Lecture 2.4-2.5 – Flashcards

Once upon a time, there was a Jewish tailor who set up his business on the main street of a town that had an anti-Semitic gang. A bunch of kids who would visit the shop each day shouting "Jew! Jew!", in an effort to basically bother him and drive him out of town. Well, the tailor was bothered, but after several sleepless nights he finally devised a plan. The next time that the kids came to threaten him, the tailor announced that anyone who called him a Jew would get a dime. He then handed out dimes to each member of the gang. Pleased with their new incentive, the kids come back the next day, they're shouting "Jew! Jew!" and the tailor, smiling, gave each one a nickel, explaining that he could only afford five cents that day. Well, the gang left satisfied because after all, a nickel's a nickel. Then in the following day, the tailor gave out only pennies to each gang member, again, explaining that he couldn't afford more than that. Well, a penny wasn't much of an incentive, and the kids began to protest. When the tailor replied that they could take it or leave it, they decided to leave it, refusing to call him a Jew for only one penny. Problem solved. Now why would members of the gang harass the tailor for free, but not for a penny? According to Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, people are generally motivated to reduce or avoid psychological inconsistencies, so when the tailor announced that he was happy to be called a Jew, and when he changed the gangs motivation from anti-Semitism to monetary reward, he made it inconsistent or dissonance-arousing for the gang to please him without financial compensation. Without a sufficiently large payment, the kids could no longer justify behaving at variance with their attitudes, which were, of course, to upset the tailor, not to make him happy. (Lecture 2.4)

n the study by Merrill Carlsmith, 60 undergraduate students at Stanford were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions. In the $20 condition, participants were required to perform boring laboratory tasks for an hour, after which they were paid $20 to tell a waiting student that the tasks were interesting and enjoyable. The experimenter explained that a paid assistant normally performed that duty as part of the experiment, but that the assistant couldn't do it that day. In the $1 condition, students were paid $1 to do the very same thing. And there was also a control condition in which students simply engaged in the boring tasks. >> What were the results? Participants in the $20 condition and in the control condition later evaluated the experimental task as slightly negative, but participants in the $1 condition actually thought the tasks were fairly positive. Festinger and Carlsmith argued that students who were paid only a dollar to lie to another person had experienced cognitive dissonance. In this particular instance, the dissonant cognitions were the following: First, the tasks were extremely boring, and second, for only a dollar, I, an honest person, just told someone the tasks were interesting and enjoyable. Festinger proposed that people try whenever possible to reduce cognitive dissonance. He regarded dissonance as a negative drive state, as an unpleasant feeling or condition, and he hypothesized that people in that $1 condition would be motivated to reduce their feelings of dissonance. Now, of course, there wasn't much the students could do about that second thought. The fact is, they did tell another person that the task was enjoyable, and they did it for only a dollar, and they probably weren't going to change their view of themselves as honest, decent people. On the other hand, the dullness of the task afforded students some wiggle room. Dullness, you might say, is in the eye of the beholder, so according to Festinger and Carlsmith, people in the $1 condition later came to believe that the task was kind of fun in order to reduce the dissonance caused by lying to another person for only a dollar. In contrast, people in the $20 condition saw the experimental tasks for exactly what they were, crushingly dull. People in that experimental condition had no need to reduce dissonance, because they already had a good explanation for their behavior: they were paid $20.The bottom line is that cognitive dissonance theory has two main prongs. First, the act of holding two incompatible thoughts creates a sense of internal discomfort, or dissonance. And second, people try to reduce or avoid these feelings of tension whenever possible. (Lecture 2.4)

First, individuals come to know their own attitudes and emotions and other internal states partially by inferring them from observations of their own behavior and the circumstances in which their behavior occurs, and second, to the extent that internal cues are weak, ambiguous, or un-interpretable, the individual is functionally in the same position as an outside observer. It just so happens that the person you are observing is yourself. (Lecture 2.4)

Self-perception theory explains classic dissonance findings in terms of how people infer the causes of their behavior. It is essentially attributional in nature, whereas cognitive dissonance theory explains findings in terms of a natural tendency to reduce inner conflict, tension, dissonance. (Lecture 2.4)

The correct answer is "Students in the $1.00 condition." According to Leon Festinger and Merrill Carlsmith, students in the $1.00 condition experienced cognitive dissonance because they lied to another person for a relatively small amount of money. (Lecture 2.4)

Although there are many different flavors of cognitive dissonance, most situations fall into one of two general categories. The first is predecisional dissonance in which dissonance or the possibility of dissonance influences the decisions people make. So, in this case dissonance comes before people make a decision. The other type is postdecisional dissonance, in which dissonace or again, the possibility of it, follows a choice that's already been made. And efforts to avoid or reduce this dissonance affect later judgements. So, in this case, dissonance comes after a decision. (Lecture 2.5)

