A Universal Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
In this paper, the "classic" study of Leon Festinger and the
subsequent Cognitive Dissonance theory are rexamined in the context of
cultural psychology. In other words, the issue being addressed is
that of the universal validity of Cognitive Dissonance theory and its
findings, in light of more recent research on cultural variations in
behvavior.
Introduction & Hypothesis
In his book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Leon
Festinger proposes a theory to explain attitude changes
resulting from an internal cognitive inconsistency. In a
nutshell, changes in behavior and attitude come about in a
simple three-stage manner. First, a contradiction within an
individual's self concept (for instance, hypocritical behavior
in which an action is inconsistent with a held belief) leads
to a state of discomfort. Second, this uncomfortable state of
dissonance is aversive; in other words, there is a motivation
and drive to reduce the discomfort caused by this
state. Finally, in an attempt to reduce the dissonance and
increase consonance, or internal consistency, a behavior or
attitude is changed so that the individual's behavior and
attitude are once again mutually congruent.
To prove this theory, Festinger and Carlsmith, in their 1959
study, examined what can be considered to be the "insufficient
justification" aspect of cognitive dissonance theory: people
are less likely to change their attitudes or behaviors in an
effort to reduce dissonance if the dissonance can be
attributed to an external source. In this case, the
incongruence is no longer purely an internal thing; instead,
the dissonance is caused externally (and thus, nothing
internal needs to be amended to reduce it). In short, with
sufficient justification for a contradictory behavior, the
behavior is no longer seen as incongruent with the individual
attitude, and as such, there will be considerably less
dissonance felt (and hence, less attitude change) than if this
external justification did not exist.
In general, though, it should be noted that this theory is
quite dependent on an internal self-contradiction being
uncomfortable and aversive; the drive to reduce this
discomfort is the main motivation for the consequent change in
behavior or attitude. In this case, a problem arises if
someone is not bothered by an internal contradiction. In other
words, if it were possible for someone to have a contradictory
self-concept without feeling in a state of dissonance (namely,
if the contradictory state is not painful or aversive), then
there would be no drive or motivation to reduce this
dissonance, and therefore, in the paradigm of Festinger and
Carlsmith's experiment as outlined above, there will be no
attitude change, regardless of any variation in the degree of
external justification. The only question remaining is that of
what type of person (self-concept) would not be in an
uncomfortable state of dissonance following an internal
contradiction.
Research by Peng and Nesbitt has found that dialectical
thinkers, specifically (in their studies) Chinese people, all
else being equal, prefer contradictions to "conventional
logic." For instance, in these studies, the Chinese subjects
preferred proverbs with dialectical or contradictory morals to
those where a moral was singular and definite. The converse
was true for the American (western thought) subjects in these
studies. The finding of interest from their article (1999)
relates to judgments and reactions to contradictory
information (748-750). In this study, it was found that when
presented with one piece of information (i.e. one argument on
one side of an issue), both American and Chinese subjects
rated the plausibility of that one argument in more or less
the same manner. However, when presented with two
contradictory pieces of evidence on the same topic (i.e. that
one argument, and another arguing for the opposite), there was
a divergence in the behavior of the subjects, split by
nationality: whereas the American subjects exhibited a
distinct polarization effect (the argument individually seen
as more probable individually (of the two) was now seen as
even more probable than before), the Chinese subjects, after
seeing both sets of contradictory evidence, reported an equal
plausibility for both statements (the plausibility was
objectively higher than the individually less plausible one
and less than the individually more plausible one).
One of the explanations for this difference draws upon an
explanation of the Chinese subjects holding a "dialectic
epistemology, which advocates tolerance of seeming
contradiction" as "both sides of a contradiction may be right
and...the truth lies between the two perspectives" (Peng &
Nisbett 1999, 749). An implication which may be drawn from
this finding, then, is that American subjects (or at a broader
level, people of Western thought and epistemology), in the
face of a contradiction, tend to augment the magnitude of the
differences between the conflicting sides. On the other hand,
Chinese subjects (of a more dialectical thought and
epistemology) would reach a compromise between the two pieces
of conflicting information, attributing equal plausibility to
both sides. Generalizing these results, it can be said that
western thinkers highlight the differences between two sides
of a contradiction while more dialectic thinkers more readily
make concessions on both sides and look for the similarities.
With this in mind, perhaps it would be the dialectical thinker
who would not encounter an internal state of dissonance upon a
contradiction in his behavior and his actions. Considering
these subjects have been shown to be more tolerant of
contradictions, it is likely that even at the seemingly
unconscious level of discomfort implicitly required in
Festinger's theory, there would not be enough of a dissonant
or aversive state to drive a need to change one's attitude in
the face of an incongruity in attitude and behavior. It is
therefore posited in this paper that those of a dialectical
epistemology, in the face of a situation similar to the one
used by Festinger and Carlsmith eliciting a cognitive
dissonant state, will exhibit much less cognitive dissonance,
and correspondingly, less change in attitude in that
situation.
