ShmoopTube

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by football, number [Football kicked into the air]

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one in television programming, in terms of contributing to obesity in America.

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Jeff tries out for the football team, he can't throw, or catch pass and is

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subsequently cut right away. He decides football is a dumb sport. He just

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exhibited what and here are your potential answers. So when Jeff was cut and

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proceeded to call the sport dumb, what was he actually doing? Was it a fundamental [man pouting on football field]

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attribution error? No, because that would describe the tendency for people to

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assume, that other people's action are due mostly to their internal feelings. As

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opposed to external factors. If we saw Jeff eating dirt in the middle of the

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field, we might incorrectly assume, he was doing so because he liked the taste of [Jeff eating dirt on a field]

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dirt. When in actuality it was the external factor of the giant linebacker

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having shoved his face into the ground, that was truly at work. And it's not self-

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effacing either, which is actually a bias that assumes success is based on [man's silhouette with lightbulb inside]

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external factors and failures based on internal factors. For example, we might

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look at Justin Bieber's success and say that he was just lucky, or that other

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people decided to make him famous. As opposed to, giving him the personal

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credit for it. The opposite of that is a self-serving bias, the tendency we have

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to attribute success to ourselves. But failure to external factors. This would be

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Justin Bieber giving himself sole credit for his success, up until his career [Justin Bieber in hot tub]

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eventually being to fade. At which point he'll blame everyone but, himself. This is

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not what's happening with Jeff here however. An attitude is simply a

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belief, or evaluation, of someone, or something. So while Jeff's attitude

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towards football might be negative, that's not what we're asking. What we're

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looking for here, is an explanation for why Jeff has suddenly decided, he thinks

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football is dumb. Even though the fact that, he tried out for the team, clearly

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suggests otherwise. That is called cognitive dissonance, it's the [man holding football]

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uncomfortable conflict, a person experiences when their behaviors don't

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match up with their feelings. Which forces them to reconsider their feelings, in order to

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alleviate this conflict. Jeff felt uncomfortable about getting cut from the

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team, for the sport he supposedly liked. So he decided to claim he didn't like the

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sport anymore, in order to cure that tension. Which is great because Jeff

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actually love hockey anyway. [man playing hockey]

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