In the experiment done by Sherman and Gorkin, they randomly assigned 77 college students, male and female, to one of three conditions in an experiment on (quote) "the relationship between attitudes towards social issues and the ability to solve logical problems." In the sex role condition, students were given five minutes to explain how the story of the female surgeon made sense. In the non-sex role condition, students were given five minutes to solve an equally difficult problem concerning dots and lines. That way, Sherman and Gorkin could make sure that the results weren't simply due to students working on a difficult problem. And in the control condition, students were not given a problem to solve. In the sex-role and non-sex-role conditions, the experimenter provided the correct solution after five minutes had passed. Roughly 80% of the students were not able to solve the problems within five minutes. Next, the experimenter told students that the study was over and she gave them booklets for another person's study about legal decisions. In reality, the second experiment was nothing more than a cover story to collect information on sexism without students detecting a connection to the first part of the experiment. In this part of the study, students read about an affirmative action legal case in which a woman claimed that she had been turned down for a university faculty position on the basis of her gender. Students then gave their opinion about three things: First, what they thought the verdict should be. Second, how justified they thought the university was in hiring a man rather than the woman. And third, how they felt about affirmative action in general. Sherman and Gorkin found that compared with students in the control group and students who were presented with the problem concerning dots and lines, people who had failed to solve the female surgeon problem were more likely to find the university guilty of sex discrimination, less likely to see the university as justified in hiring a male for the job, and more supportive of affirmative action policies in general. Based on these findings, Sherman and Gorkin concluded that students who failed the female surgeon problem tried to reduce their dissonance by acting as pro-equality as possible, trying to show themselves that they weren't biased against women. (Lecture 2.5)

In the study, 50 college students were assigned to one of three experimental conditions: Worm Expectancy/Worm Choice, Worm Expectancy/Shock Choice, and Neutral Expectancy Control Group. As soon as students entered the laboratory, they saw a table set up for the experimental tasks. Students in all three experimental conditions began by completing a personality questionnaire that asked, among other things, how brave they thought they were and how much they deserved to suffer. Then the experimenter described each of the experimental tasks, seated students in front of the task that they were assigned, and left the room to take care of some preliminary details. Students in the Neutral Expectancy Control Group were assigned to the weight discrimination task and students in the two Worm Expectancy Groups were assigned to the worm eating task -- that is, they expected to eat a worm. Ten minutes later, after students seated in front of the dead worm had been given lots of time to contemplate their fate, they were led to provide a second self-rating of how brave they were and how much they deserved to suffer -- so the researchers could see whether these ratings changed at all during the ten minutes or so that students had sat in front of their task. Then, a few minutes later, the experimenter returned and asked students to rate how pleasant or unpleasant the tasks were. Students simply gave their general impressions because they hadn't actually performed the assigned task. Students in the control condition and the worm choice condition evaluated the weight discrimination task and the worm eating task. And students in the shock choice condition evaluated the weight discrimination task and a shock task in which they would give themselves a shock on the hand. Finally,students in the control condition or the worm choice condition were given a choice between doing the weight discrimination task or the worm eating task, and students in the shock choice condition were given a choice between the weight discrimination task and the shock task -- that is, a task that involved the self- infliction of suffering but didn't have to do with worms. When given the choice, 12 of the 15 people assigned to the worm choice condition preferred to eat the worm. And 10 of the 20 people in the shock choice condition chose to give themselves painful electric shocks. That is, a large number of students chose to suffer through a disgusting or painful task rather than opting for the harmless weight discrimination task. In contrast, all 15 people in the control condition chose the weight discrimination task over the worm eating task. What the researchers concluded is that most students who expected to eat a worm changed their beliefs in at least one of three ways: First, they convinced themselves that eating a worm wasn't that bad after all. They convinced themselves that they were brave. Or they convinced themselves that they deserved to suffer. By changing their beliefs this way, students were presumably able to reduce the dissonance caused by agreeing to suffer for no good reason. In commenting on how people will adapt their belief systems to fit their situation, even if the situation is assigned at random as in the case of an experiment, Comer and Laird wrote the following: "Although it is superficially striking to observe people choosing to eat a worm, the more impressive aspect of these findings is the degree to which people will change their conceptual system to make sense of the random events of their lives." (Lecture 2.5)

This was a very simple study in which they approached 141 horse betters at Exhibition Park Race Track in Vancouver, Canada -- 69 people who were about to place a $2 bet in the next 30 seconds, and 72 people who had just finished placing a $2 bet within the past 30 seconds. Knox and Inkster asked people to rate their horse's chances of winning on a seven-point scale in which a one indicated that the chances were slight and a seven indicated that the chances were excellent. According to their results, people who were about to place a bet rated the chances that their horse would win at an average of 3.48, which corresponded to a fair chance of winning. On the other hand, people who had just finished betting gave an average rating of 4.81, which corresponded to a good chance of winning. So the hunch that Knox and Inkster had was right- people who had just committed themselves to a course of action by betting $2 would reduce any post-decisional dissonance by believing more strongly than ever that they had picked a winner. (Lecture 2.5)

What these researchers found is that people were much less likely to cheat if they signed a statement at the beginning of a tax form, which would make it dissonance-arousing to cheat on the questions that followed. Through a tricky procedure using a mock tax form, the researchers were able to determine that 63% of people in their particular study were honest when they signed a statement at the top that said: "I declare that I will carefully examine this return and that to the best of my knowledge and belief, it is correct and complete." That number, 63%, fell to 21% in another experimental condition when people signed an equivalent statement at the bottom of a tax form, after they had already answered the questions. (Lecture 2.5)