In this video I discuss the relationship between attitudes and behavior, including Richard LaPiere’s early work on discriminatory practices and Festinger and Carlsmith’s classic study on cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort caused by conflicting attitudes or behaviors, and Festinger and Carlsmith proposed that people will attempt to reduce this dissonance by either changing their attitudes, or less frequently, changing their behavior. I end by describing the Ben Franklin effect, a technique employed by Franklin to use cognitive dissonance to his advantage in his social relationships.
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Video Transcript
Hi I’m Michael Corayer, and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to look at the relationship between our attitudes and our behaviors, and the theory of cognitive dissonance. So how can we know our own attitudes? And how well can we know our own attitudes? If you’ve watched some of my previous videos, hopefully you’ve gotten the idea that there’s a number of biases that can cloud our judgment.
This means that there’s a potential disconnect between our attitudes and our behaviors and this disconnect was demonstrated in the 1930s by Richard Lapiere. What Lapiere did was he travelled over 10,000 miles in total across the United States along with a Chinese-American couple and this was during a time period in which anti-Asian sentiment was fairly high. What Lapiere and his companions found was that they faced very little discrimination in the restaurants, campgrounds, and hotels that they visited. Yet, after their trip LaPierre sent letters to the establishments that they had visited and he asked them “would you accept Chinese customers?” and what he found was that 90 percent of these establishments said no, they wouldn’t be willing to accommodate Chinese customers. And yet, they had already done so and so what this demonstrates is this disconnect between the expressed attitudes and the actual behaviors.
Now in this case we might be glad that these establishments weren’t actually following up on these expressed discriminatory attitudes, but of course it could work in the other direction. We could have somebody expressing an egalitarian viewpoint and yet their behavior might not always bear it out. Now this potential disconnect between our attitudes and our behaviors brings us to the one of the most famous studies in social psychology conducted by Leon Festinger and James Merrill Carlsmith in 1959.
What Festinger and Carlsmith did was they had participants come in to the lab and complete incredibly boring task. So these included turning little wooden pegs on a board a quarter turn, and then when you get to the end of the board, you go back to the beginning and turn in another quarter turn, and then another quarter turn, and you do that for half an hour. Or you sit with a bin and you have a bunch of little wooden spools and using one hand you place a spool into the bin, and you do this until the bin is completely full, and then one at a time you remove them. And then when it’s empty, you put them back in again, and you do this for half an hour. So the point is, these tasks were meant to be incredibly boring. There was really no purpose to doing these and so the way that we know that these tasks were actually boring for the participants is that a control group was asked in an interview following the study what they thought of the experiment. How useful was, you know, were the things that they were doing? And they said, you know, that was boring, there was really no scientific merit to this. It seemed like a waste of time.
But some of the participants were asked to lie. So before they left the lab the researcher said, you know, some “urgent meeting came up, I have to go. Can you please help me and give these instructions to the next participant?”, who was waiting in a waiting room. Now this next participant was actually a confederate but he said, you know, “could you please help me out, give them the instructions and could you tell them that the task is fun, like that you had a good time, you enjoyed it? You know, so that they’ll stick around and actually do it”. oh you know and and you know – “thank you for helping me out I can pay you. I can give you a dollar for helping me out with this next participant”. Or some participants were told “I can give you $20”, which in 1959 was a fair amount of money. And the question was, would this payment influence the subsequent judgments of these participants?
So then they lie to this participant, or who they think is a participant, and then as they’re leaving the building they also get this follow-up interview: tell us about the experiment you participated in. What did you think of it, how useful were the tasks, etc. And so the question is, what did these participants do? And did the fact that they were paid $1 or $20 influence their attitudes? What Festinger and Carlsmith found was that the amount of money they were paid did influence their judgments. But it might not be in the way that you expect. Because what they found was the group that was paid $20 to lie, so they did this boring task then they told somebody yeah it was great fun, I really had a good time, you’ll enjoy it, then they’ve got 20 bucks for doing this; these people, when they were interviewed, said “yeah, those tasks were really boring. There was no merit to it. It was a waste of time.”
Yet the group that was only paid $1 to lie actually said that the tasks were interesting. They said “yeah, it was kind of meditative, you know, to sit and do this kind of repetitive task. I enjoyed it. It was, it was a good way to spend my time. I think it was productive. I think the experiment must be, you know, the researchers are probably finding out some sort of interesting things about human behavior.” So question is, why did we see this difference?
This is where Festinger and Carlsmith proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance. And so this idea is that there’s a conflict between attitudes and behaviors and this causes discomfort; this dissonance between the attitudes and behaviors, and this discomfort needs to be resolved in some way. And Festinger and Carlsmith proposed that we resolve this discomfort either by changing our attitudes, or adding new attitudes or cognitions, or by changing our behaviors.
