8a. Festinger

2 uniformity of opinions in friendship groups

1. Social comparison theory

2. Cognitive dissonance theory

Cognitive dissonance

Conflicting cognitions create a motivational state, and this state is aversive, and creates a need to reduce dissonance

4 strategies to reduce dissonance

1. Add consonant cognitions and/or make them more important

2. Subtract dissonant cognitions and/or make them less important

3. Change attitudes/behaviour

4. Avoid dissonant cognitions

2 hypotheses of when the prophecy fails study

1. The publicly stated belief in the prophecy will be held on to, and will increase in importance → this will be expressed in proselytizing and recruitment of new members

2. The fact that the prophecy failed will be downplayed and “explained away”

Method of study → when the prophecy fails

Festinger and colleagues decided to study the Seekers through participant observation, infiltrating the group by pretending to be new converts → group leader: Dorothy Martin = Festinger gave her the pseudonym Marian Keech in his publication

Results of the study → when the prophecy fails

• Following the failed prophecy, the group begins to proselytize and recruit new members (with little success)

• They were able to generate a great deal of public interest by contacting various newspapers

• Thus, their efforts to reduce dissonance seemed to work in the short term…

• But when recruitment failed, so did the group

Conclusions of the study → when the prophecy fails

• “When prophecy fails” was able to correctly predict the behaviour of the Seekers

• The study shows in a real-world setting how powerful the theory of cognitive dissonance is

• Next step: Festinger wanted to back this up with experimental evidence

2 hypothesis of the induced compliance study

1. When behaviour openly contradicts a private attitude, the attitude will be changed (as it is easier to do so)

2. The need to change the attitude depends on the relevance of the behaviour-based cognition → to the extent that the behaviour-based cognition can be explained by other factors (i.e., subtract dissonant cognitions), the need to change the attitude-based cognition is reduced

Method of study → induced compliance

• Inconsistent attitudes = Cognition 1: “This task is boring” → Participants were given an extremely tedious task. They were provided with a rectangular board with 48 wooden pieces in rows

• Inconsistent Attitudes = Cognition 2: “I just told someone this is a fun and exciting task” → The experimenter tells participants that they are in the “control group” of an experiment about the effect of expectations on performance. The “experimental” group is supposedly told that the task is fun by a confederate.

• Incentive = The experimenter says he can pay the participant for being the “confederate” → Low reward condition: $1 / High reward condition: $20 / Control condition: No request to tell a lie

How did they measure attitude → induced compliance

Participants were asked to go to the secretary’s office after having talked to the other “participant” → attitude questionnaire (supposedly to assess experiment participation)

Result of the study → induced compliance

Individuals who are persuaded to lie without having sufficient justification will experience cognitive dissonance and subsequently change their attitudes to align with their behavior

Debate and controversy → mental rehearsal

• Janis & King (1954): Role-playing or improvising can lead to opinion change (self-persuasion) through:

  • Active creation of arguments for a particular position

  • Being rewarded through a sense of accomplishment/success

• Found no effect when a prepared communication was used and the participant was unhappy with their performance

• Festinger & Carlsmith: need to differentiate cognitive dissonance from argument generation

  • Reduce active reasoning by telling them the lie they need to tell

  • Give justification via monetary reward

  • What about the control group?

Debate and controversy → replicability

Hardyck & Braden (1962):

• Prophecy of nuclear devastation, with specific prophecy of event in 1962

• 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 (in line with cognitive dissonance predition) but they did not proselytize

• Possible reason: Different social context (bigger, more highly regarded than Seekers)

Debate and controversy → underlying mechanism (mediators)

• Festinger provided no evidence to support the idea that cognitive dissonance is a drive-like state

• Follow-up research, however, supported the idea:

  • Physiological changes (e.g., EEG, SCR) and psychological discomfort produced by counter-attitudinal statements can be measured

  • It is possible to increase (or decrease) dissonance through drugs that increase (or decrease) arousal (Cooper et al., 1978)

  • Dissonance-produced attitude change can be eliminated by getting people to misattribute their arousal (Zanna & Cooper, 1974)

Debate and controversy → necessary conditions (moderators)

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)

• The behaviour needs to have consequences (e.g., Cooper & Worchel, 1970)

Debate and controversy → theory developments

• Dissonance is a state of uncomfortable arousal that occurs when a person accepts responsibility for bringing about unwanted consequences (Cooper & Fazio, 1984)

• Dissonance occurs when one’s self-esteem has been threatened by inconsistent cognitions (Aronson, 1992)

• Dissonance occurs when people assess the consequences of behaviour against some self-standard and are found wanting (Cooper & Stone, 2001)

Impact → one-two punch

• Festinger et al.’s (1956) work propelled dissonance into the forefront of social psychology

  • somewhat ironically, dissonance research became a primarily experimental field

  • It was the combination of “When Prophecy Fails” and the induced compliance study that made dissonance have an immediate impact on social psychology

  • And dissonance was highly generative

Impact → effort justification

Aronson & mills (1959) found that people like a group more the more they suffer to join it (e.g. hazing, initiation rites)

Application in therapy

Lepper & Greene (1975) found that high external rewards lowered intrinsic motivation in children to engage in the rewarded behaviour

Application in education

External reward schemes should be used for behaviour that is not already intrinsically motivated; needs to be specific for each child

Impact → post-decision dissonance

Brehm (1956) gave a group of women free choice of what appliance to take home as a gift → the one chosen was evaluated higher and those not chosen evaluated lower compared with the pre-choice evaluation

Application in marketing

Providing customers with consonant information and helping them to undermine dissonant information can increase purchase satisfaction

Impact → forbidden toy paradigm

Aronson & Carlsmith (1962) found that children devalued an attractive toy if they refrained from playing with it after receiving a low threat vs a high threat of punishment for playing with that toy