Cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance happens to all of us.
We're going to talk about it for a little bit here. Cognitive dissonance
is the motivation to reduce tension
that you feel when your attitude
and your behavior are at odds with one another.
You ever do something
that you felt was really against your beliefs
and it made you feel weird to do it
because it was inconsistent with what you
felt or what you believed? People do it all the time. They're put in positions in all
manner of situations as we'll see,
that make us behave in ways that aren't consistent with our beliefs
or our values. So
cognitive dissonance, and we're going to see some of the research behind it,
is a motivation to alleviate that discomfort that happens
when you are acting in such a way as to be at odds with your attitudes, values, or
beliefs.
The classic example
is cigarette smoking. Cigarette smoking
is known now, it wasn't known in the 30's and in the 40's
and the 50's to cause cancer.
It's now known to be a risk factor for all manner of health problems.
But that was absolutely not known in the early 20th Century.
It became known and covered up in the late Twentieth Century,
and now there's no question about it. But people still smoke. Anybody got a pack
of cigarettes I can borrow for a second, anybody?
Come on, you can admit it, I used to smoke, I like nicotine.
Alright, cool, let me see that pack!
(humming)
Newport, ahhh, is it menthols? (No) OK, I like menthols.
Mmmmmm.
Smell that cigarette, and my mouth actually starts watering. What is that?
Classical conditioning, that's correct.
It's actually watering. Now, Surgeon General's warning: smoking by pregnant
women may result in fetal injury,
premature birth, and low birth weight. Well, hell, I'm not a pregnant woman, so I can smoke,
right? It's a rather, it's a rather non-convincing
message, right? It's going for fear appeal.
It's going to try to make me think, well gosh,
if those things could happen to an unborn, you know, if that could happen to a fetus or
cause birth defects, mmm,
maybe it could be bad for me. But it's not directly stated that it's bad for me,
and, man, they taste good when you smoke them.
If you don't smoke, they taste like shit, right?
Nobody ever took their first drag off a cigarette and went, mmmm, well that's tasty,
right? But they get that nicotine rush and then they're smoking, they're like, I can handle that.
And before they know it they're like, man, these are great.
These are awesome. The habituation process, right? The addiction process.
And then they don't get a nicotine rush anymore, they get alleviation and nicotine
withdrawal,
and they get a lifestyle and a habit that that goes with it, and all kinds of other things
that makes it really, really, really hard to quit it.
As we saw before, about 5 percent or so of people who attempt the first time with
no assistance
whatsoever are successful. But yet nowadays you can't get away from the
message that it's bad for you.
So you have dissonance. Unpleasant tension state.
I know it's unhealthy but I smoke. So I can do one of two things to alleviate
the tension.
I can quit smoking or cut down maybe
on smoking and that would alleviate the tension between the behavior and the
attitude
because the attitude is hard to avoid, isn't it?
Or you could change the attitude. You could actually care less.
I can (muffled) research as it is not conclusive. I smoke cigarettes. I know people who smoke
the
till their eighties. You can use anecdotal reasoning.
That's a smoker's lounge ceiling mural.
That's not such a subtle message is it?
I wonder if they'll stop smoking now? Probably not.
Canada
has some very serious warning labels. They aren't
subtle at all. They are in your face about the dangers of smoking.
Some who seem reasonable about some things seem unreasonable about
other things but that's normal. Training in critical thinking is
critical. So here we have a person (wrote up Times?), Melissa,
worries about the effect on her unborn child from the sound of jackhammers.
I don't know, man.
Those jackhammers might be affecting my unborn child in a very negative way.
(imitates puffing on a cigarette)
But the cigarette smoking isn't? Fascinating, isn't it? She's actually
concerned about her child.
She's worried about an environmental hazard as she engages in hazardous behavior
with regard to her unborn child, right? That's,
is that crazy? No, it's human.
It's what human beings do because
human beings have this almost limitless capacity to skew reality
to make it more palatable. So, here is an actual patient
from the local clinic that I worked at, and her
rationalization for not quitting smoking. So she was asked by her physician,
what do you see as the pros and the cons. That's the place you start.
