PSY 3109 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Leon Festinger, Cognitive Dissonance, Hazing
15 May 2018
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Unit 3: Reward and Punishment Part III (Chapter 7)
In 1959 Leon Festinger and Merrill Carl Smith offered undergraduates either $1 or $20
for doing a boring task
• Contrary to most peoples intuition, participants in the $1 condition said they liked
the task more than those in the $20 condition; the smaller reward led to greater
liking.
• This finding was, in fact, predicted by Festingers Cognitive dissonance theory
• According to Festinger, the participants in the $1 condition were put into a situation
of insufficient justification. That is, the $1 reward was considered insufficient
justification for doing a boring task, while $20 (over $80 in present-day dollars)
made doing the boring task completely justified.
• Doing a task with insufficient justification creates dissonance between two
cognitions:
a) ) am not a person who voluntarily does boring tasks
b) ) just did a boring task.
• Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that people will resolve this dissonance by
changing one of the cognitions.
• Because changing the first cognition would require a relatively difficult and
dramatic reappraisal of the self, most people will reconcile the dissonance by
changing the second cognition.
• )n particular, they might think, That task wasnt really all that bad.
Rather than enduring a low reward, participants may actually endure psychological pain.
Aronson and Mills (1959) had participants auditioned to join a group that conducted
frank and explicit discussions about sex.
• To gain entry, they needed to pass a screening test.
• For some participants, that test required answering highly embarrassing questions.
• For others, the test was not embarrassing.
• After taking the test and passing, all participants were put in a position where
they overheard the group already in discussion.
• The discussion, though about sex, was actually boring (it was about the
reproduction of spores).
• Participants who had answered the embarrassing questions rated the group
members and the discussion much more attractive than those who did not have to
answer the embarrassing questions.
o Cognitive dissonance theory: the people that had to go through the
embarrassing questions want to feel that they did that because they want to
be a part of something, so they convince ( and actually believe) themselves
that the discussion was both interesting and worth it, the other people dont
feel that there has to be a worth it component
• The researchers concluded that suffering can lead to increased liking through the
process of dissonance reduction.
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