Influencing Republicans' and Democrats' attitudes toward Obamacare: Effects of imagined vicarious cognitive dissonance on political attitudes.

The field of experimental social psychology is appropriately interested in using novel theoretical approaches to implement change in the social world. In the current study, we extended cognitive dissonance theory by creating a new framework of social influence: imagined vicarious dissonance. We used the framework to influence attitudes on an important and controversial political attitude: U.