L5: Cognitive Dissonance

John B Watson

• Classical conditioning (inspired by Pavlov’s Dog)

• Felt behaviour should be statistically tested like other hard sciences

• Felt psychology should be an observational science

  • Can’t observe internal mental states

  • Behaviour

    • Function of environment

  • Responses to reinforcement

Radical’ Behaviourism

• Skinner (1904-1990): operant conditioning

• ‘Radical’ Behaviourism

  • Everything can be explained through behaviourism

  • Mental states don’t cause behaviour (if they exist at all)

• Just ‘explanations after the fact’

  • You ate because you were hungry, not because you ‘felt’ hungry

Explain the study on Cults which proves the reinforcement (behaviourism) can’t explain everything

When Prophecy Fails (Festinger et al., 1956)

• Doomsday cult predicted massive flood by 1954

  • Flood DOESNT arrive, how does the cult react?

• Most showed ‘increased fervor’ in their belief, especially among

  • Those with the deepest conviction

  • Those who most committed to action

  • Those with the most social support

• Greater ‘liking’ following negative reinforcement

  • Behaviourism can’t explain

• Must involve some sort of mental state occurring 

  • Something ‘unobservable’ at play

Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger)

• Consistency motivation

  • Avoid experience of inconsistency

• To reduce dissonance, alter attitudes (accommodation) and construals (assimilation)

Post-decisional Dissonance

• Suppose you have a tough time choosing between two alternatives X and Y

• If you choose X

  • You are now stuck with the negative side of X, while you don’t have the positive sides of Y (dissonance)

• So change attitudes to make you not want Y to decrease dissonance experiences

  • Imagine what you didn't chose as worse than your original appraisal

Post-decisional Dissonance: Free-Choice Paradigm

• Market research

  • Women rates 8 household items in terms of desirability (1 = least, 8 = most)

• ‘You can choose from 2 items’

  • High dissonance condition (2 desirable items) = Spreading of alternatives

Effort Justification Dissonance

• Let's say you have worked hard or suffered for something of indeterminate value 

• We don’t want to believe we have wasted our efforts (dissonance)

• Things we worked and suffered towards must be valuable

  • The greater the suffering, the higher the appraisal

Effort Justification Dissonance: Forbidden Fruit

• Children play with 5 toys

  • Told they could play with all toys expect for one toy (the one they ranked second most desirable)

• Rank all toys in terms of desirability

• Results

  • Increase in attractiveness for the Forbidden Toy 

  • This toy must be valuable if by playing with it I'm risking some serious punishment

Compliance Dissonance (Festinger and Carlsmith, 1959)

• Very boring task

• Asked Ps to lie to next Ps that the task was enjoyable and either given:

  • $1

  • $20 (to lie)

• Then asked to rate how enjoyable the task was

• Results

  • $1 condition rated task as more enjoyable

    • Convinced themselves it was as $1 not sufficient to lie about very boring task (experienced dissonance)

What’s a more basic theory than Dissonance Reduction for why attitudes change

Daryl Bem

• Altered attitudes is explaining behaviour after the fact

• No aversive arousal or altered cognitions

  • ‘Oh I said I enjoyed that task to I must have felt like I enjoyed that task’

What ‘kills’ the Dissonance effect

Misattribution of arousal

• Discomfort from dissonance - ‘I do feel weird, but it’s causued by that buzzing florescent lightbulb. Now I feel better!’

• When people misattribute their arousal to some other source

Is Dissonance Reduction motivated by Dissonance Arousal

Yes

• Can infer role of arousal by:

  • Making people aware they are aroused

  • Seeing if that extinguishes the dissonance effects

What did Elliot Aronson argue about dissonance

That it only occurs when self-concept is threatened

What study shows dissonance occuring when self-concept isn’t threatened

• Students argue in favour of weed legalization

• Either paid not much or a lot

• Three groups: already opposed, already in favour, neutral

• Results

  • Highest agreement shift in favour of weed legalization when Neutral audience for not much pay

Unconscious Dissonance Reduction

• Can dissonance be unconscious dissonance involved ego-defense’ following attitude/ behaviour mismatch

• Findings

  • Attitude change appears the same as not remembering the original attitude at all

    • Therefore likely an entirely unconscious process rather than efforts to repair a consciously threatened self-concept

Unconscious Dissonance Reduction: Anterograde amnesia

• P’s can’t form new conscious memories

• Free Choice Paradigm (rank, pick 1 or 2 pairs of similar rating to take home, rank again a week later)

• Results

  • P’s still show spreading of alternative (the one they didn’t choose) even though they can’t remember choosing it

Is cognitive dissonance an automatic process

Yes, cognitive dissonance is an automatic process