Lecture 6: Cognitive Dissonance Flashcards
What is:
Heider’s Balance Theory
The idea is that people are motivated to maintain or achieve balance between our attitudes towards these various things. For example, if O is someone you like (+) and you also like X (+) but O dislikes X, you’re going to experience conflict. We like it when there’s balance (either everything like + or -), harmony, consistency, or consonance. These terms are all used by different researchers, but they all basically mean the same thing; Heider focussed on consonance.
- P: You
- O: Other Person
- X: Other Object
What is:
cognitive dissonance
An unpleasant state caused by people’s awareness of inconsistency among important beliefs, attitudes, or actions.
- According to cognitive dissonance theory, people experience a physiological discomfort when they’re feeling tension, and are thus driven to reduce this tension and achieve harmony again.
What are the different ways a person can reduce dissonance?
- Attitude change: “I don’t like smoking. It’s a bad habit.”
- Minimize inconsistency: “So what? We all have to go somehow. If smoking doesn’t get me, ozone depletion or random violence will.”
- Minimize personal responsibility: “I can’t help it. I’m hooked. I became addicted at a young age by all those Virginia Slims advertisements.”
- Adding consonants: “I eat well, I take vitamins, and exercise regularly.”
- Denial: “The government exaggerates all those health statistics. Many smokers live to a ripe old age.”
How did Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) demonstrate cognitive dissonance with their study using a boring experiment and lying?
- Participants performed a boring knob-turning task. Afterwards, they were asked to motivate another participant by lying about how fun the task was. This participant was paid either $1 or $20 to tell the lie. The researchers then asked the participant how fun they thought the task was.
- What’s going on here? Participants were asked to lie, which went against their values (“I am a good honest person”). Those given $20 were able to justify their behaviour by saying that they were paid a good amount of money to do it. Those given $1 were not able to justify their actions, so they felt the unpleasant tension of dissonance not wanting to see themselves as bad people, this led them to genuinely change their attitudes toward the task (“it wasn’t that bad!”).
What did Schachter and Singer (1962) find people would do when they lacked external justifcation, using their experiment with “hormone” injections?
- In this study, researchers looked at the idea of not having or having sufficient external justification, using emotions in particular.
- Researchers theorized that emotion requires some sort of physiological arousal, which leads us to assign a label to it. This cognitive label leads to mis-attribution.
- Participants came into the lab and got either a placebo shot or an injection that aroused them in some way. They were either told that the shot would cause physiological arousal or wouldn’t feel anything.
- They are then brought into a waiting room with a confederate that they were told also experienced the shot. The confederate was either behaving euphorically or angrily.
- The cues in this situation were thus either happy or angry. The uninformed participants needed to find reasons to explain (or “justify”) their feelings, while the informed participants had a handy external explanation available (“it’s just the drug!”).
Define:
decisional dissonance
Tension that occurs when someone has to choose between multiple attractive options. Choosing one means not choosing all the good things about the other alternative(s).
Why does the spreading-of-alternatives effect occur?
- Making the choice to give up one and take the other produces dissonance, so you increase your liking of the product you chose, and devalue the rejected product in order to justify your decision.
- For example, the Brehm (1956) experiment including women and household appliances has been repeated and the effect has been shown to occur in a broad range of decision tasks (e.g. your opinion of presidential candidates before and after casting your vote—provided you find the choice difficult!).
What are the four conditions are necessary to produce dissonance and for that dissonance to produce attitude change?
- The individual must perceive the action as inconsistent, i.e. their decision is contrary to their beliefs.
- This is particularly the case when it’s an important belief. The stronger the belief, the more dissonance you’ll feel.
- The individual must take personal responsibility for the action.
- The individual must experience uncomfortable physiological arousal.
- The individual must attribute the arousal to the inconsistency between attitude and action.
Does dissonance always lead to attitude change?
No, there are other ways to reduce dissonance, since dissonance may be dissipated at any one of the four steps For example, you could minimize the inconsistency by trivializing the attitude-discrepant behavior, or by coming up with a way of making the behavior consistent with your attitudes. Say that you’re a proud Canadian business owner and a good honest person, but you fail to pay your taxes. Instead of thinking that you’re a bad person, you can think something like “the government wastes money anyways, so it’s good that I don’t pay my taxes.”
What is Bem’s (1972) self-perception theory?
This theory was competing with cognitive dissonance theory at the time, and many thought that this theory was better because it’s simpler. The heart of this theory is that when our attitudes are weak or ambiguous, we discern our own attitudes by examining our behavior—provided we are engaging in the behavior voluntarily. For example, if you choose to eat gummy bears every day, you would probably conclude that you like gummy bears.
How did Taylor (1975) demonstrate self-perception theory using women and EKGs?
- Women were brought into the lab and shown photos of various men on campus that were bachelors. They believe that they’re hooked up to an EKG that’s measuring their heartbeat. When certain photos came up on the screen, the women were given false feedback about their physiological reaction to the photos. For some of the photos, they were told that their hearts started to beat faster. (“He makes your heart go pitter-patter…”)
- When later asked to evaluate the men, the women relied on their supposed physiological responses, but only if they’re actions did not have any consequences. Those women who were going to meet the men based on how they evaluated them were not willing to rely only on their physiological responses.
What is the:
foot-in-the-door technique
When someone asks you to to something (small) that you agree to do (e.g. donate $1 to a charity, crash at your place for one night, watch their dog for a day) and then make a larger request (e.g. donate $25 to a charity, stay at your place for a month, watch their dog for a week).
- You become more likely to say “yes” to this larger request than if had they made the large request directly.
- Why? To maintain consistency with your self-perception: provided that you agreed to the first request voluntarily, and that it meant something to you, you will infer that you must have an action-consistent attitude.
How did Sherman (1980) demonstrate the foot-in-the-door technique by calling and asking for donations?
In this study, researchers in Indiana called up Bloomington residents and asked if they would, hypothetically, volunteer to spend 3 hours collecting donations for the American Cancer Society (ACS). Three days later, someone else (not the original researcher) called and asked whether they would actually like to help collect donations. Those who had been asked (and agreed to) the hypothetical scenario were 700% more likely to agree to help than those asked directly!
How does the foot-in-the-door technique influence obedience to authority?
We often see a gradual escalation of obedience. Recall the Milgram experiments: people weren’t likely to go to the highest shock level right at the beginning. Initial requests may often be quite benign, meaning we’re not likely to encounter a lot of resistance to the action. Only after the person has acknowledged the legitimate authority of the person making the request, and decided to obey them, does the person start to make more alarming requests (e.g. administer painful shocks). In order to escalate, people have come up with justifications for their behaviour (deny free choice, emphasize positive implications of what they’re doing, etc.) in order to reduce their dissonance.
How can we tell if someone is experiencing cognitive dissonance versus self-perception?
- One key question: is the behaviour within the person’s latitude of rejection or latitude of acceptance?
- In the diagram, A is your attitude and you feel positively about the scenario, and there would be a range of scenarios that fall into your latitude of acceptance. Thus, everything else falls into your latitude of rejection. If you do a behaviour (B2) that isn’t completely aligned with your attitude, but still falls into your latitude of acceptance, you’ll shift your attitude to get rid of the discrepancy.
- For example, if you only kind of like a charity but then go and donate $1000 the charity, you’ll probably change your attitude and believe that you like the charity a lot more.
- On the other hand, if you performed a behaviour that’s in your latitude of rejection (B2), then you’ll experience dissonance because it’s so discrepant with your attitude.
