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Go Ahead, Rationalize. Monkeys Do It, Too.

By John Tierney

• Nov. 6, 2007

For half a century, social psychologists have been trying to figure out the human gift for rationalizing irrational behavior. Why did we evolve with brains that salute our shrewdness for buying the neon yellow car with bad gas mileage? The brain keeps sending one message — Yesss! Genius! — while

our friends and family are saying,

This self-delusion, the result of what’s called cognitive dissonance, has been demonstrated over and over by researchers who have come up with increasingly elaborate explanations for it. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our “moral integrity” and protect our “self-concept” and feeling of “global self-worth.”

If so, capuchin monkeys are a lot more complicated than we thought. Or, we’re less complicated. In a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Yale report finding the first evidence of cognitive dissonance in monkeys and in a group in some ways even less sophisticated, 4-year-old humans.

The Yale experiment was a variation of the classic one that first demonstrated cognitive dissonance, a term coined by the social psychologist Leon Festinger. In 1956 one of his students, Jack Brehm, carted some of his own wedding gifts into the lab (it was a low-budget experiment) and asked people to rate the desirability of things like an electric sandwich press, a desk lamp, a stopwatch and a transistor radio.

Then they were given a choice between two items they considered equally attractive, and told they could take one home. (At the end of the experiment Mr. Brehm had to confess he couldn’t really afford to give them anything, causing one woman to break down in tears.) After making a choice (but before having it snatched away), they were asked to rate all the items again.

Suddenly they had a new perspective. If they had chosen the electric sandwich press over the toaster, they raised its rating and downgraded the toaster. They convinced themselves they had made by far the right choice.

So, apparently, did the children and capuchin monkeys studied at Yale by Louisa C. Egan, Laurie R. Santos and Paul Bloom. The psychologists offered the children stickers and the monkeys M&M’s.

Once a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M’s — say, red, blue and green — he was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest — he was now much more likely to reject the blue.

The monkey seemed to be coping the same way humans do. When you reject the toaster, you could spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself, and that phenomenon, much less common, is called buyer’s remorse. (For more on that, go to www.tierneylab.com.)

But in general, people deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. The notion that the toaster is desirable conflicts with the knowledge that you just passed it up, so you banish the notion. The cognitive dissonance is gone; you are smug.

Of course, when you see others engaging in this sort of rationalization, it can look silly or pathological, as if they have a desperate need to justify themselves or are cynically telling lies they couldn’t possibly believe themselves. But you don’t expect to see such high-level mental contortions in 4-year-olds or monkeys.

As the Yale researchers write, these results indicate either that monkeys and children have “richer motivational complexity” than we realize, or our ways of dealing with cognitive dissonance are “mechanistically simpler than previously thought.” Another psychologist, Matthew D. Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests it’s the latter.

“If little children and primates show pretty much the same pattern you see in adults, it calls into question just how deliberate these rationalization processes are,” he says. “We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that’s an outsider’s perspective. This experiment shows that there isn’t always much conscious thought going on.”

The new results jibe with those of a dissonance experiment that Dr. Lieberman and colleagues did with amnesiacs, people with impaired short-term memories, who were asked to rank an assortment of paintings. Then they chose among selected ones and ranked the whole group again. By the second time they ranked the paintings, they couldn’t consciously recall their earlier rankings or their choices, so they presumably didn’t have a psychic need to rewrite history.

Yet they showed as much new disdain for the paintings they’d rejected as did a control group with normal memories. Apparently, the rejections registered in some unconscious way, so that the amnesiacs rationalized their decisions even though they couldn’t remember them.

The compulsion to justify decisions may seem irrational, and maybe petty, too, like the fox in Aesop’s fable who stopped trying for the grapes and promptly told himself they were sour anyway. But perhaps Aesop didn’t appreciate the evolutionary utility of this behavior for humans as well as animals.

Once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. A fox who pines for abandoned grapes or a monkey who keeps agonizing over food choices could be wasting energy better expended obtaining the next meal.

And if you are the owner of a yellow gas-guzzler, you might as well convince yourself that the sensible blue car you passed up was an ugly bore. Aesop may call it sour grapes; you can call it moving on. Maybe your unconscious realizes you don’t have time for buyer’s remorse. You’ve got car payments to make.

