Summary Of Return Of The Repressed: Dissonance Theory Makes A Comeback

“The Return of the Repressed: Dissonance Theory Makes a Comeback” written by Elliot Aronson is about the history of the development of Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory and the attempt to synthesis the new research findings and the old research findings to gain a deeper and clearer understanding of that phenomenon.
Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory provide a new explanation for the human behavior. It suggests that people like things for which we suffer and challenges the reward/reinforcement theory for the human behavior which explained people like things that are associated with reward. Festinger explained the theory as the following: If a person held two cognitions that were psychologically inconsistent, he or she would

Schlenker imposes that the major problem of the cognitive dissonance theory is the ambiguous definition of dissonance. The different interpretation of dissonance is shown among different psychologists, and thus leads to the difficulty to replicate and validate the experiments for the cognitive dissonance theory.
Barry Schlenker divides the problem regarding the cognitive inconsistency into two levels: the undefined way to determine the consistency of cognitions and the conflicting pair of cognitions that caused dissonance. To solve the problem regarding this ambiguous definition of dissonance, Elliot Aronson narrowed the scope of cognitions that are related to self-concept. Barry Schlenker also points out that although Elliot Aronson tried to synthesize different theories into a general rubric of the dissonance theory by linking the similarities and connections, the core idea of the individual theories and perspective on the human behavior can be very different and thus lead to different types of

According to the dictionary, the definition of a theory is a tested proposition that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a phenomenon. In my opinion, Aronson’s synthesize of different theories into one general principle seems to fail its aim for predicting the outcomes and therefore cannot be