Cognitive dissonance references

CSGnet Archive CSG1997
1

[From Rick Marken (971121.0750)]
There are a ton of research projects like the pay/satisfaction study
that have been done to test "cognitive dissonance" theory. The people
who should be able to post the refs or, better, the acual quantitative
results (they probably just report means and SDs, not the distribution
of individual scores) are the sociologists and social psychologists
on CSGNet who have easy access to university libraries (and their
own textbook collections -- my textbooks on these topics disappeared
years ago): people like Chuck Tucker, Clark McPhail, possibly Gary
Cziko and Kent McClelland. If any of you guys are listening could
you please post the reference and possibly the data from the
pay/satisfaction study I described. Thanks.

I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not familiar with the literature, but I was
able to find the book by the person who invented the theory: Leon
Festinger's "A theory of cognitive dissonance" (1959).

I also found what looks like a demolition of the evidence for the theory in
a paper by N.P. Chapanis and A. Chapanis, "Cognitive dissonance: five years
later" (Psychological Bulletin, v.61, n.1, Jan 1964, pp.1-22). It makes
damning criticisms of the experiments in the literature, finding that they
fall into two classes:

"1st, the experimental manipulations are usually so complex and the crucial
variables so confounded that no valid conclusions can be drawn from the
data. 2nd, a number of fundamental methodological inadequacies in the
analysis of results -- as, e.g., rejection of cases and faulty statistical
analysis of the data -- vitiate the findings."

The paper does not raise the question of arguing from group statistics to
individuals.

Perhaps Bruce Abbott, who wrote, e.g. in Bruce Abbott (971120.0020 EST):

Cognitive dissonance theory showed...

could comment on where cognitive dissonance theory stands these days among
mainstream experimental psychologists? I got those references from some
comparatively recent encyclopedias of psychology written for the layman.
They didn't list much more recent than those.

-- Richard Kennaway, jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk, http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/
   School of Information Systems, Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.

2

[Dan Miller (971203.1300)]

Richard Kennaway (971203) notes:

I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not familiar with the literature, but I was
able to find the book by the person who invented the theory: Leon
Festinger's "A theory of cognitive dissonance" (1959).

I also found what looks like a demolition of the evidence for the theory in
a paper by N.P. Chapanis and A. Chapanis, "Cognitive dissonance: five years
later" (Psychological Bulletin, v.61, n.1, Jan 1964, pp.1-22).

Perhaps Bruce Abbott, who wrote, e.g. in Bruce Abbott (971120.0020 EST):

>Cognitive dissonance theory showed...

could comment on where cognitive dissonance theory stands these days among
mainstream experimental psychologists? I got those references from some
comparatively recent encyclopedias of psychology written for the layman.
They didn't list much more recent than those.

I can't speak for Bruce Abbott, but I know of very few remaining
cognitive dissonance social psychologists. It is still taught in
textbook driven courses, but most of what is published in
psychological social psychology these days does not trace its
ancestry to dissonance theories.

Festinger, a student of Kurt Lewin at Iowa in the 1940s, died a
couple of years ago. Most of his students are retired or nearly so.
Dissonance theories are a types of balance theories - as is PCT. I
suppose one could associate reducing dissonance with reducing error,
but the stretch would upset the PCT Police (and rightfully so).
However, I am sure that cognitive dissonance theory is not a
particularly active research approach in experimental social
psychology.

Keep the faith,
Dan
Dan Miller
miller@riker.stjoe.udayton.edu

3

[From Bruce Abbott (971202.1350 EST]

Dan Miller (971203.1300) --

Festinger, a student of Kurt Lewin at Iowa in the 1940s, died a
couple of years ago. Most of his students are retired or nearly so.
Dissonance theories are a types of balance theories - as is PCT. I
suppose one could associate reducing dissonance with reducing error,
but the stretch would upset the PCT Police (and rightfully so).
However, I am sure that cognitive dissonance theory is not a
particularly active research approach in experimental social
psychology.

Social psychology is not my area, so I'm afraid I have no recent contact
with what has been going on with dissonance theory and alternatives to it.
Festinger's view was that individuals strive to keep their cognitions
(beliefs, perceptions, etc. compatible. Perceiving incompatibility or
dissonance between cognitions led to discomfort, which the person would seek
to reduce. One way to do this would be to change one of the cognitions. In
the study I described in an earlier post, participants performed a highly
tedious task and then were paid either a small or large amount to tell the
supposedly next participant that the task was interesting and fun. Some
time after they had done this, the were questioned on their perception of
the task. Those who were paid the small amount tended to rate their liking
for the task higher than those who were paid the large amount.

Festinger argued that those who were paid the small amount experienced
considerable dissonance about the lie they had told, because the small
amount paid did not justify the lie. So they reduced dissonance by altering
their belief about how fun the task had actually been, so that the lie
seemed like less of a lie. Those paid the large amount had also lied, but
they had been paid plenty for it and this, according to Festinger, justified
telling it in the minds of those given the large compensation. There was
less dissonance and so they did not need to adjust their belief about how
fun the task had been as much as those who had been paid little.

I'm sure you can see the parallels to control theory, although as Dan notes,
there are significant differences as well.

Regards,

Bruce