Illustrations with the Findings column in Science Times on Tuesday, about studies showing cognitive dissonance in monkeys and 4-year-olds, included an unrelated picture. The monkey shown was a macaque monkey, but the research was conducted with capuchins.

How we handle corrections

• DOI: 10.1037/H0041006
• Corpus ID: 8764837

Postdecision changes in the desirability of alternatives.

• Published in Journal of Abnormal… 1 May 1956

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Do decisions shape preference? Evidence from blind choice

Tali sharot.

1 Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK

Cristina M. Velasquez

2 Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, USA

Raymond J. Dolan

Psychologists have long asserted that making a choice changes a person’s preferences. Recently, critics of this view have argued that choosing simply reveal pre-existing preferences, and that all studies claiming that choice shapes preferences suffer a fundamental methodological flaw. Here, we address this question directly by dissociating pre-existing preferences from decision making. We studied participants who rated different vacation destinations both before, and after, making a blind choice that could not be guided by pre-existing preferences. As a further control we also elicited ratings in a condition where a computer made the decision. We found that preferences were altered after participants made a blind choice, but not when a computer instructed the participants decision. The results suggest that just as preferences form choices, choices shape preferences.

For decades, the idea that choice alters preferences has enjoyed widespread acceptance (see Ariely & Norton, 2008 ). This phenomenon, first demonstrated experimentally in 1956 by the psychologist Jack Brehm, refers to an observation that after choosing between two similarly valued items, participants rate the selected item better than they initially did, and the rejected option as worse ( Brehm, 1956 ). The results of this classic experiment, known as the “free-choice paradigm”, have been replicated numerous times (for a review see Harmon-Jones and Mills, 1999).

One of the most influential theories in psychology, cognitive dissonance theory, was generated to account for the findings ( Festinger, 1957 ). Under cognitive dissonance theory, a choice between two similarly desirable alternatives engenders a psychological tension mediated by the desirable aspect of the rejected alternative and the undesirable aspects of the selected alternative ( Festinger, 1957 ). Within the framework of the theory, this tension is reduced by re-evaluating the options post-choice (for an alternative account see Bem, 1967 ; Bem, 1972 ).

Recently, it has been suggested that all studies demonstrating choice induced preference change suffer a fundamental methodological flaw ( Chen, 2008 ; Chen & Risen, 2009 ). The core argument here is that peoples’ preferences cannot be measured perfectly, and are subject to rating noise. As participants gain experience with the rating scale they will provide more accurate ratings such that post-choice shifts in ratings simply reflect the unmasking of the participant’s initial preferences (which can be predicted by their choices) rather than reflecting any changes in preference induced by choice.

This critique provides a major challenge to the idea that choice evokes re-evaluation. To test whether making a decision does in fact alter our preferences, rather than merely reveal them, requires an experimental design where pre-existing preferences can be dissociated from the decision making task. We note that such a design has recently been implemented in primates and children ( Egan et al., 2010 ). Using a similar design, we asked participants to rate vacation destinations both before and after a decision making task. Importantly, choices were made without the participant seeing the alternatives which were revealed after the fact, such that decisions could not be effected by pre-existing preferences. If post-choice changes in ratings are merely an artifact of pre-existing preferences, then we would not expect to observe them under this design constraint. If, however, choices do alter our preferences this should be apparent even when under the stringencies of making “blind” choices. Furthermore, to test whether a sense of agency over the decision is critical for choice-induced re-evaluation we examined preferences both when the participants made “blind” choices and when a computer instructed the participants’ choices.

Experiment I – Blind Choice

Experiment I addresses the main aim of this paper. Namely, we test whether post-choice changes in valuation are observed even when choices cannot be determined according to pre-existing preferences.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

Data from 21 participants (males = 9, females = 12; age range = 18-31) were included in the analysis. Two additional participants were eliminated due to excessive number of trials with no response (> 25%). This level of performance is an a-priori cut off utilized previously ( Sharot, De Martino & Dolan, 2009 ; Sharot, Shiner, Brown, Fan & Dolan, 2009 ). Two participants were eliminated due to usage of incorrect button keys, and one because of a computer error. All participants gave informed consent and were paid for their participation.

