Utseende spelar väl ingen roll? Kan kognitiv dissonans reducera fördomsfullhet kring attraktivitet

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to examine if implicit and explicit prejudices against attractive and unattractive people can be reduced. This was meant to occur when the participants were forced to agree with a set of motivational statements about the importance of not prejudicing against attractive and unattractive faces. The participants then rated attractive and unattractive faces in an affective misattribution procedure. The hypothesis was that the participants will to avoid that cognitive dissonance arises would cause them to judge attractive and unattractive faces more equally. The study contained 60 participants, a majority of these were students. No significant results were found proving that cognitive dissonance reduces prejudices against attractive and unattractive faces. A possible explanation could be that a will to avoid cognitive dissonance could have arisen from an automatic response, much like a gut feeling, caused by the faces. This automatic response could have affected the participants will to avoid cognitive dissonance caused by the motivational statements in order for to be cognitively consistent with their gut feeling.