Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory

We do not like inconsistency.  That’s the fundamental driver behind Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory.  Joel Cooper provides appropriate nods to Leon Festinger – and those he studied with.  (See A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Festinger’s book, for his direct perspective.)  Cooper’s perspective is one that isn’t fully embraced across all the research on cognitive dissonance.  However, there is some research supporting his perspectives and lots of confusing results.  Cooper does a good job of summarizing what we’ve learned and acknowledging some of the challenges in the results we’ve seen.

Best Rewards

One of the great advancements that was brought forth by cognitive dissonance is a push back against classical operant conditioning, which suggests that the greater the reward, the better the learning.  What cognitive dissonance research discovered was that smaller rewards actually create a bigger change in behavior.  This counter-intuitive answer changed the way that people thought about learning.  If there’s too big a reward, the change is minimal.  This is similar to Deci’s discovery that external rewards break intrinsic rewards.  (See Why We Do What We Do.)  What we “knew” about motivation and how to change behaviors was broken by the reality: experiments proved that classic behavioral modification therapy couldn’t explain these results.

It’s described as “inverse linear relationship between incentive magnitude and attitude change.”  In short, the larger the reward, the smaller the change.  It mattered.

Suffering

Another curious finding appeared with connections to cognitive dissonance.  The greater the struggle to obtain something – particularly membership in a group – the more people liked the achievement.  The groups were better, and the awards were more meaningful.  All of this served to minimize the occasional torture that was endured to get there.  Hazing rituals are officially forbidden for Greek organizations (fraternities and sororities), yet there are still news stories about how these rituals have gone awry and people are injured.  Members of these organizations frequently stand by these rituals that they themselves endured.

Classical theories of change and conditioning cannot explain the transformation from pain and self-questioning to assurance that these goals were worth the effort.  However, cognitive dissonance posits that the gap between the memory of the hard work and the reality of the result must be resolved.  We have to think the work was worth it to address the effort we put in.

Threats and Punishment

Every parent wants to know how to teach their children right from wrong.  They want to shape their behaviors in ways that lead to productive and happy adults.  Here, cognitive dissonance and the research that tested the theory have another surprising suggestion.  Make the threats and consequences mild rather than severe.  When the threats are mild, the child can believe that the desired behavior was their idea, and cognitive dissonance can slowly but steadily change their attitudes and motivations in the desired direction.

Practically, it means offering a subtle reprimand for eating candy before dinner rather than an explosion.  The severe threat or punishment absolves the systems that drive cognitive dissonance from their need to engage.

Disengagement

Albert Bandura wrote a guide for how to bypass some of our built-in morality.  In Moral Disengagement, he explains the mechanisms that would separate people from their morality with striking regularity.  They essentially come down to ways that a person doesn’t need to accept responsibility – or complete responsibility – for their actions.  Der Führer ordered me, so it wasn’t really my decision.  Cognitive dissonance faces the same forces that disable its power for resolving inconsistencies in our lives.

By being able to claim that the decision wasn’t ours, or that we had no choice, cognitive dissonance is disabled and rendered helpless.  That’s why it’s important to consider how we may be subtly or overtly creating “outs” for people when we’re trying to leverage cognitive dissonance for positive change.  Many research efforts have been undone by subtle coercion that the researcher didn’t intend.

Learning

Not every result in the study of cognitive dissonance has yielded clear results – even those where the confounding problem of coercion has been eliminated.  One such set of experiments is around the impact of dissonance on learning.  The theory – coupled with learning theory – predicted that simple learning should be enhanced by cognitive dissonance while complex learning should be inhibited.

Conceptually, simple learning is enhanced by motivators.  Malcolm Knowles et al. explain the forces that drive learning in adults in The Adult Learner, and one of those factors is the need to know.  Cognitive dissonance can provide that reason.  This amplification of simple learning was what the research found.

