Ch. 6 Cognitive Dissonance and the Need to Protect Our Self-Esteem

Question 1

Self-Esteem

Answer 1

SELF-ESTEEM – refers to people’s evaluations of their own self-worth – that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent.

• One of the most powerful determinants of human behavior stems from our need to preserve a stable, positive self-image.

Question 2

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Answer 2

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE – the discomfort caused when two thoughts conflict, or when our behavior conflicts with our attitudes.

• Dissonance is most painful, and we are most motivated to reduce it when one of the dissonant cognitions challenges our self-esteem.
• In other words, DISSONANCE isn’t caused by just any kind of inconsistency. It’s caused specifically by actions or beliefs that challenge our very sense of self-worth.

REDUCING COGNITIVE DISSONANCE – Because DISSONANCE is a direct threat to our self-worth, we will go to great lengths to reduce it. We do this in three primary ways:

1. Change our behavior to bring it in line with the dissonant cognition.
   
   • Ex: A smoker quits smoking because she knows it is very bad for her.
2. Attempt to justify our behavior by changing one of the dissonant cognitions.
   
   • Ex: A smoker rationalizes that smoking ‘isn’t that bad for you’ so she can continue her filthy habit without believing she is killing herself.
3. Attempt to justify our behavior by adding new cognitions.
   
   • Ex: A smoker creates a new cognition, insisting that the ‘relaxation benefits of smoking’ are so positive that they offset the negative effects, allowing her to continue her dirty, gross habit.

• Dissonance explains why so much of human thinking is NOT RATIONAL, but rather rationalized, and though that rationalization might sound stupid or ridiculous to others, to the person doing the rationalization, it is perfectly reasonable.
  
  • No matter how smart they are, people who are in the midst of reducing dissonance are so involved with convincing themselves that they are right that they frequently end up behaving irrationally and maladaptively.
  • We sometimes pursue new information because we want to be accurate in our views or make the wisest decisions. But once we are committed to our views and beliefs, most of us distort new information in a way that confirms them.
• Throughout our lives, we will be confronted with evidence that we were wrong about something important to us—something we did or something we believed. Will you step off the pyramid in the direction of justifying that mistake … or will you strive to correct it?

Question 3

Postdecision Dissonance

Answer 3

POSTDECISION DISSONANCE – In any decision, there are pros and cons to each potential choice. So, AFTER THE DECISION, your belief (cognition) that you’re smart is DISSONANT with all the negative things about the thing you chose and all the positive things about the thing you rejected.

• Thus, you immediately go to work REDUCING this DISSONANCE in several possible ways:

1. IRREVOCABILITY HYPOTHESIS – You subconsciously enhance the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and devalue the rejected alternatives. This is especially true when the decision you’ve made is IRREVOCABLE. It cannot be undone.
   
   • In other words, once the decision is made and there is no going back, to reduce dissonance, your brain works overtime to convince you that you made the right decision because now you’re stuck with it.
   • When people were asked to predict whether keeping their options open would make them more or less happy with their decision, they predicted that keeping their options open would make them happier. They were wrong. Because they underestimated the discomfort of dissonance, they failed to realize that the finality of the decision would make them happier.
   • The irrevocability of a decision always increases dissonance and the motivation to reduce it.
   • LOWBALLING – An unscrupulous strategy whereby a salesperson induces a customer to agree to purchase a product at a low cost, subsequently claims it was an error, and then raises the price; frequently, the customer will agree to make the purchase at the inflated price. Three reasons why this works
     
     1. Thus, by using dissonance reduction and the illusion of irrevocability, high-pressure salespeople increase the probability that you will decide to buy their product at their price.
     2. The customer COMMITED – Although the customer’s decision to buy is reversible, a commitment of sorts does exist. Signing a check for a down payment creates the illusion of irrevocability, even though it’s a nonbinding contract.
     3. ANTICIPATION of an exciting event was created – the feeling of commitment triggered the anticipation of an exciting event: driving out with a new car. To have had the anticipated event thwarted would have been a big letdown.
     • The higher cost is RATIONALIZED away – Although the final price is substantially higher than the customer thought it would be, it is probably only slightly higher than the price at another dealership. Under these circumstances, the customer in effect says, “Oh, what the heck. I’m here, I’ve already filled out the forms, I’ve written out the check—why wait?”
2. JUSTIFICATION OF EFFORT – The tendency for individuals to increase their liking for something they have worked hard to attain.
   
   • This is why Fraternity members who were hazed during pledging or Marines whose spirits were broken during boot camp can come to embrace the organization and its members once they attain full membership. The DISSONANCE that was built up while enduring the hardship of pledging/training must be reduced. And the way that is accomplished is by convincing yourself that you endured that hardship for a good reason – to attain something great.
   • Studies show that things that are worked hard for are generally more liked than things that are not worked hard for.
     
