*Social PsychNumero TROIS!

*The Need for Cognitive

Dissonance

*Read pages 318-320

*This should hopefully clarify the idea of cognitive dissonance.

*What to Know

*Cognitive Dissonance

*Post-Decision Dissonance

*Justification of Effort

*What are three ways we are likely to reduce dissonance?

*Festinger Study on Cognitive Dissonance

*Festinger's (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance).

*Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance etc.

*Back to our famous example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition).

*Attitudes may change because of factors within the person. An important factor here is the principle of cognitive consistency, the focus of Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory starts from the idea that we seek consistency in our beliefs and attitudes in any situation where two cognitions are inconsistent.

*When someone is forced to do (publicly) something they (privately) really don't want to do, dissonance is created between their cognition (I didn't want to do this) and their behavior (I did it).

*Forced compliance occurs when an individual performs an action that is inconsistent with his or her beliefs.

*The behavior can't be changed, since it is already in the past, so dissonance will need to be reduced by re-evaluating their attitude to what they have done.

*THIS HAS BEEN PROVEN IN AN EXPERIMENT – THE ONE WE WATCHED YESTERDAY!

*AIM

*Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) investigated if making people perform a dull task would create cognitive dissonance through forced compliance behavior.

*METHOD

*In their laboratory experiment, they used 71 male students as participants to perform a series of dull tasks (such as turning pegs in a peg board for an hour).

*They were then paid either $1 or $20 to tell a waiting participant (a confederate) that the tasks were really interesting. Almost all of the participants agreed to walk into the waiting room and persuade the confederate that the boring experiment would be fun.

*RESULTS

*When the participants were asked to evaluate the experiment, the participants who were paid only $1 rated the tedious task as more fun and enjoyable than the participants who were paid $20 to lie.

*CONCLUSION

*Being paid only $1 is not sufficient incentive for lying and so those who were paid $1 experienced dissonance. They could only overcome that dissonance by coming to believe that the tasks really were interesting and enjoyable. Being paid $20 provides a reason for turning pegs and there is therefore no dissonance.

*CRITICAL EVALUATION

*It tends to be a feeling or perception – so it is hard to measure.

*There are also individual differences in whether or not people act as this theory predicts.

*Highly anxious people are more likely to do so. Many people seem able to cope with considerable dissonance and not experience the tensions the theory predicts.

*Ways to Reduce Dissonance

*Justification of Effort

*Hazing…

“Justification of Effort” pg. 319

*Justification of Effort

*This theory is clearly implicated in the effect of rites of passage and hazing rituals on group solidarity and loyalty. The hazing rituals, prevalent in military units, sports teams and Academic fraternities and sororities, often include demanding and/or humiliating tasks which lead (according to dissonance theory) the new member to increase the subjective value of the group. This contributes to his/her loyalty and to the solidarity of the entire group.

Obscene and sexually explicit words

*Aronson and Mills (1959) Famous Experiment on Justification of Effort

Mild andTame words

Boring on mating

*Aronson and Mills Study

*One of the first and most classic examples of effort justification is Aronson and Mills's study.[2]

*A group of young women who volunteered to join a discussion group on the topic of the psychology of sex were asked to do a small reading test to make sure they were not too embarrassed to talk about sexual-related topics with others.

*The mild-embarrassment condition subjects were asked to read aloud a list of sex-related words such as prostitute or virgin. The severe-embarrassment condition subjects were asked to read aloud a list of highly sexual words (e.g. f*ck, c*ck) and to read two vivid descriptions of sexual activity taken from contemporary novels.

*All subjects then listened to a recording of a discussion about sexual behavior in animals which was dull and unappealing. When asked to rate the group and its members, control and mild-embarrassment groups did not differ, but the severe-embarrassment group's ratings were significantly higher.

* This group, whose initiation process was more difficult (embarrassment equalling effort), had to increase their subjective value of the discussion group to resolve the dissonance.

*Other Ideas

*People do not value what they do not pay for.