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
  1. Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1957.
  2. 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.
  3. 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