     • Similarly, those who work hard for a goal liked the result better than those who did not have to work hard to attain the same goal.
3. COUNTERATTITUDINAL BEHAVIOR – Acting in a way that runs counter to one’s private belief or attitude. The way you react to this behavior depends on whether you have reasonable EXTERNAL or INTERNAL JUSTIFICATION for behaving this way.
   
   • EXTERNAL JUSTIFICATION – A reason or an explanation for dissonant personal behavior that resides OUTSIDE the individual (e.g., to receive a large reward or avoid a severe punishment).
   • INTERNAL JUSTIFICATION – The reduction of dissonance by changing something about oneself (e.g., one’s attitude or behavior).
   • Ex: Say your friend shows you her expensive new dress and asks your opinion. You think it’s ugly, but you tell her it’s great because you don’t want to hurt her feelings and it’s too late to return it. Chances are, you do NOT experience much dissonance with the COUNTERATTITUDINAL BEHAVIOR because you have excellent EXTERNAL JUSTIFICATION (Your friend’s feelings).
   • But what if you don’t have a good external justification for being insincere? What if your friend Jen is wealthy and can easily afford to absorb the cost of her ugly new dress? What if she sincerely wanted to know what you thought? Now the external justifications you had for lying before are minimal. If you still withhold your true opinion, you will experience dissonance. When you can’t find EXTERNAL JUSTIFICATION for your behavior, you will attempt to find INTERNAL JUSTIFICATION, attempting to reduce dissonance by changing something about yourself, such as your attitude or behavior. Now your brain goes into overdrive searching for INTERNAL JUSTIFICATION. You might begin by looking harder for positive things about the dress that you hadn’t noticed before. Within a short time, your attitude toward the dress will have moved in the direction of the statement you made.
   • SUMMARY: When we enact COUNTERATTITUDINAL BEHAVIOR with little EXTERNAL JUSTIFICATION – that is, without being motivated by something outside of ourselves – what we believe begins to conform more and more to the lie we told.
   • BEN FRANKLIN EFFECT – What happens when YOU are subtly induced to do a favor for a person you don’t much like?
     
     • ANSWER: You like THEM better than you did BEFORE you did them a favor. Why? Well, why would you do a favor for someone you don’t like? That thought causes dissonance. In order to reduce this DISSONANCE, your brain rationalizes that the person isn’t so bad after all. Thus, doing them a favor makes total sense if you like them.
     • Another explanation is that those who begin to see themselves as kind/generous tend to act more kindly/generously.
       
       • This is an example of counterattitudinal behavior because you are acting in a way (helping someone) that is contrary to your beliefs (you don’t like the person you are helping). Dissonance theory predicts that you will like the person more after doing them the favor.

Question 4

Justifying Cruelty

Answer 4

DEHUMANIZATION – Perceiving and framing other humans as subhuman or not human at all.

• This DEHUMANIZATION decreases the DISSONANCE created when people treat others poorly – slaves, genocide, prejudice.
• The need to reduce dissonance can change attitudes toward an innocent victim.
• Many people have always held negative and prejudiced attitudes toward certain groups, and calling them names might make it easier for them to treat them ruthlessly.
• Ex: Imagine these two scenes:
  
  1. A soldier kills an enemy combatant in the heat of battle;
  2. A soldier kills an innocent civilian who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which soldier will experience more dissonance?
     
     • One of the major causes of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among veterans is their inability to reduce dissonance over killing innocent bystanders.
• Studies show that during a war, military personnel are more likely to demean civilian victims (because these individuals can’t retaliate) than military victims. This is because the death of these innocents must be justified in order to reduce the DISSONANCE caused when they are killed. This is done by DEHUMANIZING them in the minds of the soldiers.
• Success at dehumanizing the victim virtually guarantees a continuation or even an escalation of the cruelty: It sets up an endless chain of violence, followed by self-justification (in the form of further dehumanizing and blaming the victim), followed by still more violence and dehumanization. In this manner, unbelievable acts of human cruelty can escalate, such as the Nazi “Final Solution”

Question 5

Justifying our own Immoral Acts

Answer 5

COUNTERATTITUDINAL IMMORAL ACTS – are acts performed by us that are contrary to our own moral beliefs.

• This creates DISSONANCE whereas acts deemed immoral by society, but not by us, would not create the same level of DISSONANCE because your personal beliefs don’t deem that act immoral and so your act does not conflict with your belief.
• Ex: Suppose that after a difficult struggle, you decide to cheat. According to dissonance theory, it is likely that you would try to justify the action by finding a way to minimize its negative aspects. In this case, an efficient path to reducing dissonance would involve changing your attitude about cheating.
  