However, contrary to what the coupling of cognitive dissonance and learning theory would predict, complex learning tasks weren’t inhibited.  The distinction between simple and complex learning may seem abstract, but the line is drawn, because we’ve recognized that stress and fear inhibit complex learning.  There are many perspectives and theories about the gap between the two.  Often, we’re reminded of the apparent division between lower-level, implicit types of learning from the more complex, prefrontal cortex types of learning.  Kahneman uses the analogy of System 1 and System 2 in Thinking, Fast and Slow, and the model holds up for learning.

The question remains why researchers didn’t see a reduction of complex learning in scenarios of cognitive dissonance.  My answer is that cognitive dissonance is a different kind of stressor that’s not about short-term survival and therefore may influence learning differently.  Researchers will argue that the mechanisms they use for stress are often completely arbitrary and fake, but they still seem to have impact.  A classic approach is to create a time pressure either in the form of instruction or as an incentive for time-based performance.

Complicating the situation is that other research results indicated precisely the opposite – with no effect on simple learning and an inhibitory impact on complex learning.  Clearly, the forces at play in the intersection of cognitive dissonance and learning are nuanced.  While I’m convinced that simple learning is encouraged with dissonance with no ill effects for complex learning, that may not universally be the case.

Fear

In Emotion and Adaptation, Richard Lazarus explains fear as a cognition.  He explains the evaluation process and how that process works.  Ultimately, he proposes that we evaluate a situation to determine the degree of appropriate fear.  Cooper recounts research by Schachter and Singer, which proposed that fear is a label we can apply to arousal.  In other words, we have a biological, unconscious response to something, and we label that arousal with the word fear.

This explains a curious result of research, where cognitive dissonance’s impact was disabled when participants were provided with an alternative explanation for the arousal that dissonance created.  When injected with a placebo and told of expected anxiety, participants attributed their dissonance arousal to the drug – and then failed to change their attitudes to resolve the inconsistency of thought.

This finding shows us that we need to be careful to not provide an excuse for the arousal that cognitive dissonance provides lest we nullify its effect on changing attitudes.

Curiously, it was discovered that the valence of arousal could be experimentally manipulated.  Participants in research could be encouraged to lean towards excitement or anxiety with the subtle manipulation of prompts and responses.  This suggests that the way people interpret cognitive dissonance may be subjective.

Amphetamine

When the placebo mentioned above was changed to an amphetamine, a stimulant, the results changed.  In the placebo research, people attributed their arousal to the drug and therefore didn’t change.  However, when given an amphetamine, people in every group showed more attitude change.  One potential explanation for this is the arousal was of greater magnitude and therefore demanded a greater response.  Even low-choice participants, who could have claimed that they didn’t have to address their behavior discrepancy because they weren’t given options, changed.

Perhaps the low-choice condition failed to generate arousal and therefore there was no need to change, but the addition of amphetamine caused an arousal that needed to be addressed.

Commitment

Another interesting factor at play in cognitive dissonance is the degree to which someone commits to the behavior.  People with stronger commitments seem to have greater moves towards consistency.  Commitment is a bit of an odd word, because it implies an internal state, but that state can be driven externally.  Write an essay that’s destroyed afterwards, and the commitment is low – even if you passionately believe in what you’ve written.  Write it and share it to a disinterested party, and it goes up slightly.  Write it and have it shared with a decision-maker, and it goes up again.  Deliver a public speech, where we believe the audience can be persuaded, and commitment soars.

The greater the commitment to the position, the greater the forces at play and the more attitude or behavior adjustment we’d expect to see from the forces of cognitive dissonance.

It’s important to note that the effect seems to be eliminated if the person or people we’re speaking with seem to be unmoved or unmovable.  If we believe that our counter-attitudinal statements were rejected, no attitude change occurs.  Our perceptions of efficacy matter.

Unwanted Consequences

The major revision to cognitive dissonance proposed by Cooper and his colleagues is the idea that cognitive dissonance requires a consequence, and it only appears when that consequence was foreseeable.  Foreseeable is a standard less than predictable; it’s only reasonably possible.  (See The Suicide Lawyers.)  Even if there’s a 10% chance that something can come as a result of a behavior, it may be sufficiently foreseeable and therefore something that causes cognitive dissonance.

