Understanding all inconsistency compensation as a palliative response to violated expectations

Abstract

It has been repeatedly shown that, when people have experiences that are inconsistent with their expectations, they engage in a variety of compensatory efforts. Although there have been many superficially different accounts for these behaviors, a potentially unifying inconsistency compensation perspective is currently coalescing. Following from a common prediction error/conflict monitoring mechanism, any given inconsistency is understood as evoking a common syndrome of aversive arousal. In turn, this aversive arousal is understood to motivate palliative efforts, which manifest as the analogous compensation behaviors reported within different psychological literatures. Based on this perspective, compensation efforts following both 'high-level' (e.g., attitudinal dissonance) and 'low-level' (e.g., Stroop task color/word mismatches) inconsistencies can now be understood in terms of a common motivational account.