condi-
tions is that the group member is seen as typical or representative of the group.