Stimuli consisted of 80 names of vacation destinations adapted from a previous study ( Sharot, De Martino & Dolan., 2009 ). The order in which stimuli were presented was random.

Pre-choice Rating task consisted of eighty trials of 11s. On each trial a name of a vacation destination appeared on screen for 6s. The participants were instructed to imagine themselves spending next year’s vacation at that location. The participant then had 2s to rate how happy they estimate they would be if they were to vacation at that location (1- unhappy, 2- a bit unhappy, 3- neutral, 4 – happy, 5- very happy, 6 – extremely happy) using the keyboard. If the participant did not respond that trial was excluded from the final data analysis. A fixation cross was then presented for 3s.

Choice task: Pairs were determined by a Matlab program as implemented previously ( Sharot et al., 2009 ) such that approximately 75% of the trials included two options that were rated the same in session 1 (critical condition), and the rest (approximately 25% of the trials) included two options that were rated differently in session 1 (non-critical condition). This was implemented to enhance the power for detecting difference in the critical trials for which data and analysis is reported here. Each stimulus appeared in only one pair. All choices were hypothetical.

As a cover story participants were told that the study was designed to examine “subliminal decision making”. To ensure participants believed this to be the case they were shown a copy of an article “Subliminal instrumental conditioning demonstrated in the human brain” describing similar type of research carried out in this laboratory ( Pessiglione et al., 2008 ). Subjects were told the current experiment constituted a follow-up study. Participants were told that on each trial two masked names of vacation destinations from session 1 would appear on screen side by side for 2ms. Participants were told they would not be able to consciously perceive these stimuli because they would appear very briefly, and would be masked. In reality, only nonsense scribbles were presented during those 2ms (such as: “%^!x *&()%), and no vacation destination were ever presented. Then the word “choose” appeared on the screen instructing participants to indicate, by pressing one of two buttons, which of the “masked” holiday destinations (the one on the right or the one on the left) they would prefer to spend a vacation (again - in reality no masked stimuli were presented). Participants had up to 2s to respond and once the decision was made the names of the ‘chosen’ and ‘rejected’ destinations were revealed on screen (e.g., Greece - Thailand), and a star appeared above the destination the participant had blindly chosen. The trial lasted for 4s. A fixation cross was then presented for 3s.

Post-choice Rating was identical to pre-choice rating task.

Analysis: Analysis was conducted as done previously ( Sharot, De Martino & Dolan, 2009 ; Sharot, Shiner, Brown, Fan & Dolan, 2009 ). For each participant and stimulus post-choice shifts in preference were calculated by subtracting the mean-corrected pre-choice rating from mean-corrected post-choice rating (i.e. difference scores). Then, for each participant, the average difference scores were calculated for selected and rejected stimuli. A t-test was conducted to examine whether these were significantly different from zero, and from each other. Mean-corrected ratings are the distance of a particular stimulus’ rating from the average rating for that participant and session (x i − μ), indicating the value of a stimulus relative to all other stimuli in that session.

The results revealed a choice-induced change in preference (see Figure ). Specifically, ratings increased after the decision making stage for the selected stimuli (t (20) = 2.4, P < 0.03). Thus, even though the choice was random and not determined by pre-existing preferences, participants rated selected stimuli as more desirable after the blind decision, relative to before. Ratings did not change for rejected stimuli (P > 0.9). This increase in ratings for selected stimuli tended to be larger than the non-significant decrease for rejected stimuli (t (20) = 1.8, P < 0.1).

Post-choice Reevaluation

Difference in mean-corrected ratings between the prochoice task and the postchoice task for alternatives that were selected and rejected in the blind-choice condition (Experiment 1) and the computer-choice conditions (Experiments 2 and 3). A higher difference score indicates higher ratings after than before decision-making task. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean.

Experiment II – Computer Choice A

Experiment II was conducted to test whether choice-induced changes in preferences are contingent on the participants making the decision themselves, or are also observed when choices are made for the participants.

Data from 19 participants (males = 9, females = 10; age range = 18-27) were included in the analysis. Data from three additional participants were eliminated due to excessive number of trials with no response (> 25%).

