Download Reading 5

READING 5
Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance by Festinger & Carlsmith (1959)
Please refer to the printed reader, Readings in Social Psychology 3/e, for the text of this
article.
Overview
Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory states that people seek to maintain a consistency
between their beliefs and their actions―and that this motive can give rise to some
irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior. As discussed in Chapter 6 (Attitudes),
this theory predicts that under certain conditions, people who find themselves behaving in
ways that contradict their beliefs experience an unpleasant state of tension known as
cognitive dissonance. To reduce this tension, they often change their attitude to bring it in
line with their behavior, exhibiting a process of self-persuasion. The following study by
Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) represents the first controlled test of this important
theory. In this study, as you will see, people who were given little inducement to lie—
compared to those who were highly paid for it―come to believe that lie as a way to
justify their behavior.
Critical Thinking Questions
1. According to Festinger and Carlsmith, why did the offer of $20 reduce cognitive
dissonance?
2. According to Festinger and Carlsmith, subjects who were paid $1 to lie felt cognitive
dissonance between their actual experience and the lie they told, and they resolved this
dissonance by changing their perception of their experience. Why did they resolve
dissonance in this way? Are there other ways they could have reduced the dissonance?
3. What is the importance of the fact that the results from 11 subjects were excluded from
the analyses? Does this make the results of this experiment suspect?
4. How would self-perception theory described in Chapter 3 and Chapter 6 explain the
results of this experiment? How would self-affirmation theory described in Chapter 10
explain the results of this experiment.
5. How is this study related to the study described in Reading #1, in which children’s
intrinsic motivation was undermined by a reward? How would cognitive dissonance
theory explain the results of that study?
6. Do people often experience cognitive dissonance in their everyday lives? How do they
tend to resolve cognitive dissonance?
Answers to Critical Thinking Questions
1. Participants were placed in a situation where their attitudes and behavior were
inconsistent. One the one hand, they had just completed a task about which they had a
negative attitude (i.e., it was boring). On the other hand, they had just told a confederate
who they believed to be another participant that the task was fun. Absent sufficient
justification for having lied about the task, participants would likely experience cognitive
dissonance because of this inconsistency. But participants in the $20 condition had
sufficient external justification for lying: they were paid very well to do so. As a result,
these participants did not experience the same level of cognitive dissonance as
participants in the $1 condition because they could rationalize their inconsistent behavior
to be the result of the $20 payoff.
2. According to Festinger and Carlsmith, dissonance is an arousing and uncomfortable
state. Faced with the inconsistency between a negative attitude towards the peg-turning
task and having just told someone the task was fun, participants need to do something to
reduce their dissonance. Past behavior (i.e., lying) cannot be changed, but participants
can change their attitude about the task in order to bring it in line with their behavior.
That is what they seem to do in the $1 condition, reducing their dissonance by changing
their attitude. According to Chapter 6, there are also other ways to reduce dissonance,
including adding consonant cognitions, minimizing the importance of the conflict, and
changing perceptions of the behavior. In this study, for example, another way to reduce
dissonance would have been for participants to minimize the importance of the conflict
by convincing themselves that a little white lie told in the context of a research
experiment is not a big deal; after all, they were lying in order to help the experimenter.
3. The exclusion of these participants is not particularly problematic in interpreting the
findings and importance of this study. Four reasons are given for the exclusion of these
11 participants. Two of the reasons—suspicion about the true purpose of the experiment
and a refusal to lie to the confederate—occurred with comparable frequency across the $1
and $20 condition. Were this not the case, the results of the study could be called into
question because it would be unclear that the procedures and participant expectations
were standardized across conditions. But the lack of systematic differences by condition
renders participant exclusion on this basis relatively unimportant. The other two reasons
for exclusion were that participants either told the confederate that they were paid to lie,
or demanded the confederate’s phone number so they could call her afterwards to explain
the lie. Participants excluded for these reasons were all in the $1 condition. If anything,
this finding demonstrates the power of cognitive dissonance in that participants paid only
$1 were so bothered by their own inconsistency that they could not follow through with
the lie as promised. One could argue that the behavior of these participants provides
additional, yet anecdotal support for the authors’ predictions about dissonance.
4. Self-perception theory would suggest that participants inferred something about their
attitudes from observing their own behavior. In other words, unsure as to how they really
felt about the peg-turning task, participants would look to their subsequent behavior for
the answer. In the $20 condition, participants would likely conclude that they told the
confederate the task was fun because they were paid a lot of money to do so. As a result,
there is no reason to believe they had actually enjoyed the task. But in the $1 condition,
when there is insufficient justification to lie about the task, participants would assume
that they must have enjoyed the task because otherwise they would not have said they
did. Unlike dissonance theory, self-perception theory does not assume that inconsistency
leads to uncomfortable arousal. Self-affirmation theory suggests that in the wake of
dissonance, we often seek to affirm that we are good and worthwhile people. Selfaffirmation theorists would suggest that after lying, participants in the $1 condition would
likely to want to engage in prosocial behavior to make themselves feel better about their
dissonance. This would explain, for instance, why participants in the $1 condition were
more likely to agree to participate in a future experiment. By doing so, they could reduce
dissonance and affirm themselves to be good and helpful people.
5. Both this study and the Lepper et al. research investigate issues of justification for
behavior. In Lepper et al., children come to view extrinsic justification as the basis for
their behavior, and they become less likely than ever before to engage in that behavior
once the reward is taken away. Cognitive dissonance theory is best able to explain the
behavior of children who never had intrinsic motivation to engage in the target activity.
When these children were given rewards to engage in the activity, they may have
experienced dissonance because of the inconsistency between their attitudes and their
behavior. However, they could have viewed the external reward as sufficient justification
for their behavior, thereby allowing them to reduce their dissonance without changing
their attitude about the task. When the reward was taken away, their remaining negative
attitude towards the target activity would prevent them from engaging in it on their own
accord. Children who had a preexisting intrinsic motivation for the target activity may
have experienced dissonance when rewards led them to an increase in the behavior.
Faced with the inconsistent thoughts of “I feel personally motivated to engage in this
behavior” and “I engage in this behavior most frequently when others reward me for it,”
they may have felt the need to change their previous attitude and conclude that they only
engage in the behavior because of the reward.
6. Festinger and Carlsmith would suggest that, yes, people do often experience cognitive
dissonance in life. People often experience inconsistent attitudes or hold attitudes that are
inconsistent with their behaviors. People also experience dissonance when trying to
justify the effort they exert or the difficult decisions they make. Strategies for reducing
dissonance include changing your attitude, changing your perception of your behavior,
adding consonant cognitions, minimizing the importance of the conflict, and reducing the
perceived choice regarding the behavior. Whenever people are faced with the discomfort
of cognitive dissonance, they are motivated to do something to reconcile the
inconsistency.
Links For Further Investigation
For a site with extensive additional coverage of cognitive dissonance—including details
of the original Festinger and Carlsmith study, links to dissonance-related popular media
articles, and real-world examples—see http://cognitive-dissonance.wikiverse.org/.
Over the years, dissonance theory has been applied to a wide range of topics and
domains. The following article discusses the relevance of cognitive dissonance to issues
of foreign policy, national security, and confronting threats of terrorism:
http://www.perrspectives.com/articles/art_cogdis01.htm.