Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance Theory

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Prejudice based on skin color began when the first African slaves arrived in the colonial United States in 1619. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 solidified the central importance of slavery to the South’s economy. Slaves in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population.
Festinger's (1957) cognitive dissonance theory proposed that cognitions can be relevant or irrelevant, and—if relevant—consonant or dissonant. As stated by (Fiske, 2014) people avoid dissonance in several ways, most easily by self-generated attitude change, that is, changing the dissonant cognitions. For slave owners to accept the idea of treating humans as property they enlisted the use of cognitive dissonance as Festinger defined as (Fiske,