19.3: Insufficient Justification and Induced Compliance

These experiments illustrate the first of three types of insufficient justification effects that we will consider in this chapter. It is sometimes known as the insufficient justification through induced compliance paradigm of dissonance reduction.

In both studies, subjects were induced to do things that they didn’t really want to do. The experimenter got them to engage in “counter-attitudinal” behavior (i.e., to do things that ran counter to their attitudes—like telling a lie). But in each study, half of the subjects were induced to do so with what seemed to them like very weak justification. These subjects could not find a good external justification for doing what they did, and this produced cognitive dissonance between the counter-attitudinal behavior and the attitude itself. Since the subject could not go back in time and undo the behavior, the only way to reduce this dissonance was to modify their attitudes so that they become more consistent with telling the people outside that the experiment was interesting (the task wasn’t really that boring).

Such shifts in attitude are known as insufficient justification effects, because they arise when justification or coercion is so small that it seems to the subject insufficient to justify their behavior. Thus, subjects seemed to find $1 an insufficient justification to lie, and to find eating grasshoppers at the behest of someone they didn’t like an insufficient justification for eating them.

Note that the justification is in fact sufficient to get the subject to do something they don’t want to do (since most of them did eat grasshoppers or lie). But later it seemed so mild that it was difficult for the subject to realize that this was what had led them to do what they did. They saw the justification as insufficient. They were subtly pushed to do something, but it felt to them like they freely chose to do it.

Not all examples of attitude change in response to induced compliance are trivial. For example, European-American students were asked to write essays in support of large scholarships for minority students (which many of them opposed). Half of the subjects were told that the exercise was voluntary (low external incentive). The other half were told that it was required (high external incentive). The subjects with the high external incentive didn’t change their attitudes about affirmative action, but the subjects with a low external incentive developed more positive attitudes to minority students. Similar results have been found for attitudes toward many other topics, including police brutality and the legalization of marijuana.

When people experience cognitive dissonance, they will typically try to modify the inconsistent element that is least resistant to change. So, although one of Zimbardo’s subjects could theoretically reduce dissonance by denying that she ate the grasshoppers, it is obvious that she just did, and so it is easier to change her attitude about eating grasshoppers. Again, deeply held views that enhance one’s self-esteem will be more resistant to change than many of our more peripheral, less deeply held attitudes.

Insufficient justification effects leading to attitude change have been found in a very wide range of conditions. They are especially strong when the following conditions are met (but there is good evidence that dissonance and attempts to reduce it can arise even when they are not met).

1. The person sees the counter-attitudinal behavior as freely chosen (if it was coerced, then the coercion would explain the behavior).
2. The behavior could be foreseen to have some bad consequence.
3. The person sees themselves as responsible for these consequences.

An Alternative Explanation: Self-perception Theory

Daryl Bem proposed an alternative account of such phenomena. He argued that people discover their own attitudes and emotions partly by observing how they themselves behave. When internal cues are ambiguous or hard to interpret, we are in much the same position as an outside observer who is trying to interpret us.

According to Bem, subjects in the two experiments inferred their attitudes by observing their own behavior. Thus, subjects paid $20 inferred that they lied because they were well paid. But subjects paid $1 inferred that they said what they did because they believed it (since there being no strong external reasons to justify it). It remains a matter of controversy whether Bem’s account or dissonance theory’s account provides a better explanation of these two experiments (there is some evidence that Bem’s theory is right about certain types of cases and dissonance theory is right about others).

We won’t worry about this issue here, however, since the phenomena themselves are what matter for our study of reasoning. We will speak of these sorts of results as dissonance results, and we will see that in many cases it is quite plausible to suppose that peoples’ aversion to perceived inconsistency plays an important role in their thought and behavior.

Prohibition

A related type of insufficient justification involves prohibition. In a 1963 study, Aronson and Carlsmith told nursery-school children that they could not play with an attractive toy. Half the children were threatened with a mild punishment if they played with the toy; the other half were threatened with a more severe punishment. Later the children in the mild threat condition valued the toy less than the children in the severe threat condition.

Dissonance theory’s explanation is that the children in the severe threat condition had a very good external justification not to play with the toy. They could have said to themselves: I like the toy, but I don’t want to be punished and that is why I’m not playing with it. But the children in the low threat condition couldn’t reason this way. The threat was very mild, and so it provided insufficient justification for avoiding the toy. This led to dissonance: I like the toy; I play with toys that I like; but I’m not playing with this one. They reduced this dissonance by devaluing the toy. (“It’s really not that attractive after all.”) What implications might this have for getting children—or adults—to change their attitudes?