ould not be introduced in the south until the attitudes of prejudice and discrimination had been changed in the mainstream thinking, to do anything else would have created social turmoil and chaos, they believed. Dissonance theory researchers believed just the opposite, however. They argued that the only way to change the attitudes of prejudice was to desegregate immediately, and the change would follow (Brehm & Cohen, 1962). Specifically, once people started to social interact with those they had previously felt prejudice towards, they would create new attitudes to correspond with their new behavior, and decrease cognitive dissonance. Obviously the dissonance theorists were correct in their predictions, as prejudice diminished over the next decades (save for a few ignorant and resistant exceptions). Since the 50s, several modifications and additions have been made to Festingers original dissonance theory. Also, there have been several challenges to the theory, most of which are dismissed by the old school for having insufficient evidence or lack of experimental realism. Elliot Aronson was one of the major contributors to the theory, constantly updating and re-working his findings through the 90s. His first major modification came in 1960. Aronson argued that dissonance was highest when rather than simply two cognitions were involved, but cognition about our self-concept and a behavior that contradicts the self-concept (Aronson, 1960). Aronson teamed up with Merrill Carlsmith two years later to make yet another modification to the theory, which stated that people would be likely to behave and make statements that contradicted their beliefs and values in order to gain or maintain acceptance into a valued group, such as the harsh initiation mentioned earlier (Aronson & Carlsmith, 1962). Hooked on dissonance, Aronson was quick to return to the experiments, this time concluding that in order to reduce dissonance and maintain the v...
