加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校 社会心理学 P13 13 认知失调

[Applause] okay 12:30 so does anybody in here know

a student named Marc summers is Marc summers here so I got an email from Marc summers last night and I assumed he was a student in this

class although I can't find him on the roster but he sent me a great email that I wanted to share with everyone it is

I'm not being sarcastic it's it's a great email and he sent me a quote I guess from a news story that I thought

was very appropriate the story starts with the name of a 14 year old student I guess her name is well we'll just call

her Kristy because I can't pronounce her actual name and the story is Kristy a 14 year old from Truckee California has taken three days off from school so she

could camp out near the theater in Westwood Village neighborhood of La she and her mother Lori are two of the estimated 500 people who started

arriving on Thursday with pup tents lawn chairs and sleeping bags in the hope of securing a good spot on or near the red

carpet mother Lori said she thinks quote half of the teachers would be very excited if she knew what Kristy was

doing end quote and then the person who sent me the email Marc summers wrote perhaps a timely illustration of the

false consensus effect and I agree I'm guessing half of Christie's teachers would not be impressed anyway

if you know Marc tell him I said thank you I can't find him anywhere on my computer from ever having taken this class no I looked in my previous like

grade lists and things like that can't find him so I emailed him back and said who are you

and nice email but I mean I also said who are you so if I find out I'll let you know

it's who it you're him alright thank you why aren't you on my roster oh that's

not your real name all right I'm getting sent emails under assumed names well it was still a cool email whoever you are

I'm gonna call you Batman that's okay all right good email all

right so when we left off last time we were talking about cognitive dissonance and we're gonna continue talking about cognitive dissonance but we are talking about this first very classic study in

cognitive dissonance by Leon Festinger back in the 50s and just to sort of refresh the details of this because I want to make sure that people are clear on what happened and why it happened in

this study because it's a really important study in the history of Social Psychology all subjects came in they all

did an incredibly boring task and then everyone was asked essentially to go lie to the next subject and tell them what a

cool study this was okay half of the subjects who were told we're gonna pay you a lot of money to go get the next subject ready but the implication is to

lie and the other subjects were told you're we're gonna pay you a very small amount of money to go get the next subject ready or in essence to lie okay

after going and lying to the next subject all these folks who had done the incredibly boring task and now lied and told someone else it was an interesting

task were asked Oh before you leave I have one more thing I was supposed to ask you to fill out and on this last thing that they're asked to fill out they

indicate how much they themselves really enjoyed doing the incredibly boring tasks and what they found okay is it

those who had been paid a dollar to do the incredibly boring task now say that they like the task quite a bit those

paid twenty dollars to do the sorry those paid a dollar to lie now say they really did like the task they did previously those paid twenty dollars to

lie okay now say no didn't like the task at all and so the implication of this

study is that the reason why these folks are saying I liked that boring task is because they experienced dissonance

about lying to the next person and one way to resolve that dissonance about lying is to make what would be a lie

into not a lie if I can convince myself that I actually enjoyed the task then going and telling the next person I enjoyed the task isn't a lie okay in

contrast and I'll come back to in a second in contrast the person who got paid twenty dollars can tell themselves a different story they can say look I lied but I know why I lied I lied for a

lot of money and I'm okay with that yes lies are bad but not all lies are created equally this why isn't that harmful and I got paid a boatload of

money okay I'm gonna go rent a limo now so these folks have sufficient justification for what they did these

folks do not have sufficient justification for what they did now why did these folks actually agree to go tell the next person that the experiment

was fun why did they agree to that in the first place okay these subjects believe that they freely chose to go and do this okay but we know

by this point in social psychology that the real reason people willing to do something that they don't really like the idea of doing for a very small amount of money is because of

obedience to Authority okay so the real reason everyone says yeah I'll go lie to the next person is because obedience to

Authority is at work but situational pressures are often invisible and so as a result when this person thinks about why did I go lie to that next person

they can't say to themselves where they don't say to themselves I know I lied to that next person because there was an authority figure and I tend to do what authority figures asked me to do that's

the real reason that's actually a sufficient justification but they're not aware of it because these things happen outside of awareness so instead they have to say well I guess I freely chose to do it

why would I have freely chosen to have done that that makes me uncomfortable I'm gonna change my belief about this and by doing so I eliminate the sense

that I've lied okay there's a little question in the front okay so are there questions on this result why this result came about makes sense

okay good now there is sort of four classic varieties of dissonance studies that was the first kind that's called the

insufficient justification paradigm I will not ask you on the exam which of these is an insufficient justification paradigm I'm using these terms so that

we have a way to refer to them but I would never ask you this would never be a choice insufficient justification paradigm free choice paradigm I just might use that to help introduce

a question and then I would describe the method itself in the second of these that is typically referred to as the free choice paradigm this was done by

jack bream who was a student of festinger's okay and in this study and hundreds of studies like it in the year

since subjects are asked to sort of rank some initial set of things in this study he brought in sort of stay-at-home moms which of course in 1950

five pretty much all moms were stay-at-home moms he brought them in and he told them it was a marketing study about appliances so we were looking at sort of how effectively various

