Festinger Flashcards
What is cognitive dissonance?
- conflicting cognitions create a motivational state (dissonance)
- which is an aversive state and creates a need to reduce dissonance
- strategies to reduce dissonance: add consonant cognitions and/or make them more important, subtract dissonant cognitions and/or make them less important, change attitudes/behaviour, avoid dissonant cognitions
What are the competing theories?
- balance theories: they don’t predict which element will be changes or the strength of the motivation to change
- learning theory (reinforcement): makes competing predictions to cognitive dissonance theory
What is the prophecy from Planet Clarion?
- Marian Keech was telling people that Lake City would be destroyed because the lake would flood etc, effectively that the world was ending but only for America
- began writing down these things that aliens dictated to her in order for her to save mankind
Where does the cognitive dissonance stem from?
- conflict of 2 cognitions
- cognition 1: prophecy will come true (public statement of this belief in the face of derision from the community will make it extremely difficult to change this cognition)
- cognition 2: the prophecy failed (proof in the form of no spaceship to the rescue and the world still intact the next day)
What were the hypotheses of study 1?
- publicly stated belief in the prophecy will be held on to, and will increase in importance
- fact that the prophecy failed will be downplayed and ‘explained away’
What was the method of study 1?
- participant observation: infiltrated the group by pretending to be new converts
- group leader Dorothy Martin but given pseudonym (Marian Keech)
What were the results of study 1?
- all messages about the cataclysm came in form of automatic writing seances to group leader
- group were given clear and detailed instructions on what to do in order to board waiting spacecraft (midnight, 21/12), instructions followed and were ready
- following failed prophecy the group begins to proselytize (convert) and recruit new members with little success
- able to generate lot of public interest by contacting various newspapers
- efforts to reduce dissonance seemed to work in the short term but when recruitment failed so did the group
What were the conclusions of study 1?
- ‘when prophecy fails’ was able to correctly predict the behaviour of the seekers
- study shows in a real-world setting how powerful the theory of cognitive dissonance is
- Festinger wants to back this up with experimental evidence
What were the aims of study 2?
- experimental evidence for dissonance theory: behaviour is in conflict with attitudes, effect of adding consonant cognitions
- understanding compliance: what happens to cognitions when we do something we don’t believe in? do incentives help people to reduce dissonance?
What were the hypotheses of study 2?
- when behaviour openly contradicts a private attitude, the attitude will be changed (easier to do)
- need to change the attitude depends on the relevance of the behaviour-based cognition: to extent that the behaviour-based cognition can be explained by other factors, need to change the attitude-based cognition is reduced
- role of incentives: cognitive dissonance theory (stronger the incentive to show counter-attitudinal behaviour, the weaker the attitude change) and reinforcement theory (more a behaviour is rewarded, the stronger the behaviour change)
What was the method of study 2?
- cognition 1: ‘this task is boring’- participants given tedious task of turning pegs on a board
- cognition 2: ‘I just told someone this is a fun and exciting task’- asks the participant to help out (think they’re in the control group) by telling someone of the seemingly experimental group that the task is fun and exciting. given reward of $1 or $20, those with high reward would have less dissonance as reason for lying is due to the money but the low reward wouldn’t have an explanation and so need to deal with the dissonance by changing attitude
What were the results of study 2?
- low reward condition claimed to enjoy the task the most
- control group enjoyed the task the least, with high reward also not enjoying it but not the same extremes
What was the replicability of the study?
-Hardyck and Braden (1962) looked at prophecy of nuclear devastation, 29 families (135 people) built shelters and stayed underground for 42 days. in response to the failed prophecy they changed the meaning of the prophecy to accommodate reality but they didn’t proselytize
How is the study lacking evidence for ‘drive-like state’?
- provided no evidence to support the idea that cognitive dissonance is drive-like state
- follow-up research supported the idea
- physiological changes and psychological discomfort produced by counter-attitudinal statements can be measured
- possible to increase/decrease dissonance through drugs that increase/decrease arousal (Cooper et al, 1978)
- dissonance-produced attitude change can be eliminated by getting people to misattribute their arousal (Zanna and Cooper, 1974)
What are the moderators for the change in behaviour?
-necessary conditions for attitudes to change after counter-attitudinal behaviour: people need to believe they had the choice to engage in the counter-attitudinal behaviour (Linder et al, 1987) and the behaviour needs to have consequences (Cooper and Worchel, 1970)