  • This is not only a rationalization of your own behavior but a change in your system of values.
  • Thus, two people acting in two different ways could have started out with almost identical attitudes toward cheating. One came within an inch of cheating but decided to resist, while the other came within an inch of resisting but decided to cheat. After they had made their decisions, however, their attitudes toward cheating would diverge sharply as a consequence of their actions.

Question 6

Avoiding Temptation with Insufficient Punishment

Answer 6

HARSH PUNISHMENT FALLACY – harsh punishment does NOT teach the value of good behavior. All it teaches is to try to avoid getting caught.

• This is because HARSH PUNISHMENT serves as a strong EXTERNAL JUSTIFICATION to avoid a behavior you actually want to do. But it doesn’t make you not want to do the behavior, it just makes you try to avoid getting caught.
  
  • With strong EXTERNAL JUSTIFICATION, you don’t develop DISSONANCE and so you don‘t feel motivated to make any changes to your attitudes or perceptions.
  • To make REAL changes in behavior and attitudes, you must take away the EXTERNAL JUSTIFICATION, causing DISSONANCE in the person, which requires them to REDUCE the DISSONANCE by changing their attitudes and beliefs, which produces genuine and lasting personal change.

INSUFFICIENT PUNISHMENT – The DISSONANCE created when individuals LACK sufficient EXTERNAL JUSTIFICATION for having resisted a desired activity or object. This usually results in individuals DEVALUING the forbidden act or object.

• Essentially, when someone cannot have/do something and have no real EXTERNAL JUSTIFICATION for avoiding the thing, they rationalize that it “wasn’t that great anyway” even if they actually thought it was great before the restriction.
• Ex: Children who had received a threat of mild punishment were far less likely to play with a forbidden toy than children who had received a threat of severe punishment.
  
  • This is because those given a mild threat had to provide their own (INTERNAL) justification by devaluing the attractiveness of the toy (“I didn’t want to play with it anyway”). The resulting dissonance reduction lasted for weeks.
  • The less severe you make the threat, the less external justification there is; the less external justification, the higher the need for internal justification. The child can reduce his dissonance by convincing himself that the toy wasn’t that great anyway.
  • The kids threatened with mild punishment changed their attitude about the toy (it’s not really so great, which was their INTERNAL JUSTIFICATION) while the kids threatened with severe punishment wanted the toy as much as they ever did (They only stayed away from the toy because of the strong EXTERNAL JUSTIFICATION of severe punishment).
  • The children who had received a severe threat had ample justification for their restraint. They knew why they hadn’t played with the toy, and therefore they had no reason to change their attitude about it. These children continued to rate the forbidden toy as highly desirable; indeed, some even found it more desirable than they had before the threat.
  • But what about the others? Without much external justification for avoiding the toy—they had little to fear if they played with it— the children in the mild threat condition needed an internal justification to reduce their dissonance. Before long, they persuaded themselves that the reason they hadn’t played with the toy was that they didn’t like it. They rated the forbidden toy as less attractive than they had when the experiment began
• So if you want a person (your child, for example) to do something or not to do something only once, the best strategy would be to promise a large reward or threaten a severe punishment.
• But if you want a person to become committed to an attitude or to a behavior, the smaller the reward or punishment that will lead to momentary compliance, the greater will be the eventual change in attitude and therefore the more permanent the effect

Internal Versus External Justification for Counterattitudinal Behavior and Avoiding Temptations:

• Magnitude of Reward or Threats
  
  • Small (Internal Justification)
    
    • Counterattitudinal Behavior (People Rewarded for Doing Something They Donˆ’t Want to Do) – Dissonance Resulting in Long-Term Internal Change “Now I really like it”
    • Avoiding Temptations (People Threatened Punishment for Doing Something They Want to Do) – Dissonance Resulting in Long-Term Internal Change “I really don’t like it after all!”
  • Large (External Justification)
    
    • Counterattitudinal Behavior (People Rewarded for Doing Something They Donˆ’t Want to Do) – No Dissonance (“I did it for the money, I still really don’t like it”)
    • Avoiding Temptations (People Threatened Punishment for Doing Something They Want to Do) – No Dissonance (“I avoided it because of the severe threat; I still really want to do it”)

Question 7

Hypocrisy Paradigm

Answer 7

HYPOCRISY PARADIGM – Hypocrites judge others more harshly than do people who have not committed the same unethical acts, and they present themselves as being more virtuous and ethical than everyone else. That is, they typically polarize their judgments, seeing more evil in others and more righteousness in themselves.

HYPOCRISY INDUCTION – The arousal of DISSONANCE by pointing out a person’s hypocrisy – having individuals make statements that run counter to their behaviors and then reminding them of the inconsistency between what they advocated and their behavior. The purpose is to lead individuals to more responsible behavior.

