ABSTRACT
T he tradition of social cognition has focused on the way in which people perceive and think about their social world. One of the hallmarks of perceivers' social cognitive schemas is a preference for consistency among cognitions. To extend an example of Leon Festinger's (1957), if we find ourselves standing in the rain, we prefer being wet to being dry. Getting wet may be physically uncomfortable; viewing the world as inconsistent is psychologically intolerable. Our drive to perceive consistency among our cognitions spawned the research tradition of cognitive dissonance and gave rise to more than 50 years of research to understand the ramifications and limits of our consistency need.