Method
To accurately measure the degree of one's dialecticism is not as
simple as say, measuring one's heart rate. Additionally, an
experimenter cannot just arbitrarily divide subjects by nationality
and assume that this will create a distinction between those of
western ideology and those of a more dialectic epistemology, for
there may be many Americans who are dialectic as well as many Chinese
who have a Western mind-set. Therefore, the experiment will first
involve a questionnaire or survey to assess each subject's degree of
dialecticism. This survey will involve a series of situations,
followed by the presentation of two conflicting, but feasible,
statements about it. After the presentation of the two statements,
the survey will require the subject to rank the plausibility of each
statement on a scale from 1 to 10 (with 10 being most plausible). Of
course, these numbers are meaningless without a control group to rate
the plausibility of the statements individually. So an additional
subject pool (for the control group) will be needed to take these
surveys, but will only receive one out of the two statements for each
situation for analysis and plausibility judgment.
Upon completion of the survey, the rest of the experiment will follow
much like Festinger and Carlsmith's (1959) original study, but with a
few twists. Subjects (actually, only one real subject and a number
(three or four) of confederates) will be taken into a room where they
will be briefed on the nature of the study. Subjects will be thanked
for taking their time to come participate in a study which seeks to
find a connection between speech patterns and ways of resolving
situations (hence the survey) as they relate to the speed with which
they can process information. Of course, this is all fake.
When the subject enters the experiment room, he is seated at a table,
and sitting before him on that table is a big shoebox full of tiny
cut-out slivers of paper, each containing a random character string
of five characters. There are literally tens of thousands of these in
the box. The subject (and the confederates who appear to be other
subjects) is told that he has an hour to alphabetize as many of the
random phrases as possible. The goal of the study, he is told, is to
see how many he can accurately put in order in one hour. At this
point the experimenter leaves and everyone gets busy to the (tedious)
task at hand.
After the hour passes, the experimenter returns to inform them that
the task is over and thanks them for their participation. Suddenly,
someone (yet another confederate) comes to the experimenter to let
him know that someone is on the phone for him. The experimenter
apologizes, says he will be right back, and leaves, apparently to
tend to the phone call. In the meantime, one confederate starts to
comment about how boring the task was. Another confederate disagrees
and gives reasons as to why it was interesting and fun. A debate
should start, and any participation by the real subject is fine. A
few minutes later, the experimenter returns, looking distraught,
saying that he has just been called away on an emergency and that
while he can pay off these subjects and/or give them whatever credit
they need for the study, he would like to know if they could give the
pre-study overview to the next groups of subjects, offering them
extra money to do the talk. The experimenter will claim that there
are exactly as many groups as there are "subjects" in this current
study. Further, he pleads with them to make the experiment sound
interesting, to maintain the scientific validity of the data. All the
confederates agree and are escorted away, apparently off to other
rooms, each to talk to a next group of subjects. The one real
subject, hopefully under influence of peer pressure, will also agree,
and accept an extra monetary reward for doing so (the subject gets
either an extra $1 or $50 and pockets it there on the spot).
The subject is escorted into a room where there are three or four
"subjects" (all confederates who are to assess how convincing he is
at selling the experiment) waiting, and he should proceed to explain
the nature of the task. As in the Festinger study, one of the "next
subjects" will mention that he has heard the task to be boring, to
which the subject should object and provide reasons for the task
being fun and enjoyable. Finally, the subject, now thinking he is
done with everything there is, must make one last stop to get his
payment for having participated in the study. He is instructed to go
to a "main desk" where a secretary-type gives him a questionnaire to
fill out along with a receipt to sign to ensure the transfer of the
extra money (the secretary will attribute this to being another
"paperwork" nightmare). This questionnaire will contain the real
experimental data. It will ask the subject to rate, on a scale of 1
to 10 (10 being the most enjoyable) how enjoyable the task was, and
if he would something similar in the future, should the opportunity
arise. It is the subject's responses to these questions about the
nature of the task that will ultimately be used in determining any
attitude change. This final survey will be matched with the initial
survey to obtain the results.
Subject Pool
Subjects will be college students of any and all nationalities who
are willing to participate. Ideally, they should be students who are
not familiar with the work of Leon Festinger, so perhaps students of
an introductory psychology class will suffice. In addition, it may be
probabilistically beneficial, since this was alluded to in the
introduction and in Peng and Nisbett's prior study on contradiction
reasoning, to focus on Chinese students (both in China and the United
States) and American students. However, the nature of this experiment
is to measure attitude change in relation to amount of dialecticism,
so the subject pool should not exclude members of other ethnicities.