• Studies have shown that people who were made aware of their own hypocrisy had to deal with the fact that they were preaching behavior that they themselves were not practicing (presumably arousing DISSONANCE). To remove the hypocrisy and maintain their self-esteem, they needed to start practicing what they were preaching. And that’s exactly what they did.
  
  • Essentially, when people are reminded of their own fallibility (i.e. their hypocrisy is called out), they are quicker to go from anger to forgiveness than if this reminder is not induced.

DISSONANCE ACROSS CULTURES

• COLLECTIVIST Societies are more likely to find behavior aimed at maintaining group harmony and less likely to see people justifying their own personal misbehavior but more likely to see people experiencing dissonance when their behavior shames or disappoints others.
• In collectivist societies:
  
  • People will vicariously experience dissonance on the part of someone they know and like and their attitudes will actually change to conform to those of their dissonance-reducing friends, even though they were not the one experiencing the situation that caused DISSONANCE.
  • They will justify their choices if they feel someone else is observing them during the decision-making but not later.
    
    • This pattern was reversed for Americans (members of Individualistic societies).
  • This shows that perceived privacy or public visibility of the choice being made interacts with culture to determine whether dissonance is aroused and the choice needs to be justified.

Question 8

Self-Affirmation Theory

Answer 8

SELF-AFFIRMATION THEORY – The idea that people can reduce threats to their self-esteem by affirming themselves in areas unrelated to the source of the threat.

• There are three ways of reducing dissonance:
  
  1. changing our behavior
  2. changing one of the dissonant cognitions
  3. adding new cognitions.
• Sometimes, however, it is not easy to reduce dissonance in any of these ways. As a result, people often resort to reducing DISSONANCE by focusing on and affirming their competence on some dimension unrelated to the threat
  
  • Ex: “Yes, it’s true that I smoke,” the tobacco user might say, “but I am a great cook”. These justifications may sound silly to the nonsmoker, but not to people trying to reduce their cognitive dissonance. It simply assures them that they are good people despite their failure.
  • VALUES AFFIRMATION WRITING EXERCISE – People are given a list of values, asked to pick the one that is most important to them, and then to write about why that value is important.
    
    • As simple as this sounds, values affirmation exercises have been shown to have a wide range of lasting positive effects on people’s lives, particularly when they allow people to mitigate a threat to one area of their self-esteem, reminding themselves that there are other parts of their lives that are important.
      
      • The increased performance from the Values Affirmation Exercises “fed” on itself such that the students who did the exercise continued to do better for years to come.

Question 9

Self-Evaluation Maintenance Theory

Answer 9

SELF-EVALUATION MAINTENANCE THEORY _(_Abraham Tesser) – People experience dissonance when someone close to us outperforms us in an area that is central to our self-esteem. More specifically, people will experience dissonance in relationships when three conditions are met:

1. We feel close to another person
2. he or she is outperforming us in a particular area
3. and that area is central to our self-esteem.

• So there is NO problem if a close friend outperforms us in an area that is NOT particularly important to us. In fact, we feel even better about ourselves for having such a talented friend. Dissonance only occurs when a close friend outperforms us on a task that is important to the way we define ourselves.
• As a result, this dissonance can be reduced by:

1. becoming less close to the person
2. changing our behavior so that we now outperform them
3. deciding that the area is not that important to us after all.

• Most dissonance research focuses on how our self-image is threatened by our own behavior, such as acting contrary to our attitudes or making a difficult decision.
  
  • In contrast, Self-Evaluation Maintenance Theory focuses on how dissonance arises in interpersonal relationships, where we often compare our own accomplishments with someone close to us.

Question 10

Narcissism

Answer 10

NARCISSISM – The combination of excessive self-love and a lack of empathy toward others.

• Though, “lack of empathy” is clearly negative, what’s so bad about high Self-Esteem?
• TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY – high self-esteem protects us against thoughts about our own mortality – self-esteem serves as a buffer, protecting people from terrifying thoughts about death.
  
  • People with high self-esteem are thus less troubled by thoughts about their own mortality than people with low self-esteem are.
• However, high self-esteem at its extreme becomes self-absorption, which has many negative aspects. Narcissists do less well academically than others, are less successful in business, are more violent and aggressive, and are disliked by others, especially once people get to know them
• And people are becoming more narcissistic – measured by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory given to college students in the United States between the years 1982 and 2008 shows there has been a steady increase in NARCISSISM since the mid-1980s.
• VOLUNTEERISM may be one protective factor against narcissism – Many young people devote countless hours to helping others through volunteer work. Ironically, in so doing they may have hit upon a way to become happier than by taking the narcissistic route.
  
  • The only problem is that NARCISSISTS are unlikely to volunteer to help people in the first place.