Sober living

Cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant mental state that may result if someone really does have certain beliefs but thinks or acts in a way that contradicts them. In groups, the familiar prior knowledge about own group and other groups is captured by social identity theory and self-categorization theory (Sect. 2.3). In addition, group-level schemas and categories at the societal level take the form of Moscovici’s social representations; shared social understandings make the unfamiliar into the familiar by reference to old socially shared concepts. When…