Post-choice and pre-choice rating tasks were identical to Experiment I. The decision making task differed, as participants were told that on each trial the computer will select which vacation destination out of two options the participant will vacation at next year. On each trial two names of vacation destinations from session 1 appeared on screen side by side for 4sc. Then the word “choose” appeared on screen above the two options and a star sign appeared next to the stimuli the computer had randomly chosen for the participant for 2sc. To ensure the participants were attending to the task, and to equate motor action to the blind choice condition, participants were instructed to indicate which stimulus the computer had chosen for them by pressing one of two buttons to indicate right or left location once they saw the star sign. A fixation cross was then presented for 3s.

No choice-induced changes in preferences were observed ( Figure ). Ratings did not shift after the decision making stage for either selected (P > 0.15 – note that this is a numerical decrease ) or rejected (P > 0.7) stimuli. Neither were changes in ratings for selected and rejected stimuli different from each other (P > 0.4).

Experiment III – Computer Choice B

As an interim summary, we have shown (Exp 1) that blind choices can affect subsequent preferences, and that this effect is abolished in the computer-choice (instructed) condition. However, we acknowledge one potential difference between Experiment I and II that tempers this overall conclusion. Our caveat relates to a possibility that symbol strings are common substitutions for vulgarities. Thus, seeing the nonsense scribbles (e.g., “%^!x *&()%) in Experiment I may have emphasized the alternatives and the decision that followed. These symbols were not present in Experiment II. Thus, we run an additional group of participants on a second computer choice task (Exp III) that incorporate nonsense scribbles as in Experiment I.

Data from 20 participants (males = 8, females = 12; age range = 18-35) were included in the analysis. Data from three additional participants were eliminated due to excessive number of trials with no response (> 25%).

The procedure was identical to Experiment I except that participants were informed that the computer will make a choice for them and that after observing the choice they should indicate by pressing the left or right button the option the computer had choose for them.

No choice-induced changes in preferences were observed ( Figure ). As in Experiment II, ratings did not shift after the decision making stage for either selected (P > 0.3) or rejected (P > 0.8) stimuli. Neither were changes in ratings for selected and rejected stimuli different from each other (P > 0.6).

Conjunction Analysis

To formally test for the effects of choice, agency and emphasis (due to nonsense scribbles) on rating change in all participants, we conducted a linear regression analysis entering the shift in ratings (post-choice – pre-choice) for selected and rejected options as the dependent measures. The independent measures included choice, agency, and emphasis (which were entered each as 1 or 0), and the interaction between choice and agency, and choice and emphasis (which were entered as the product of the two variables). Results of a step-wise regression revealed that the model which best explained the change in ratings was one that included only the interaction between choice and agency (Beta = 2.3), F (1,119) = 6.7 P < 0.01. This suggests that shifts in preference are guided by choice where participants believe they are instrumental in the decision making process, but not when a computer instructs the choice.

Our results demonstrate that choices not only reveal preferences alone but also shape them. We show that even when decisions are made randomly, and are not guided by pre-existing preferences, these choices change expectations of hedonic outcome. Furthermore, choice-induced change in preference is observed only when participants believe they have been instrumental in making a decision, and not when the decision was instructed by a computer.

The behavioral finding that making a decision can change our overall preferences is consistent with recent fMRI data. We have previously shown that a signal in the caudate nucleus, that tracks expected hedonic outcome, was altered by choice and resulting in enhanced post-choice activity for selected, and reduced post-choice activity for rejected, items ( Sharot De Martino & Dolan, 2009 ). It is important to note that we do not rule out the likelihood that choices can be guided by pre-existing preferences. On the contrary, we have previously shown that decisions between two equally rated options are predicted by a neurophysiological signal in the caudate nucleus that indexes the expected hedonic impact of the option, consistent with the idea that decisions do indeed mirror a neural representation of pre-existing preferences ( Sharot De Martino & Dolan, 2009 ). These prior results, coupled with the current findings, point to a conclusion that choices reflect and shape hedonic expectancies.

The claim that choice shape preferences is also consistent with a previous study demonstrating preferences changes in a context where non-human primates and children make blind choices, but not where an experimenter makes the choice for them ( Egan, Santos & Bloom, 2010 ). The current results extend those findings to adults (using different dependent variables, stimuli, and operationalization of the blind choice), suggesting that preference re-evaluation following a blind choice is not constrained to agents lacking a fully developed brain, language, and/or mature cognitive capacities.

