2 - Psych 160 - 8

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Cognitive dissonance theory (festinger)

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• The theory that inconsistencies among a person’s thoughts, sentiments, and actions create an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that leads to efforts to restore consistency
o Study – after placing a bet at the track, people are more likely to concentrate on the positive features of the horse they bet on and to downplay any negative features. This rationalization process gives them greater confidence in the choice they made.
o Voters express greater confidence in their candidates whem they are interviewed after they have voted and are leaving the polling station than when they are interviewed approaching it
o Decisions evoke dissonance and dissonance reduction, but these processes can occur both before and after decisions are made
o Study (aronson & mills) – the boring and disappointing sex discussion only produced dissonance for those who had undergone a severe initiation to join the group (saying obscene words outloud vs innoncuous onces). When the experimenters asked the participants at the end of the study to rate the quality of the discussion on a number of scales, those in the severe condition rated it more favorably than those in the other 2 conditions
o Study (cooper) – the need to justiy the high price that one pays in psychotherapy appears to be an important component of its success—or, at any rate, of people’s evaluations of its success. <comparison of a standard treatment of those suffering from an inability to be assertive with a bogus therapy that consists of physical exercise>>both therapies were effective since articipants in each of the 2 conditions were more insistent on receiving the extra $1 than articipants in a control condition, but the standard therapy was not significantly more effective than cooper’s bogus exercise therapy.
o Study – compared to those who had just written an essay consistent with their prior attitudes, those who had written a counter-attitudinal essay performed better on the easy task and worse on the difficult task. As dissonance theory predicts, it seems that acting at variance with one’s true beliefs does indeed generate arousal

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Induced (forced) compliance

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• Subtly compelling individuals to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values, which typically leads to dissonance and often to a change in their original attitudes or values in order to reduce their dissonance.
o Core idea behind Lyndon Johnson’s stratagem: by having doubters in his administration give press conferences in which they publicly defended the administration’s position, the inconsistency between their private doubts and their public comments led them to dispel their doubts
o Study (festinger & carlsmith) – participants engaged in a very boring experiment for an hour (loading spools on a tray over and over, turning pegs a quarter at a time). Those in the control condition were interviewed and of course gave low ratings of their enjoyment. Participants in the two other conditions were told that the experiment was about how people’s performance on a task is influenced by their expectations about it beforehand and these participants were led to believe they were in the control “no expectation” condition. Experimenter explained that the next participant was about to show up and needed to be told that the study was interesting. This was usually done, the experimenter explained, by a confederate posing as a participant. But the confederate was absent, putting the experimenter in a bit of a jam. Would you the experimenter tell the next participant that the experiment is interesting? The xperimenter offered the participant either $1 or $20 for doing so. Results: this lieing would produce dissonance for those participants who were given only $1>their words were inconsistent with their beliefs and $1 wasn’t enough to justify their lie. Those given $20 could at least tell themselves, that yes, they did lie, but they were justified in doing so because the pay was so good and the lie was of little consequence. Participatns in the $1 condition reduced their dissonance, by changing their attitude about the tasks they performed.
o If you want to get people to do something and you want them to internaize the broader message or value behind what you have gotten them to do, then use the smallest amount of incentive or coercion necessary to get them to do it. If the incentives are barely sufficient (as in the $1 condition), people’s need to rationalize will tend to produce deep-seated attitude change in line with their behavior.
o Study (“forbidden toy” paradigm) – (aronson & carlsmith) – they predicted that this restraint from playing with the forbidden toy would produce dissonance, but only for the children in the mild threat condition. For them, the desirability of the toy wo uld be inconsistent with their not playing with it, an inconsistency that Aronson & carlsmith prediced tehc hildren would resolve by derogating the toy—by convincing themselves that it wasn’t such a great toy after all. As expected, the children in the severe threat condition either did not change their opinion of the forbidden toy or they liked it even more than beforehand. In contrast, many of those with the mild threat condition viewed it less favorably, and none viewed it more favorably. Thus, the threat of mild punishment can bring about psychological change, such that they will no longer be tempted to do what you don’t want them to do.
o Study (lepper) – children who had been in the mild threat condition of the forbidden toy paradigm were sig less likely to give in to the temptation to cheat 3 weeks later – the apparently resolved the dissonance surrounding their earlier decision not to play with the attractive toy by playing up their moral vitures—by concluding something like “I’m a good kid, I do what I’m told, I don’t cheat.”

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Self-affirmation

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• Taking stock of one’s good qualities and core values, which can help a person cope w/ threats to self-esteem
o Study (steele) – asked science and business ma jors at U of Washington to participate in an experiment using the standard free-choice paradigm. In a control condition, both groups showed the usual dissonance effect of finding hidden attractions in the chosen alternative and hidden flas in the unchosen alternative. But in another condition, the participants put on whit elab coats before rendering their final evaluations. Steel prediced that wearing a lab coat would affirm an important identity for the science majors but not for the business majors. The results supported his predictions. The business majors reduced dissonance just as much as the control group; the science majors did not. If you feel good about yourself, you don’t have to sweat the small stuff like minor decisions.
o Different cultures find different circumstances dissonance-arousing: for independent Westerners it may be prompted by a concern about the ability of the self to make an adequate choice that reflects well on one’s decisiveness; for Easterners and perhaps other interdependent peeps, it may be prompted by a concern about the ability of the self to make choices that would be approved by others

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Self-perception theory

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• A theory that people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and inferring what their attitudes must be
o It works like social perception: people come to understand themselves and their attitudes in the same way that they come to understand others and their attitudes
o Bem argues that people in the cognitive dissonance experiments are not troubled by any unpleasant state of arousal lie dissonance; they merely engage in a dispassionate inference process. They don’t change their attitudes in these studies, but rather they infer what their attitudes must be.

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Theory of planned behavior

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• The successor to the theory of reasoned action that maintains that the best predictors of deliberate behavior are people’s attitudes toward specific behaviors, their subjective norms, and their beliefs about whether they can successfully perform the behavior in question

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Theory of reasoned action

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• A theory that maintains that people’s deliberate behavior can be accurately predicted by knowing their attitudes toward specific behaviors and their subjective norms
o It assumes that people quite consciously and deliberately choose to act in certain ways.
o Subjective norms=their sense of whether others will (or will not) approve of that course of action
o Study – the mother’s attitudes were sig predictors of their initial intentions to breast-feed or bottle-feed their babies, and of their subsequent decisions to breast-feed or not