While this perspective is partially supported, it limits the scope of cognitive dissonance and requires us to stretch the limits of consequences to their maximum extreme.  We’ve got to believe that the consequences can be very small – like someone forming a negative impression of us.

As a framework for story telling and converting a desire to change into a framework for action, it is useful.  You simply expose someone to the potential negative consequence as a result of their actions and then you allow those consequences to happen.  This should be sufficient to cause an attitude shift – presuming that none of the ways that cognitive dissonance can be subverted are present.

Personal Responsible

One of the predecessors, then, that comes as a part of this proposed revision is that for a person to experience cognitive dissonance, they must accept some level of responsibility for their action having caused the negative consequences.  A failure to take personal responsibility because of one of the previously discussed ways or other, less common ways eliminates the need to address the dissonance – because they won’t experience any.  When perceived as random events, there is no need for someone to modify their beliefs or behaviors.

Self-Consistency and Self-Affirmation

Two other proposed revisions to Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory are a theory of self-consistency and a theory of self-affirmation.  Self-consistency says that we strive to resolve how our behaviors don’t match our values.  Self-affirmation proposes that our attitudes and behaviors should be self-affirming (positive).  Both revisions have mixed but ultimately negative evidence.

Self-consistency struggles with the challenge of articulating a single belief system for an individual.  As Reiss’ work in both Who Am I? and The Normal Personality and the work of Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind point out, our behavior is driven by a set of conflicting values and fundamental beliefs that we must constantly reconcile.  This means it’s hard to believe that people are recognizing their inconsistency.

Self-affirmation struggles when we realize that affirmation may be discordant with how a person feels and therefore may make the inconsistency and discrepancy worse rather than better.  (See Compassion and Self-Hate.)  Fundamental structural problems like this, in addition to the evidence, has made it difficult for either of these revisions to the theory of cognitive dissonance to be accepted.

Distraction

While not a permanent strategy, it is possible to defer processing of cognitive dissonance by means of distraction.  This can be either intentional, purposeful distraction, or by simply being too busy to take a step back and reflect.  Dangerous conditions can occur where people are too busy to recognize dissonance for long periods of time: when they suddenly have time, they end up processing all of the dissonance at once – with sometimes tragic results.

We’ve all heard stories of the people who take a vacation and suddenly have an identity crisis.

Comparing Self vs. Other

One of the challenges in developing an irrefutable theory for cognitive dissonance is that it’s an internal, mental process that is therefore not subject to direct observation.  There are simple differences in how you evaluate yourself – whether you use a progress milestone like a growth mindset (see Mindset), or you judge yourself against those around you.  The research on happiness seems to imply that people always want more than their peers.  They want 10% more than they’re currently making – but more than that, they’re also looking to do better than their peer group.  (See Thinking, Fast and Slow and The Righteous Mind.)

Group Salience

Cognitive dissonance is also influenced by forces beyond the individual.  Their group memberships and the social norms created as a part of those groups can have a profound impact on cognitive dissonance – if they’re primed.  In Influence, Robert Cialdini explains how priming people to see themselves a particular way or as a part of a particular group dramatically changes the degree to which they’ll behave in ways that are consistent with their prior statement or with the perceived preferences of the group.

If you want people to behave more like a group, make sure that that group is more salient in their minds while they’re making the decision.

Public Separation

Bill Clinton was known as the Teflon president, because the scandals never seemed to stick to him.  Even when he had to admit to his extra-presidential interactions with Monica Lewinsky, his approval ratings climbed.  Though most admitted that they didn’t approve of his actions, they still approved of him as a president.  This odd response makes sense when people disconnected his personal ethics from what they perceived to be the skills necessary to run the country.

These odd pathways can confound attempts to predict what effect – if any – cognitive dissonance will have.

All Theories Are Wrong

George Box, an economist, said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”  This statement captures the core of the discussions about cognitive dissonance and proposed revisions.  The original model has its limitations, and the revisions attempt to get at resolving them.  Ultimately, we need to remember that though Cognitive Dissonance may be wrong, it probably is useful.