ABSTRACT
Common to the concepts of balance, congruity, and dissonance is the notion that thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior tend to organize themselves in meaningful and sensible ways. These concepts have appeared in various forms in almost all sciences. The concept of consistency in man is, then, a special case of the concept of universal consistency. In a longitudinal study, considerably more convincing evidence was obtained in support of the strain-toward-symmetry hypothesis. Except for Newcomb's longitudinal study, the experimental situations dealt mostly with subjects who responded to hypothetical situations, and direct evidence is scarce. The principle of congruity, which is in fact a special case of balance, was advanced by C. E. Osgood and P. H. Tannenbaum in 1955. Osgood and Tannenbaum have formulated the principle of congruity in quantitative terms allowing for precise predictions regarding the extent and direction of attitude change–predictions which in their studies were fairly well confirmed.