Obviously there are some pros or you wouldn't be doing it. If it was all cons,
you'd probably quit, right? So there's some
some question and the patient says,
I see the benefits of quitting smoking include much improved health
throughout our lifetime,
less aggravation of existing allergy symptoms, so I've already got a health
problem that's made worse
by this, less sinus infections, better health for my family members cause I won't
be exposing my kids to second hand smoke,
elimination of smoking financial costs which back then,
three dollars a pack, pack a day,
that's eleven hundred dollars a year. And she's thinking, man, gym membership only costs 65 a
month. I would actually,
I would actually net three hundred dollars or so,
four hundred dollars. Even with the gym membership, I'd still have more money in my pocket.
These are all clear, compelling, logical reasons to quit smoking, right?
This is what's owned by the patient, the patient themself
came up with the list. But,
everyone's got a bad habit.
Smoking is better than drinking. Besides, I could die in a car wreck tomorrow. When it's my time to go,
I'll go.
Phoof! Just like that!
Cognitive dissonance. She knows this.
She knows this and she smokes.
This makes that okay. The
dissonance is alleviated by a shift in the attitude. I could actually quit and
I'd be consistent with all of this,
but if I can't quit, if I find myself challenged, and it's very difficult
to quit, then how how am I going to live with myself knowing that I'm doing damage to
my
my own health and maybe my own children's health and I'm spending
money I don't necessarily have to spare.
You know what? Life is short. Oh, well. I can just eradicate it
as a tension state by changing my attitude. The attitude is the change there.
This study is the classic study of
Carlsmith and Fessinger of cognitive dissonance.
It's a hard thing to prove. Now
that makes some sense to you. I can see that you could probably look at that
example
and that makes sense. But something that just makes sense doesn't work for us in
science. We have to prove it.
To operationalize that and test it experimentally
is difficult. That's a hard thing to wrap your head around. But Carlsmith and
Festinger,
'57 I believe it was, came up with a
a design that showed this in action,
this principle in action. So, a study of an insufficient justification versus over
justification.
Patients, or excuse me, participants were given either a dollar,
back in that day, that would be worth about six bucks in today's values,
or they were given twenty dollars,
which would be worth about, what, 120 dollars today.
This is an old study. So you imagine
today you're in this study. You don't know you're in the study. You don't know the
conditions of the study
until you're in it. All you've got to do is tell a
little white lie. Now, most people
like to see themselves as honest people, right?
I'm an honest person, right? You think you're an honest person.
Is there ever a time that you would lie?
I would hope so, right? If you are hiding Anne Frank
in your attic and the Nazis come and say, are you hiding a Jew in your
attic, I would hope you would say, of course not, why would I do that?
That would be a benevolent lie, right? There's a
real good moral reason to engage in what otherwise would be an immoral behavior,
right?
That's because ethics are debatable,
that we have debates in ethics. The idea that we would just lie to people
with no
real moral reason to do so is repugnant to most people.
We don't like people to lie to us. We are offended when people lie to us, are we
not?
You find out somebody told you a lie, you feel cheated, you feel
like you might have to reevaluate that relationship depending on how big
the lie was.
But a little white lie. Interesting. So here's the thing.
Puts people in a situation that is by definition
boring. The situation is such that you are going to be brought in,
you're given a board with pegs to turn. You turn the peg
clockwise, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc, etc, etc, the next row, the next row, the
next row,
and then you turn them all back.
The task is designed to be monotonous, tedious,
and unlikable, right? You engage
in a half an hour of tedious, monotonous, unlikable behavior.
You don't know why. You're just in a study. You assume there's some purpose to this,
and then they tell you, we have a person that usually meets our participants as they
come in
and you're randomly assigned here after
that tells the participants that it is going to be an enjoyable task. We don't want people
thinking that it's not enjoyable and not coming and word getting out. So we have
somebody we usually pay
to tell them it's going to be an enjoyable, interesting
learning experience or something to that effect. But that person didn't make it
today,
and we're wondering if you would do it for us? We'll pay you to do it.
