Assignment#3 Group Assignment

In this assignment it was decided from early on that my group would do something local. After failing at many searches for local communication acts on the 1990 coup, the local government programme ‘Matthew in the Middle,’ and local comedian acts, just to name a few we stumbled upon a young lady performing a monologue on being a good exemplar. This monologue was most apt to be studied from a narrative perspective but what we also found as a group was that there were a number of alternative perspectives of communication that it could have been studied from. One of the perspective we looked at was the cognitive dissonance theory and how its scope was broad enough to encompass the totality of the monologue.

Cognitive is mental/ mind and dissonance is discomfort/ conflict. Mental conflict occurs according to Leon Festinger when an individual’s behaviour does not coincide with his/ her attitudes and beliefs or vice versa. He outlined that when in this state an individual will either change their behaviour to be in sync with beliefs or vice versa. Festinger also stated that action will be taken to maintain a state of consonance by the individual and they may either
1. Change their thought to parallel behaviour
2. Change behaviour to parallel thought
The motivation he stated comes from the discomfort an individual feels when in this state and that it is innate in humans to have inner harmony at all times.
When we looked at the monologue we saw that the main character was in a constant state of cognitive dissonance due to mixed messages from her mother. Her mother relayed to her that she must follow in her footsteps, but when she does she is scolded because the image her mother sees is not one that she would like to be associated with, hence the reason for the orator’s cognitive dissonance.

While the narrative paradigm was one also fitting for this communication act, as it explained how the story progressed and how plots are unfolded, this theory that stemmed from the psychological field appealed to my group mates and me. The novelty of the theory and the fact that the monologue fit so well into its frame work was the ‘icing on the cake’ so to speak.

This group project forced us all to look into areas that we did not look before. The fact that we had no restrictions on theories used to explain our communication act gave everyone an opportunity to be creative and research new and exciting areas in the communication realm that we may not have touched on.