Cognitive Consistency

For graduate students and psychologists, Gawronski (psychology and social psychology, U. of Western Ontario, Canada) and Strack (psychology, U. of WA?rzburg, Germany) assemble 21 chapters by psychologists and others from North America, Europe, and Israel who examine the role of cognitive consistency in aspects of social cognition. They address topics related to mental representation, processing fluency and motivational fit, implicit social cognition, thinking and reasoning, decision making and choice, and interpersonal processes. Also discussed is a neuroscientific perspective on dissonance; parallel constraint satisfaction as a mechanism for cognitive consistency; nonpropositional consistency; balanced identity theory; implicit ambivalence; and discrepancies between implicit and explicit attitudes, prejudices, and self-esteem. Other chapters address mental models and consistency; evaluative conflict in attitudes and decision making; self-produced decisional conflict; regret, consistency, and choice; consistency as a basis for behavioral interventions; cognitive consistency in prejudice-related belief systems; stereotype confirmation and disconfirmation; sense making, victim blaming, and justice judgments; and the sharing of cognition in groups. Annotation Ac2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)