Chapter 6 & 3: Cognitive Dissonance Flashcards
Cognitive Dissonance theory
By Leon Festinger
The theory is that inconsistency between a person’s thoughts, sentiments, and actions creates an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that leads to efforts to restore consistency.
Festinger was right in maintaining that decisions evoke dissonance occurs before and after decisions are made
Knox & Inkster 1968 Bet Study
Aim: Cognitive Dissonance. The investigators reasoned that the act of placing a bet and irrevocably choosing a particular horse would cause the bettors to reduce the dissonance associated with the chosen horse’s negative features (doesn’t do well on a wet track) and the competing horses’ positive features (the perfect distance for one horse, the best jockey on another).
Procedures: Dissonance reduction should be reflected in greater confidence on the part of those interviewed right after placing their bets once rationalization has set in. Findings: Indeed, bettors who were interviewed right before they placed their bets gave their horses, on average, a “fair” chance of winning; those interviewed after they had placed their bets gave their horses, on average, a “good” chance to win.
Effort justification
The tendency to reduce dissonance by justifying the time, effort, or money devoted to something that turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing
Aronson & Mills 1959 Group Discussion on Sex Study
Aim: effort justification
Procedures: Undergraduate women, when they arrived, were told that because not everyone could speak freely and comfortably about such a topic, potential participants had to pass a screening test to join the group. Those assigned to a control condition simply read aloud a list of innocuous words to the experimenter, who was a man. Th ose assigned to a “mild” initiation condition read aloud a list of
mildly embarrassing words. Finally, those in a “severe” initiation group read aloud a list of obscene words and a passage from a novel describing sexual intercourse. All participants were then told they had passed the test and could join the group. They then met with the group and heard their very boring discussion.
Findings: The experimenters asked participants at the end of the study to rate the quality of the discussion, those in the severe initiation condition rated it more favorably than did the participants in the other two conditions.
Induced (forced) compliance
Subtly compelling people to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values in order to elicit dissonance and therefore a change in their original attitudes and values
Festinger & Carlsmith 1959 Boring Experiment
Aim: Demonstrate the power of induced compliance to shift people’s attitudes
Procedures: Participants in the control condition of the experiment had to do an extremely boring task. They were then asked to rate how much they enjoyed the experiment, and they gave it quite low ratings. The participant was asked to explain to the next participant who was about to show up and needed to be told the study was interesting. Would you, the experimenter
asked, play the role usually performed by the confederate and tell the next participant that the experiment is interesting? The experimenter offered the participant to pay either $1 or $20 for doing so. Nearly every participant participated. They lied by saying that a mind-numbingly boring study was interesting.
Findings: When participants in the $1 condition later evaluated their
experience, they rated the monotonous tasks more favorably than participants in the other conditions. Only the
participants in the $1 condition rated the activities above the neutral point.
To reduce their dissonance, participants in the $1 condition would rationalize their behavior by changing their attitude about the task they had performed. If they convinced themselves the task was interesting a fter all, their lie wouldn’t really be a lie.
Aronson & Carlsmith Freedman, Lepper Forbidden Toy Study
Aim: The usage of induced compliance and extinguishing undesired behavior
Procedure: A researcher showed nursery school children a set of fi ve toys and asked them to say how much they liked each one. He then said he would have to leave the room for a bit but would be back soon. In the meantime, the children were free to play with any of the toys except their second favorite. Half the kids were told not to play with the forbidden toy because the experimenter would “be annoyed” if they did (mild threat condition). In the “severe threat” condition, if the kids played with the forbidden toy, the experimenter “would be very angry.”While the experimenter was gone, each child was covertly observed, and none played with the forbidden toy.
Findings: For children who received
only a mild threat, there would be no such justification, producing dissonance, and they would likely resolve the inconsistency by devaluing the toy, convincing themselves it wasn’t so great after all. Those in the severe threat condition either didn’t change their opinion of the forbidden toy or liked it even more than before.
