UNDERSTANDING CHANGE: USING BERRY’S ACCULTURATION MODEL TO EXPLAIN CREATIONIST AND EVOLUTIONARY BELIEFS OF YOUNG ADULTS

Human origins have been debated by evolutionists and creationists. Christian young adults are educated first on creationism and learn of evolution later. This delayed education of evolution leads to potential belief change and stress. This belief change process may be similar to Berry’s acculturation. After belief change, individuals may exhibit belief bias during human origin argument evaluation. Little research has been done to explore a formal belief change model and belief bias in human origin argument evaluation. Data was collected from 121 PSYC 102 and MTurk participants in an online survey measuring evolution and creationist beliefs. Vignettes presented evidence for creationism and evolution. This evidence was evaluated by participants. Cluster analyses, MANOVAs, and ANOVAs were used to determine statistical significance. Results found three groups of individuals exist and these groups differed on age of exposure to evolution and belief change stress measures. These groups evaluated creationism and evolution evidence differently exhibiting belief bias during argument evaluation. These results expand current literature by finding a potential belief change model and preliminary evidence to support earlier teaching of evolution in schools. Limitations include violated statistical assumptions and forced clusters. Further research is needed to explore these three groups in more detail

A Multilab Replication of the Induced-Compliance Paradigm of Cognitive Dissonance

According to cognitive-dissonance theory, performing counterattitudinal behavior produces a state of dissonance that people are motivated to resolve, usually by changing their attitude to be in line with their behavior. One of the most popular experimental paradigms used to produce such attitude change is the induced-compliance paradigm. Despite its popularity, the replication crisis in social psychology and other fields, as well as methodological limitations associated with the paradigm, raise concerns about the robustness of classic studies in this literature. We therefore conducted a multilab constructive replication of the induced-compliance paradigm based on Croyle and Cooper (Experiment 1). In a total of 39 labs from 19 countries and 14 languages, participants (N = 4,898) were assigned to one of three conditions: writing a counterattitudinal essay under high choice, writing a counterattitudinal essay under low choice, or writing a neutral essay under high choice. The primary analyses failed to support the core hypothesis: No significant difference in attitude was observed after writing a counterattitudinal essay under high choice compared with low choice. However, we did observe a significant difference in attitude after writing a counterattitudinal essay compared with writing a neutral essay. Secondary analyses revealed the pattern of results to be robust to data exclusions, lab variability, and attitude assessment. Additional exploratory analyses were conducted to test predictions from cognitive-dissonancetheory. Overall, the results call into question whether the induced-compliance paradigm provides robust evidence for cognitive dissonance