More broadly, the current findings can be interpreted within the framework of both cognitive dissonance theory and self perception theory. According to cognitive dissonance theory, observing one’s (blind) decision can trigger dissonance between the initial cognition that the two options are equally preferred and an action which commits to one option over another ( Festinger, 1957 ). This psychological tension is reduced by re-evaluating the alternatives post-choice, such that the options are no longer perceived as equal. When a computer, rather than an agent, makes the selection dissonance does not arise, due to absence of agency in committing to an action which conflicts with an initial cognitive evaluation. We note that the choices made here were hypothetical, and it is possible that different results may be observed for decisions that involve real consequences.

Within self perception theory ( Bem, 1967 ), it is assumed that subjects infer their preferences by observing their choices. The theory’s explanation for the present results would be as follows: participants believed they were learning their preferences, and updated their explicit ratings accordingly. However, when a computer made the decision, preferences were not updated as those choices were not perceived as reflecting the participants’ preferences.

In sum, the results support Brehm’s (1956) initial claims of choice-induced changes in preference in a study that steers clear of the methodological flaw associated with the “free choice paradigm”. Post-choice re-evaluation may serve an adaptive purpose by promoting commitment to our selected action, thus preventing us from wasting time dwelling on what may have been, and/or getting stuck by constantly changing our minds. Interestingly, enhanced commitment to our chosen options likely occurs when decisions are random, such as blindly sticking a pin in a map to choose a travel destination, or flipping a coin to make a life altering decision.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by a Wellcome Trust Program Grant to R.J Dolan, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to T. Sharot. We thank J. McDermott, R. Moran and E. Featherstone and for assistance in programming, P. Dayan & L. Santos for discussion. S. Fleming and D. Bach for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

This paper first appeared in print in Psychological Science in September 2010, 21, 1231-1235 http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/9/1231

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Choice changes preferences, not merely reflects them: A meta-analysis of the artifact-free free-choice paradigm

Affiliations.

• 1 Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
• 2 Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University.
• 3 Department of Psychology.
• PMID: 33411557
• DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000263

One of the prominent, by now seminal, paradigms in the research tradition of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) is the free-choice paradigm developed by Brehm (1956) to measure choice-induced preference change. Some 50 years after Brehm introduced the paradigm, Chen and Risen (2010) published an influential critique arguing that what the paradigm measures is not necessarily a choice-induced preference change, but possibly an artifact of the choice revealing existing preferences. They showed that once the artifact is experimentally controlled for, there is either no or very little evidence for choice-induced preference change. Given the prominence of the paradigm, this critique meant that much of what we thought we knew about the psychological process of cognitive dissonance might not be true. Following the critique, research using the paradigm applied various corrections to overcome the artifact. The present research examined whether choice truly changes preferences, or rather merely reflects them. We conducted a meta-analysis on 43 studies ( N = 2,191), all using an artifact-free free-choice paradigm. Using different meta-analytical methods, and conceptually different analyses, including a Bayesian one, we found an overall effect size of Cohen's d = 0.40, 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.32, 0.49]. Furthermore, we found no evidence for publication bias as an alternative explanation for the choice-induced preference change effect. These results support the existence of true preference change created by choice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

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Choice Both Affects and Reflects Preferences

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What Is Cognitive Dissonance Theory?

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Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors.

This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.

For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition), they are in a state of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Cognitive dissonance was first investigated by Leon Festinger, arising out of a participant observation study of a cult that believed that the earth was going to be destroyed by a flood, and what happened to its members — particularly the really committed ones who had given up their homes and jobs to work for the cult — when the flood did not happen.

While fringe members were more inclined to recognize that they had made fools of themselves and to “put it down to experience,” committed members were more likely to re-interpret the evidence to show that they were right all along (the earth was not destroyed because of the faithfulness of the cult members).

How Attitude Change Takes Place

Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and behavior in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance). This is known as the principle of cognitive consistency.

When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance.

Notice that dissonance theory does not state that these modes of dissonance reduction will actually work, only that individuals who are in a state of cognitive dissonance will take steps to reduce the extent of their dissonance.