Fake Results & Discussion
It is hypothesized that dialecticism will be negatively correlated
with attitude change in the low-justification condition. In other
words, people who think dialectically, regardless of the experimental
manipulation of external justification, will rate the enjoyment of
the task around the same. On the ten point scale mentioned above in
the method section, the average amount of enjoyment reported by the
non-dialectic, low-justification ($1 condition) should be around
5.73; for the non-dialectic, high-justification, around 1.17; and for
dialectic, independent of justification condition, around 3.72 (maybe
the low-justification group would be 3.98 and the high-justification
group would be 3.62, but this would be statistically insignificant).
The extremely low average rating in the
high-justification condition among non-dialectic subjects, as
well as the way the dialectic subjects' average ratings are
somewhere in the middle, can be explained by the one major
procedural change in this experiment from Festinger's
original. In this experiment, the subject is placed in a group
discussion setting with what he thinks are other subjects (the
confederates) right after the completion of the task,
discussing how boring or entertaining it was. The
non-dialectic thinkers exhibit a typical polarization
response: they believe even more strongly than before that the
task was boring. The dialectic thinkers, who may have
initially viewed the task as mind-numbingly dull, after
hearing a confederate argue that the task was indeed fun and
exciting, will take that into consideration and perhaps
believe that the task is not as dull as initially thought, but
not quite as exciting as the confederate thinks in a form of
compromise.
The high ratings from the low-justification non-dialectic thinkers
merely reinforce the findings of Festinger and Carlsmith; these
subjects experience the cognitive dissonant situation of believing
that the task is boring, while engaging in the conflicting action of
telling a group of people how fun and exciting it is. Without any
other reason for engaging in the activity of saying the task was fun
(low justification), they change their attitudes to reduce this
internal mental disparity, and believe that the task was indeed much
more fun than it was.
As expected, the dialectic thinkers were not affected by the
cognitive dissonance. Regardless of the amount of justification, all
dialectic thinkers rated the task at the same level of entertainment.
Alternative Explanations and Potential Pitfalls
One weakness of this study is that it still relies on self-report
data from the subjects for the final data gathering. While at a first
glance, this may not seem to be such a big deal, this fact alone is
one of the main problems of the cross-cultural study by Peng and
Nisbett. When "dialectic thinkers" report an increased plausibility
of an otherwise commonly-held implausible statement in the light of
contradictory evidence, there are at least two causes for this.
First, it might be exactly as reported in the literature: that this
is a direct reflection of a differing belief, differing thought
processes. Alternatively, perhaps (as this is merely a self-report)
these subjects have been brought up to behave this way. Internally,
they may feel as much discomfort as any ordinary western thinker (and
so, perhaps the internal aversive state of dissonance is a
universal); the only difference comes in they way these dialectic
thinkers are taught to express this discomfort. Whereas the western
thinkers, who are usually from a more individualistic culture which
emphasizes the development of the individual self, are more
encouraged to take pride in being different and hence, holding a
strong opinion, dialectic thinkers, often from a more collectivistic
culture which emphasizes the group, and being "one of the group,"
would be more encouraged to suppress any individual differences and
focus only on maintaining the equilibrium of the group. This might
explain why dialectic thinkers would report a "compromise" in the
presence of contradictory evidence -- it is not because they think
that way, but rather, it is what they report, out of a desire to not
threaten any other's beliefs.
Obviously, many subsequent studies must be done to examine the
universality of Festinger's theory. Future studies need to address
the distinction between reporting dissonance and actually
experiencing the discomfort associated with dissonance (as alluded to
in the last paragraph). As it is currently, even if the dialectic
subjects feel the aversiveness of a contradictory situation, perhaps
there is an even stronger cultural script which has been rehearsed in
their life which overpowers any drive to reduce this dissonance.
Also, future studies on this topic should do a better job in
isolating the source of the contradiction. This study has two
distinct sources: the group discussion, and the external
justification condition. Without isolating these two conditions, any
sort of dissonant influence discovered cannot be explicitly inferred
from either of the two, but rather, can only be concluded from the
combination of both.
Works Cited
- Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive
Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1957.
- Festinger, Leon, and James M. Carlsmith. "Cognitive Consequences of
Forced Compliance." Readings in Social Psychology. Ed. Wayne
A. Lesko. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2000. 104-112.
- Peng, Kaiping, and Richard E. Nisbett. "Culture, Dialectics, and
Reasoning About Contradiction." American Psychologist. 54.9
(1999): 741-754.
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Last modified: Sun Apr 30 13:33:47 PDT 2000