When does inconsistency produce dissonance?
Aronson believed that a given inconsistency will arouse dissonance if it implicates our core sense of self.
Thus, we ought to experience dissonance whenever we act in ways that are inconsistent with our core values and beliefs and a) the behavior was freely chosen, b) the behavior wasn’t sufficiently justified, c) the behavior had negative consequences, and d) the negative consequences were foreseeable.
Linder, Cooper& Jones 1967
Aim: the critical role of freedom of choice in dissonance and insufficient justification
Procedures: College students were offered either 0.50 or 2.50 to write an essay in favor of a state law banning communists from speaking on college campuses. Because the law was at odds with the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech, nearly all students were opposed to it, and their essays thus conflicted with their true beliefs. For half the participants, their freedom to agree (or
decline) to write such an essay was emphasized. For the other half, it was not.
Findings: There was no dissonance eff ect among participants whose freedom to agree or decline was not emphasized. In the free-choice group, however, the standard dissonance effect was obtained: those paid $0.50 changed their attitude more than those paid $2.50. Those who paid only 0.50 had no justification for a large cash payment like the $2.50 group and thus felt the full weight of their behavioral inconsistency leading to dissonance.
J.Cooper & Worchel 1970
Aim: People experience dissonance only when their behavior results in harm of some sort.
Procedures: Participants were induced
to tell someone (who was actually an associate working with the researchers) that a boring experiment was very interesting. For doing so, they were offered either a small or a large incentive. Half the time, the confederate appeared convinced that the boring task was going to be interesting, and half the time the confederate remained unconvinced.
Findings: The boring task was rated more favorably only by participants who were offered little incentive to lie and were paired with a Confederate who appeared to believe the lie.
The participant experiences dissonance due to the feeling of a deceiver due to the confederate believing them (negative consequences).
An example of hoe foreseeability leads to dissonance
Negative consequences that aren’t foreseeable don’t threaten a person’s self-image as a moral and decent person, so they shouldn’t arouse dissonance.
But if the negative consequences are either foreseen or foreseeable the standard dissonance effect is obtained.
Self-affirmation and dissonance
Self-affirmation can assuage the need to reduce dissonance in a situation.
Is Dissonance Universal?
East Asians exhibit dissonance effects in the induced-compliance paradigm because they question their actions when others are observing them, and they also show dissonance effects in the free-choice paradigm if they are led to think about other people’s possible reactions to their choices. Unlike Westerners.
Different circumstances arouse dissonance in people of different cultures.
Heine & Lehman 1997
Aim: If the dissonance effect was the same in people from the two different cultures.
Procedures: In one study using the free-choice, self-affirmation paradigm, researchers asked Japanese and Canadian participants to choose between two CDS to see if they would exhibit the dissonance effect by rationalizing their decision as the correct one. The researchers, however, first gave some participants self-affirmation in the form of positive feedback on a personality test.
Findings: Participants showed a substantial dissonance effect in the control condition, finding previously unnoticed attractions in the chosen CD and previously unnoticed flaws in the unchosen one, but no dissonance effect if they had received positive feedback about their personalities.
The Japanese participants, in contrast, were unaffected by the self-affirmation manipulation, and they showed no dissonance effect in either condition.
Kitayama et al
Procedures: Participants choose between two CDs under one of two circumstances. For some participants, hanging right in front of them at eye level was the poster shown allegedly a prop from an unrelated experiment. But in actuality, the researchers wanted to see whether the schematic faces in the poster might prime the concept of “social others,” thereby prompting the Japanese participants to show a dissonance effect.
Findings: In the standard free-choice condition, the Japanese showed no evidence of dissonance reduction, but in the poster condition, they did. American participants actually showed the same or even slightly less dissonance reduction in the poster condition than in the standard condition.
Self-affirmation theory
The idea that people can maintain an overall sense of self-worth after being exposed to psychologically threatening information by affirming a valued aspect of themselves unrelated to the threat.
