19.1: Two Striking Examples

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Last week you signed up to be a subject in a psychology experiment. Now, you walk into the psychology lab, sit down across the table from the experimenter, then notice a large plate of fried grasshoppers in front of you. After some initial discussion of other matters, the experimenter asks you to eat a few of the grasshoppers. What would you do?

The pressure to comply with experimenters in situations like this is much greater than is often supposed, and many of the subjects in this 1965 study by Philip Zimbardo and his coworkers ate several grasshoppers. But the experimenters manipulated what turned out to be a very interesting variable; they randomly assigned each of the subjects to one of two groups.

Nice-experimenter Group: In this condition, a warm, friendly experimenter nicely asked subjects to eat grasshoppers as a favor.

Cold-experimenter Group: In this condition, a cold, aloof experimenter pressured subjects to eat grasshoppers.

The subjects were later asked (by a third person) how much they liked the grasshoppers. No one was wild about them, but which group do you think disliked them the least? It turned out that the group that had been asked by the aloof experimenter had a more positive attitude toward eating the grasshoppers than the group that had been asked by the friendly experimenter. A 1959 study by Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith sheds some light on this puzzling outcome. They asked each of their subjects to perform a boring, repetitive, meaningless series of manual tasks—arranging and rearranging rings on spools—for an hour. They then asked each subject to go outside to the waiting room to tell the next subject how interesting and enjoyable the experiment was, and to remain on call to talk to other subjects about it, in case the experimenter’s assistant would be unable to do so. In other words, they asked the subjects to lie. The subjects were randomly assigned to two conditions:

High-Reward Group: Subjects in this condition were paid $20 to lie to the person waiting outside.

Low-Reward Group: Subjects in this condition were paid $1 to lie to the person waiting outside.

Subjects were later asked how much they had enjoyed the hour-long task. Now that you know the outcome of the grasshopper experiment, you may be able to predict what they said. The high-reward ($20) group said that the activity was very dull. It was dull, so no surprise there. But the low-reward ($1) group said that the task had been more interesting. What’s going on?

In each case, the group that had a strong external inducement to do something they didn’t want to do (eat grasshoppers, lie to the waiting subjects) didn’t change their original attitude (about eating grasshoppers or about how boring the task was). But the group that had a weak external inducement did change their attitude (the grasshoppers weren’t so bad; the task really wasn’t all that boring).