Festinger - cognitive dissonance Flashcards
Lecture 14 (16 cards)
Background - festinger
- PhD in child behaviour
- Assistant professor to Lewin on group dynamics
Background - research interests
- Festinger initially works on a quantitative model of decision making, statistical questions, lab work with rats
- At MIT he “became a social psychologist”
- Impact of architectural and ecological factors on student housing satisfaction for the university
- Propinquity effect - fester notices uniformity of opinions in friendship groups
Social comparison theory
Cognitive dissonance theory - Festinger suggested that a person’s subjective reality is dependent on the mental representations of everything around them
- Objective reality influences subjective reality but is not the same
- Subjective reality is the key to understanding human action
- Mental representations are cognitions
- Mental representations can be in conflict with each other
Background - cognitive dissonance
- Conflicting cognitions create a motivational state = dissonance
- This state is aversive, and creates a need to reduce dissonance
- Strategies to reduce dissonance:
Add consonant cognitions and/or make them more important
Subtract dissonant cognitions and/or make them less important
Change attitudes/behaviour
Avoid dissonant cognitions
Background - competing theories
- Balance theories - e.g. Heider, don’t predict which element will be changed or the strength of the motivation to change
- Learning theories - e.g. reinforcement, most popular theory about human behaviour and behavioural change at the time
Background - observing a phenomenon
Festinger notice that cults rarely change their beliefs even if faced with evidence against their prophecies
Study 1 - when prophecy fails
- Cognitive dissonance stemming from the conflict of
- Cognition 1 - the prophecy will come true, public statement of this belief in the face of derision from the community will make it extremely difficult to change this cognition
- Cognition 2 - the prophecy failed, proof in the form of no spaceship to the rescue and the world still intact the next day
Hypotheses:
4. The publicly stated belief in the prophecy will be held on to and will increase in importance, this will be expressed in proselytising and recruitment of new members
5. The fact that the prophecy failed will be downplayed and explained away
Method:
6. Festinger and colleagues decided to study the seekers through participant observation, infiltrating the group by pretending to be new converts
7. Group leader - dorothy martin, Festinger gave her the pseudonym marian keech in his publication
Results:
8. All messages about the cataclysm came in the form of automatic writing seances to the group leader
9. The group were given clear and detailed instructions about what to do in order to be able to board the waiting spacecraft at midnight on december 21st, instructions were followed and the group was ready
10. Following the failed prophecy, the group begins to proselytise and recruit new members (little success)
11. Able to generate a great deal of public interest by contacting various newspapers
12. Their efforts to reduce dissonance seemed to work in the short term, but when recruitment failed, so did the group
Conclusion:
13. “When prophecy fails” was able to correctly predict the behaviour of the seekers
14. The study shows in a real world setting how powerful the theory of cognitive dissonance is
Study 2 - induced compliance
Aim:
1. Experimental evidence for cognitive dissonance theory
2. Understanding compliance - what happens to cognitions when we do something we don’t believe in (behaviour is in conflict with attitudes), do incentives help people to reduce dissonance (effect of adding consonant cognitions)
Hypotheses:
3. When behaviour openly contradicts a private attitude, the attitude will be changed as it is easier to do so
4. The need to change the attitude depends on the relevance of the behaviour based cognition
5. To the extent that the behaviour based cognition can be explained by other factors, the need to change the attitude-based cognition is reduced
Role of incentives
6. Cognitive dissonance theory - the stronger an incentive to show counter-attitudinal behaviour, the weaker the attitude change (H2)
7. Reinforcement theory - the more a behaviour is rewarded by an incentive, the stronger the change in behaviour and attitudes
Method:
8. Inconsistent attitudes:
Cognition 1 - this task is boring - participants given an extremely tedious task, provided with rectangular board q=with 48 wooden pieces in rows, given instruction to turn each peg ¼ turn with right hand, turn them back, for an hour
Cognition 2 - i just told someone this is a fun and exciting task - the experimenter tells participants that they are in the control group on the effects of expectations on performance, experimental group is supposedly told that the task is fun by a confederate, experimenter asks participants to help out as a confederate and to tell the next “participant” that the task is fun and exciting
Incentive:
9. Experimenter says he can pay the participant for being the “confederate”, high reward $20, low reward $1, control condition not asked to lie
Attitude measure:
10. Participants asked to go to the secretary’s office after having talked to the other participant
11. Given attitude questionnaire
Debriefing:
Participants are fully debriefed about the study, including deception, by experimenter
results:
highest enjoyment of task with low reward
Debate and controversy - replicability Hardyck and Braden
- prophecy of nuclear devastation with specific prophecy of event in 1962
- 29 families (135 people) build shelters and stayed underground for 42 days
- in response to failed prophecy they changed the meaning of the prophecy to accommodate reality (in line with H1) but did not proselytize, possible due to different social context (bigger and more highly regarded than seekers)
Debate and controversy - underlying mechanisms
- Festinger provided no evidence to support the idea that cognitive dissonance is a drive-like state
- Follow up research supported the idea:
physiological changes and psychological discomfort produced by counterattitudinal statements can be measured - it is possible to increase or decrease dissonance through drugs that change arousal
- dissonance -produced attitude change can be eliminated by getting people to misattribute their arousal
Debate and controversy - necessary conditions
Necessary conditions for attitudes to change after counter-attitudinal behaviour
1. People need to believe they had the choice to engage in the counter-attitudinal behaviour
2. The behaviour needs to have consequences
Debate and controversy - theory developments
- Dissonance is a state of uncomfortable arousal that occurs when a person accepts responsibility for bringing about unwanted consequences
- Dissonance occurs when one’s self-esteem has been threatened by inconsistent cognitions
- Dissonance occurs when people assess the consequences of behaviour against some self-standard and are found wanting
Impact and legacy - one two punch
- Festinger et al propelled dissonance into the forefront of social psychology
- Dissonance research became a primarily experimental field
- Combination of when prophecy fails and induced compliance that had the impact
- Dissonance highly generative
impact and legacy - effort justification
- Aronson and Mills - found that people like a group more the more they suffer to join it - application in therapy
- Lepper and Greene - sound 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 and legacy - post decision dissonance
- Brehm gave a group of women free choice of what appliance to take home as a gift, the chosen one 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 and legacy - forbidden toy paradigm
- Aronson and carlsmith - 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
- Application in education - mid punishment can be more effective than harsh punishment
debate and controversy - conclusion
- Festinger was pleased that dissonance theory was undergoing change
- All theories need to change
- Popular science book