The theory of cognitive dissonance has been widely researched in a number of situations to develop the basic idea in more detail, and various factors have been identified which may be important in attitude change.

What Causes Cognitive Dissonance?

• Forced Compliance Behavior,
• Decision Making,

We will look at the main findings to have emerged from each area.

Forced Compliance Behavior

When someone is forced to do (publicly) something they (privately) really don’t want to do, dissonance is created between their cognition (I didn’t want to do this) and their behavior (I did it).

Forced compliance occurs when an individual performs an action that is inconsistent with his or her beliefs. The behavior can’t be changed since it was already in the past, so dissonance will need to be reduced by re-evaluating their attitude toward what they have done. This prediction has been tested experimentally:

In an intriguing experiment, Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) asked participants to perform a series of dull tasks (such as turning pegs in a peg board for an hour). As you can imagine, participant’s attitudes toward this task were highly negative.

Example of Cognitive Dissonance

Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) investigated if making people perform a dull task would create cognitive dissonance through forced compliance behavior.

In their laboratory experiment, they used 71 male students as participants to perform a series of dull tasks (such as turning pegs in a peg board for an hour).

They were then paid either $1 or $20 to tell a waiting participant (a confederate) that the tasks were really interesting. Almost all of the participants agreed to walk into the waiting room and persuade the confederate that the boring experiment would be fun.

When the participants were asked to evaluate the experiment, the participants who were paid only $1 rated the tedious task as more fun and enjoyable than the participants who were paid $20 to lie.

Being paid only $1 is not sufficient incentive for lying and so those who were paid $1 experienced dissonance. They could only overcome that dissonance by coming to believe that the tasks really were interesting and enjoyable. Being paid $20 provides a reason for turning pegs, and there is, therefore, no dissonance.

Decision Making

Life is filled with decisions, and decisions (as a general rule) arouse dissonance.

For example, suppose you had to decide whether to accept a job in an absolutely beautiful area of the country or turn down the job so you could be near your friends and family.

Either way, you would experience dissonance. If you took the job you would miss your loved ones; if you turned the job down, you would pine for the beautiful streams, mountains, and valleys.

Both alternatives have their good points and bad points. The rub is that making a decision cuts off the possibility that you can enjoy the advantages of the unchosen alternative, yet it assures you that you must accept the disadvantages of the chosen alternative.

Brehm (1956) was the first to investigate the relationship between dissonance and decision-making.

Female participants were informed they would be helping out in a study funded by several manufacturers. Participants were also told that they would receive one of the products at the end of the experiment to compensate for their time and effort.

The women then rated the desirability of eight household products that ranged in price from $15 to $30. The products included an automatic coffee maker, an electric sandwich grill, an automatic toaster, and a portable radio.

Participants in the control group were simply given one of the products. Because these participants did not make a decision, they did not have any dissonance to reduce. Individuals in the low-dissonance group chose between a desirable product and one rated 3 points lower on an 8-point scale.

Participants in the high-dissonance condition chose between a highly desirable product and one rated just 1 point lower on the 8-point scale. After reading the reports about the various products, individuals rated the products again.

Participants in the high-dissonance condition spread apart the alternatives significantly more than the participants in the other two conditions.

In other words, they were more likely than participants in the other two conditions to increase the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and to decrease the attractiveness of the unchosen alternative.

It also seems to be the case that we value most highly those goals or items which have required considerable effort to achieve.

This is probably because dissonance would be caused if we spent a great effort to achieve something and then evaluated it negatively.

We could, of course, spend years of effort into achieving something which turns out to be a load of rubbish and then, in order to avoid the dissonance that produces, try to convince ourselves that we didn’t really spend years of effort or that the effort was really quite enjoyable, or that it wasn’t really a lot of effort.

In fact, though, it seems we find it easier to persuade ourselves that what we have achieved is worthwhile, and that’s what most of us do, evaluating highly something whose achievement has cost us dear – whether other people think it’s much cop or not!

This method of reducing dissonance is known as “effort justification.”

If we put effort into a task that we have chosen to carry out, and the task turns out badly, we experience dissonance. To reduce this dissonance, we are motivated to try to think that the task turned out well.