In some cases, they got paid a dollar, right? You were randomly assigned,
or you got paid twenty dollars. In other words, you were going to get
the equivalent of 6 bucks or 120 bucks to just go into the other room
and tell a person you think is another participant that what you just did and
you know to be monotonous and boring
is actually interesting and fun.
Not hurting anybody, really, are you? They're already coming in to the study
and then after they do this
they're asked about their opinions of the study they were in.
So as far as they know, this is just all regular
normal procedure. They get to the end of it
and they say, well how enjoyable were these tasks -5 to +5.
How much did you learn? 0-10. How much scientific importance do you think this
study has? 0 to 10.
Would you likely participate in a similar experiment in the future? -5 to
+5, and what you have here
is a control group that didn't have to tell the lie. They won't have to tell a lie.
So you get a rating of what people generally see this task to be.
Then you've got the one dollar group and the twenty dollar group.
How enjoyable was it? Negative 0.45.
Neutral, actually slightly negative, right?
How much did you learn? Three on a scale of 1 to 10.
How important? Neutral. 5.6.
It must have some value or they wouldn't have us do it, right?
Would you do it again? Neutral to slightly negative.
Naahhhh,
I wouldn't want to do it again.
But if you got a dollar to lie, all of a sudden, the tasks were significantly more
enjoyable.
Now, you didn't think they were any more
knowledge based, and you didn't learn anything more. You thought they were a little more
important
but really more importantly, check it out, you'd be more likely
to do it again. You would do an
experiment like this again. That's clearly
the positive side of things. That's your attitude isn't it?
That's attitude being measured here. Behavior.
You did a boring task, then you lied about it,
now would you do it again? Yeah, I think I would do it again.
But look at the twenty dollar people. They're no different
than not getting paid and not being asked to tell a lie at all.
They tell the truth to themselves. That's the key here.
I have about equivalence there, there,
there, and there. In other words, if you paid me 120 dollars
to sell some body a little white lie, I don't really have any cognitive
dissonance.
Who wouldn't tell a little white lie for 120 bucks?
Doesn't hurt anybody, they're going to be here for 30 minutes, they're going to do it anyway.
In other words, there's no inconsistency between the behavior of telling a white
lie,
and my belief in myself as an honest person if you put a hundred and twenty dollars in
the picture.
But if I told you a lie for six measly bucks?
Now I have somethings got to change. The behavior is not consistent
so what can I change? My attitude. I'll actually see the task as more
interesting,
right? That I learned more and it was more important. They changed your attitude. Yes, sir?
(Were they aware that
one room was getting only a dollar and the other got paid more?) No, actually, nobody got paid in the end.
So it was a real terrible thing for them. Yeah, they then explained that
social psych research often
is based on deception because if you told people what was really going on
they wouldn't behave in those ways, right? They would know what was going on, you would
get experimenter bias, you get participant bias.
What they wanted was an unbiased look at what people would do under certain
conditions.
So in the end, nobody got paid to do it. But one group told a lie and thought they were
going to get paid a lot,
one group told a lie and thought they weren't going to get paid much at all,
and the people who thought they weren't going to get paid much at all didn't feel
good about that
so they actually changed their attitudes so that it wasn't a lie anymore
(The dollar group may be looking at it and be thinking well we can be paid
more cause these guys are getting) um, um, they were unaware of the other groups, yeah.
They were not. They didn't know about the comparison. As far as they knew, they just
were at an experiment.
So everybody was then randomly assigned to those two groups and, yeah,
so what you see is an actual clear-cut experiment
where the behavior is inconsistent with a person's attitude. In one case,
throw a lot of money in on it and it's like, well, who wouldn't?
So now I don't feel so bad about it. But in the other case, I'm not a liar, I just lied,
for almost nothing, but you know what, I didn't really lie.
I really like the experiment. I thought it was kind of interesting.
So now it's fixed. Cognitive dissonance resolved.