19.2: Cognitive Dissonance

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Leon Festinger devised the theory of cognitive dissonance to explain such phenomena. This theory was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, was studied less in the next two decades, and made a comeback in the 1990s. Festinger argued that when a person perceives inconsistencies among her actions, attitudes, and beliefs, she will experience an unpleasant motivational state that he called ‘cognitive dissonance’ (‘cognitive’ means ‘psychological’ and ‘dissonance’ means ‘disharmony’, so the idea is that the person feels a disharmony or conflict among their beliefs, attitudes, and the like). Dissonance is psychologically uncomfortable.

The notion of dissonance will be clearer if we contrast it with two other notions. Some of our actions and attitudes reinforce one another: you oppose gun control, and you belong to the NRA; you support campaign finance reform, and you voted for the candidate who supports it. Others are irrelevant to one another: you oppose gun control, and you brush my teeth. But some of our actions and attitudes are psychologically inconsistent: you believe smoking can kill you, but you smoke two packs a day; you think lying is wrong, but you lied through your teeth to get this job. Such inconsistency will often produce cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is an emotionally unpleasant state of tension that results from such perceived inconsistencies. For example, telling a lie to the waiting subjects (action) seems inconsistent with your view that you’re not the sort of person who would tell a lie unless there was a good reason to do so (belief).

Cognitive dissonance involves tension and discomfort, so people will try to eliminate, or at least reduce it. The way to reduce it is typically to modify some of one’s actions, beliefs, or attitudes. Since past actions have already occurred, and a person cannot change what has already been done, dissonance reduction will typically involve a change in attitude or beliefs. This will be easier to see if we consider how dissonance theory explains the two experiments described above.

How Dissonance Theory Explains the Experiments

In both experiments, subjects are induced to do something they don’t want to do. Eating grasshoppers is disgusting and lying to the person outside is wrong. To explain such phenomena, dissonance theory requires one additional assumption:

When we have strong external reasons or justification for doing something that we don’t approve of, we can explain why we did that thing by noting this justification.

Subjects in the high-reward condition of the second (boring task) experiment could reason this way (though they didn’t do so consciously): I told a lie. I think lying is wrong and I’m not the sort of person who lies without good reason. But sometimes there are good reasons. For example, it is acceptable to tell a little white lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings (“How do you like my new haircut?”). That wouldn’t really show that I’m deceitful. Similarly, in this case, I had a good external reason to tell a lie (the $20). In short, subjects in this condition could conclude that the lie didn’t really reflect badly on them, because they had a strong external justification ($20) to tell it.

But subjects in the low-reward condition didn’t have this out. They could only reason this way: I told a lie. I think lying is wrong and I’m not the sort of person who would tell a lie unless there was a good reason to do so. But I didn’t have a good reason ($1 isn’t enough to justify it). So, these subjects feel an inconsistency among their beliefs and actions: I lied; I wouldn’t lie without a good reason; I didn’t have a good reason. The result: cognitive dissonance.

Festinger reasoned that subjects who lied for $1 couldn’t really justify doing it for so little money. So, to avoid seeing themselves as deceitful—to make their action consistent with their attitudes—they (subconsciously) modified their attitude toward the experiment. It really wasn’t as boring as they originally thought.

The pattern of explanation of the second experiment is the same. Subjects who encountered the friendly experimenter had a good external justification for eating the grasshoppers. They were doing something to help a nice person that they liked. But subjects who had the unfriendly experimenter couldn’t justify their actions in this way. They were stuck with some dissonant views about themselves: I just ate those disgusting grasshoppers; I don’t do things like that without a good reason; I had no good reason to eat them. To reduce this inconsistency, they modified their attitude. The grasshoppers weren’t really that disgusting after all.

In this chapter, we will examine four types of situations where cognitive dissonance plays a role in our actions and thought. The first, which we have focused on thus far, involves induced compliance.