Now in this case, the participants can’t change their behaviors; they’ve already lied to this next participant and so they have this possibility that they might change their attitudes. And so the idea is the group that got $20 that’s sufficient to justify their lying. So essentially the conflict that they’re experiencing, the discomfort is, the task was boring: “I think it was boring and I just told somebody it was fun”. There’s some conflict there and the $20 group justifies it by saying “yeah, but I got 20 bucks. That’s a lot of money, so that’s sufficient. Of course anybody would lie for twenty dollars. Yeah, boring task, yeah, I’ll tell him it was fun for 20 bucks. Sure, no problem.” The cognitive dissonance has been relieved through this 20 dollars. This is sufficient to justify lying.
But what Festinger and Carlsmith proposed is that in the $1 group, $1 is not sufficient. So they say “the task was boring, I told someone it was really fun, and I got a dollar to do that. I mean am I, is it, was my honesty worth so little?” That’s not sufficient. A dollar is not sufficient to resolve this conflict and so they thought what was happening was the participants were changing their attitude about the task in order to reduce this dissonance. They were saying “well, okay it was boring but I told someone it was fun, and I got a dollar. Maybe it wasn’t actually so bad? You know, it was kind of interesting. Maybe I didn’t really lie, you know? There was something positive about it. There was something engaging. It was kind of meditative to do this. It was relaxing, you know what, I think I actually enjoyed the task. I was wrong to think it was so boring initially. Yeah, the task was fun, it was fine; I didn’t really lie and I got a dollar.” And this is how they’re resolving this conflict between their attitude and their behavior.
Now we can come up with real–life examples where we might see evidence of this cognitive dissonance; where we see people that hold conflicting attitudes and behaviors. Like smokers who, of course, know the dangers of smoking and yet they don’t quit. And so they might make up some justifications to try to reduce this dissonance. They might say things like “well, I exercise regularly and that’s gonna make up for it” or you know “I have a lot of stress and the smoking is relaxing and, you know, stress is unhealthy too. So it’s good that I can relieve my stress in this way and it kind of balances out. And so it’s okay that I smoke, even though, you know, it’s, people say it’s so harmful”, right? This would be another way we see people trying to resolve this cognitive dissonance.
And we can also look to an extreme example in which Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter infiltrated a doomsday cult and they described this experience in their book “When Prophecy Fails“. And they were curious what happens in this cult that believed the world was going to end, and yet the world didn’t end. So we had these cult members who had quit their jobs, who had given away their possessions, and they did all this thinking the world was going to end. And then on the day that it was supposed to end, it didn’t end. So how do they justify this massive amount of dissonance? How are they going to reduce this huge conflict between all their behavior leading up to this and then the realization that the world didn’t end?
What Festinger Riecken, and Schachter found was that the way that these cult members got rid of this dissonance was they said “the world was saved by us. It was because of our efforts, because of our behaviors, our commitment, that the world was saved. And so we are the saviors. We are not fools who gave away all our possessions for no reason, we did it to save the world. And therefore, there was nothing wrong with our behaviors in the past. We weren’t being foolish, we were actually saving humanity.” This how they reduced this potentially massive amount of dissonance. So how can we use this dissonance in our daily lives?
Well, one way we might apply the theory of cognitive dissonance is through what’s known as the “Ben Franklin Effect” and this is because Benjamin Franklin was not just a great statesman and diplomat, but he was also an excellent social psychologist. He had an idea of this idea of cognitive dissonance long before Festinger and Carlsmith, and the way that Franklin demonstrated this was he described that he would request a favor from someone who he felt didn’t really like him. He thought this would create a way to ingratiate himself with the person and that was more effective than just offering to do a favor himself, which they might see is sort of conniving, or sneaky or suspicious.
So instead, he would ask them for a favor. Like he would ask to borrow a rare book that he knew was in their possession. He’d say “oh, you know, could I borrow that” and what he thought was this was creating dissonance, even though he didn’t use this word. Because the person is now asking himself you know “why did I help that Franklin character? I don’t even really like the guy. Why would I do him a favor and lend him this rare book?” And Franklin supposed that what would happen is the person would change their attitude in order to resolve this conflict. “Well, you know what, maybe Franklin’s not so bad. I guess I lent him the book because, you know, he’s not as terrible as I thought.” And this meant that they might be more willing to help Franklin in the future. Or as Franklin wrote “he that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged”.
Ok, so that’s one way you can think about applying the idea of cognitive dissonance. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