A classic dissonance experiment by Aronson and Mills (1959) demonstrates the basic idea.

To investigate the relationship between dissonance and effort.

Female students volunteered to take part in a discussion on the psychology of sex. In the “mild embarrassment” condition, participants read aloud to a male experimenter a list of sex-related words like “virgin” and “prostitute.”

In the “severe embarrassment” condition, they had to read aloud obscene words and a very explicit sexual passage.

In the control condition, they went straight into the main study. In all conditions, they then heard a very boring discussion about sex in lower animals. They were asked to rate how interesting they had found the discussion and how interesting they had found the people involved in it.

Participants in the “severe embarrassment” condition gave the most positive rating.

If a voluntary experience that has cost a lot of effort turns out badly, the dissonance is reduced by redefining the experience as interesting. This justifies the effort made.

How To Reduce Cognitive Dissonance

Dissonance can be reduced in one of three ways: a) changing existing beliefs, b) adding new beliefs, or c) reducing the importance of the beliefs.

Change one or more of the attitudes, behavior, beliefs, etc., to make the relationship between the two elements a consonant one.

When one of the dissonant elements is a behavior, the individual can change or eliminate the behavior.

However, this mode of dissonance reduction frequently presents problems for people, as it is often difficult for people to change well-learned behavioral responses (e.g., giving up smoking).

This is often very difficult, as people frequently employ a variety of mental maneuvers.

Acquire new information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs.

For example, thinking smoking causes lung cancer will cause dissonance if a person smokes.

However, new information such as “research has not proved definitely that smoking causes lung cancer” may reduce the dissonance.

Reduce the importance of the cognitions (i.e., beliefs, attitudes).

A common way to reduce dissonance is to increase the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and decrease the attractiveness of the rejected alternative. This is referred to as “spreading apart the alternatives.”

A person could convince themself that it is better to “live for today” than to “save for tomorrow.”

In other words, he could tell himself that a short life filled with smoking and sensual pleasures is better than a long life devoid of such joys. In this way, he would be decreasing the importance of dissonant cognition (smoking is bad for one’s health).

Critical Evaluation

There has been a great deal of research into cognitive dissonance, providing some interesting and sometimes unexpected findings.

It is a theory with very broad applications, showing that we aim for consistency between attitudes and behaviors and may not use very rational methods to achieve it. It has the advantage of being testable by scientific means (i.e., experiments).

However, there is a problem from a scientific point of view because we cannot physically observe cognitive dissonance, and therefore we cannot objectively measure it (re: behaviorism). Consequently, the term cognitive dissonance is somewhat subjective.

There is also some ambiguity (i.e., vagueness) about the term “dissonance” itself. Is it a perception (as “cognitive” suggests), a feeling, or a feeling about a perception? Aronson’s Revision of the idea of dissonance as an inconsistency between a person’s self-concept and a cognition about their behavior makes it seem likely that dissonance is really nothing more than guilt.

There are also individual differences in whether or not people act as this theory predicts. Highly anxious people are more likely to do so. Many people seem able to cope with considerable dissonance and not experience the tensions the theory predicts.

Finally, many of the studies supporting the theory of cognitive dissonance have low ecological validity. For example, turning pegs (as in Festinger’s experiment) is an artificial task that doesn’t happen in everyday life.

Also, the majority of experiments used students as participants, which raises issues of a biased sample . Could we generalize the results from such experiments?

What is the difference between cognitive dissonance theory and balance theory?

Cognitive dissonance theory, proposed by Festinger, focuses on the discomfort felt when holding conflicting beliefs or attitudes, leading individuals to seek consistency.

Heider’s Balance Theory , on the other hand, emphasizes the desire for balanced relations among triads of entities (like people and attitudes), with imbalances prompting changes in attitudes to restore balance. Both theories address cognitive consistency, but in different contexts.

Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2) , 177.

Brehm, J. W. (1956). Postdecision changes in the desirability of alternatives. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52(3) , 384.

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of cognitive dissonance . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Festinger, L. (1959). Some attitudinal consequences of forced decisions . Acta Psychologica , 15, 389-390.

Festinger, L. (Ed.). (1964). Conflict, decision, and dissonance (Vol. 3) . Stanford University Press.

Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2) , 203.