Cognitive dissonance as factor of influence in American courtroom discourse

Lyudmyla Pelepeychenko; Yurii Zatsnyi; Margaryta Zaitseva

doi:10.21744/lingcure.v5nS3.1497

Authors

Lyudmyla Pelepeychenko National Academy of the National Guard of Ukraine, Ukraine
Yurii Zatsnyi Zaporizhzhia National University, Ukraine
Margaryta Zaitseva
m.o.zaitseva@nlu.edu.ua
Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University, Ukraine

Keywords:

cognitive dissonance, communicative strategies, English-language courtroom discourse, linguistic means, moves, tactics

Abstract

The article reveals the specificity of cognitive dissonance in courtroom discourse as one of the mechanisms of communicative influence on the recipients. Two types of the phenomenon in question are grounded: dissonance caused by real-life facts, which include the nature of the crime itself, and dissonance artificially created by the prosecutor and the defense lawyer to persuasively influence the jury and the judge. Common is the use of a narrative as a persuasive, arousing the associative activity of the recipients by contrasting the axiological features of the concepts; combining elements of rational and emotional communicative influence. Distinctive features include the communicative strategies and tactics used by speakers and the choice of concepts around which communicative influence is modeled. The speeches of the prosecutor and the defense lawyer represent a kind of battle of narratives and a contest of cognitive dissonance. The research results in the following findings: the narrative that not only causes cognitive dissonance but also implicitly presents a way to overcome psychological discomfort and harmonize elements of the cognitive structure in the minds of the recipients wins.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Andreyeva, GM, Bogomolova, NN, & Petrovskaya, LA (2002). Zarubezhnaya sotsialnaya psikhologiya XX stoletiya: Teoreticheskiye podkhody (Foreign social psychology of the twentieth century: Theoretical approaches).

Archer, D. (2011). Cross-examining lawyers, facework and the adversarial courtroom. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(13), 3216-3230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2011.06.007

Aronson, E. (1969). The theory of cognitive dissonance: A current perspective. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 4, pp. 1-34). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60075-1

Cancino-Montecinos, S., Björklund, F., & Lindholm, T. (2018). Dissonance reduction as emotion regulation: Attitude change is related to positive emotions in the induced compliance paradigm. Plos One, 13(12), e0209012.

Cherry, K. (2019). What is cognitive dissonance.

Cooper, J., & Fazio, R. H. (1984). A new look at dissonance theory. Advances in experimental social psychology, 17, 229-266. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60121-5

Danet, B. (1980). Language in the courtroom. In Language (pp. 367-376). Pergamon. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-024696-3.50062-4

Duizenberg, M. R. . (2020). Linguistics landscape: A cross culture perspective. Linguistics and Culture Review, 4(1), 15-28. https://doi.org/10.37028/lingcure.v4n1.17

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance (Vol. 2). Stanford universi

Festinger, L. (2000). Teoriya kognitivnogo dissonansa [Theory of cognitive dissonance]. Festinger. St Petersburg.

Heider, F. (1946). Attitudes and cognitive organization. The Journal of psychology, 21(1), 107-112.

Lazebna, N. (2021). Quadronimic interpretation of English-language digital discourse. Linguistics and Culture Review, 5(S1), 1075-1086. https://doi.org/10.37028/lingcure.v5nS1.1492

Malyuga, E., & McCarthy, M. (2018). English and Russian vague category markers in business discourse: Linguistic identity aspects. Journal of pragmatics, 135, 39-52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.07.011

Newby, G. B. (2001). Cognitive space and information space. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(12), 1026-1048.

Newcomb, T. M. (1953). An approach to the study of communicative acts. Psychological review, 60(6), 393.

Osgood, C. E., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1955). The principle of congruity in the prediction of attitude change. Psychological review, 62(1), 42.

Owuamalam, C. K., & Spears, R. (2020). Do humans possess an autonomous system justification motivation? A Pupillometric test of the strong system justification thesis. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 86, 103897.

Pavlidou, T. (1991). Cooperation and the choice of linguistic means: Some evidence from the use of the subjunctive in Modern Greek. Journal of Pragmatics, 15(1), 11-42. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(91)90024-R

Peron, E. M., Baroni, M. R., Job, R., & Salmaso, P. (1985). Cognitive factors and communicative strategies in recalling unfamiliar places. Journal of Environmental psychology, 5(4), 325-333. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(85)80002-5

Rabin, M. (1994). Cognitive dissonance and social change. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 23(2), 177-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-2681(94)90066-3

Razfar, A. (2005). Language ideologies in practice: Repair and classroom discourse. Linguistics and Education, 16(4), 404-424. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2006.04.001

Shermer, M. (2015). The moral arc: how science makes us better people. Henry Holt and Company.

Sjåstad, H., Baumeister, R. F., & Ent, M. (2020). Greener grass or sour grapes? How people value future goals after initial failure. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 88, 103965.

Sorlin, S. (2017). The pragmatics of manipulation: Exploiting im/politeness theories. Journal of Pragmatics, 121, 132-146.

Stanchi, K. (2014). What Cognitive Dissonance Tells Us About Tone In Persuasion. Journal of Law and Policy, 22(1), 4.

Stone, J., & Cooper, J. (2001). A self-standards model of cognitive dissonance. Journal of experimental social psychology, 37(3), 228-243. https://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.2000.1446

Wisner, W. (2019). Cognitive dissonance.

Zaitseva, M., & Pelepeichenko, L. (2021). The specifics of the narrative in the judicial discourse of the United States. Linguistic and stylistic studies , 46-60.