Why do college students spend so much money to get drunk at the end of a

hard week of studying? Is it because there's nothing else to do or is it because drinking relieves problems that the person is trying to avoid?

In my experiment, I hope to find if drinking actually has an effect on cognitive dissonance and if there's a correlation between how much a person drinks and their dissonance level.

According to cognitive dissonance theory, there is a tendency for individuals to seek a balance between their beliefs, opinions and actions. When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance. In the case of a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior, it is most likely that the attitude will change to accommodate the behavior. If alcohol is added into this equation, will the people that consume it have the same dissonance that

they would have had if they had not drunk in the first place?

To determine this I read different periodical ar

In Charles Larson's book, Persuasion, Reception and Responsibility, it is noted: "…another approach to the consistency theory is the congruency theory, by Charles Osgood and Percy Tennenbaum (1955, pg. 89)." This theory states that we want to have balance in our lives and there is a logical way figure it out.

Even though I've pointed out two ways above to test alcohol's effect on dissonance, there is something else I can test. If Steele's theory works on social drinkers, can it work on college students and their binge drinking? My hypothesis is that it can, but only if the student is in a receptive mood of the dissonance change. I predict that if the person wants to get drunk, then their dissonance will go down. If they don't want to get drunk the more alcohol that is pressured onto them, the more dissonance they feel.

4.) Do you want to get drunk? (This could start moving them into a range of dissonance that they usually feel when bingeing.)

As you can see, drinking does have a positive correlation for relieving dissonance. Even the people at the party did eventually lose some dissonance. One can assume, though, that this wasn’t by choice because they’re dissonance increased as they got nearer and nearer to a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.05. I think that the decrease after that was caused due to either 1.) they were seeing that other people were having a good time or 2.) the alcohol had an actual chemical effect with their bodies lessening their dissonance. (Of course these two reasons could be the exact same reasons that the other two groups’ dissonance went down.)

Of course, most of the above articles related to how alcohol affects not so much dissonance as it affects behavior. But then again, dissonance is still being researched and we often do not realize the psychological events that take place in our everyday lives. It is important to take notice of theories such as the balance theory, the congruency theory, and the cognitive dissonance theory so that one's self-persuasion occurs knowingly. As psychologists and theorists gain a better understanding of Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory, manipulation of it could occur more easily than it already does in today's society.

3.) they pass out due to over consumption of alcohol.

Some topics in this essay:
Southwick Critchlow, DISCUSSIONS Limitations, Procedure Introduce, Drug Strategies, Taylor PM1994, Percy Tennenbaum, Leon Festinger's, EXPERIMENT BEGINS, Materials Funding, Mel Gibson, college students, cognitive dissonance, cognitive dissonance theory, attitude change, dissonance theory, mel gibson, initial survey, blood alcohol, 5 8, binge drinking, social drinkers, 5 8 participants, people conflicting opinions, effects drinking alcohol, help understand people,