appliances kind of marketed themselves sold themselves to people okay so he showed them these eight appliances like a toaster and I don't know what else

they didn't have microwaves yet but other things you could put in front of a person eight of them and then each subject was asked to rank them from most liked to lease light liked so what's

your number one ranked appliance number two so on down to number eight so they do this ranking and after doing this the subjects are then told by the way as

part of your payment for today okay we're gonna let you take one of these appliances home with you okay you're gonna get one of these appliances as a gift now it just so happens that we have

two appliances that we have extras of and you can choose which of those two you would like to take home okay now this was alive they have all eight but

what they do is they always give the subjects what's essentially a hard choice okay they give them a choice between the one they ranked number four

and the one they ranked number five okay so these are two right in the middle of their rankings and they're pretty similar to each other so there's probably some things that they like

about each some things that they don't like about each okay on average subjects tend to choose the fourth the one they had ranked fourth but not always

sometimes people say well you know now that I think about a little more I'd rather over the fifth okay so half of the subjects get to choose between the

fourth and fifth ranked item which ones they would like to take home with them at the end of the experiment but the other half of the subjects are told as part of your participation today you are

going to get one of these appliances to take home and here it is and they're just shown the one that they had ranked number four and that's it so you have some subjects who are freely choosing

between the items they ranked fourth and fifth and other people who are just given the item that they probably would have chosen if given a choice but here there's no choice they're just

given the item okay and then a few minutes later before they leave the experimenter says oh by the way you know we just want you to rank these one more time for us based on just however you're feeling

right now so just rank them one to eight based on however you're feeling now so they rank sorry so they rank the eight appliances again and what the

experimenter is interested in is how their rankings change from the first ranking to the second ranking as a function of whether or not they were

choosing an item to take home or simply given an item to take home now in the absence of something like cognitive dissonance theory you'd say who cares what's the difference it doesn't really

matter right why should there be anything moving around but from the perspective of cognitive dissonance theory we can say oh you know this choosing between number four and number

five which are pretty evenly matched that creates conflict for a person because on the one hand if they accept this fourth ranked item they're

rejecting something else they liked almost as much so that's kind of a dissonant thing to do but also in accepting the fourth ranked item they're accepting an item that probably has

flaws that are almost just as great as whatever flaws were number five so there's kind of a conflict between accepting something you don't love and rejecting something you don't hate okay

it's a hard choice their theory is that if you were choosing between the one you ranked number one and number eight there would be no effects on your rankings initially and your subsequent rankings

but if there's a conflict laden choice like here there should be attitude change but again not if you were simply

given item number four okay because there's no dissonant cognitions here so the dissident cognitions just so that you have a sense of what they might be

in this case I spelled them out for you the the selected item is chosen freely and it has some weaknesses things you might not want and

the rejected item has some strengths that you would have liked to have gotten so there's this conflict there and what they find ok it's actually a little hard

to see these somehow the color didn't come out so well but what you see is what what's on here is the change in liking from the first ranking to the last ranking or the change in the so the

rankings going up or down so what we see is the item they selected when they got to choose went up about one and a half ranks in the rear Anki so it went from four to somewhere between two and three

in the rear ankles and the one they rejected went from five down to somewhere between sixth and seventh okay so what they've essentially done is

they've taken the two items that were hard for them to choose between and they've spread the difference for between them in their revised rankings of those items okay so now

psychologically they're treating these items as much more different from each other than they did in the initial rankings okay in contrast when there was no choice when they were simply given

the fourth ranked item there's no changes there's no changes in their rear ankles so it's not like fourth ranked items always go up and fifth ranked

items always go down it only seems to happen to these items where there was a conflict over what to choose and the

idea is that by separating these two in one's rear ankles okay we've now made the choice much less dissonant now there's a clear choice because if you had initially

given me the item ranked second and asked me to compare that to the item ranked sixth or seventh I said that's a no-brainer that's easy there's no dilemma there and so what they've done is they've been revised their

impressions to create a conflict free choice in retrospect so remember one of the hypotheses hypothesis five has as

one of the two parts that were motivated to be consistent okay and it's easier to feel consistent about the choice you've made when you've made an easy choice between the second

Rankin's sixth-ranked items but in order to do that what our brain does is goes and switch switches our memory for what

we thought all along so internally this makes us feel consistent externally this makes us look like we're rationalizing

and changing how we feel about things after the fact to make it fit with the events as they happened okay was there a

question I answered it perfect I was hoping I would yeah do people realize that they're doing this it's a good

question okay we're gonna come back to that towards the end of this lecture that was actually the first major thing I studied that's actually why I have a job here at UCLA because I I asked that question and so we'll come back to that

at the end so yeah that's a great example of the reasonable person standard me saying that's a great question to her when it was the question that I asked 15 years ago so yeah of

course I think that's a great question but I do I think it's a good question all right so the third of these types of

cognitive dissonance studies might be characterized either as the hazing or initiation rights studies or they're

often referred to as the effort equals liking studies and what that means will become clear to you in a moment so this

was done by Elliot Aronson back in I think the late 50s okay if you ever see the book the social animal it's one of the faint most famous books in the

history of social psychology he wrote this book I guess sometime in the late 60s and it's in its 12th edition or something this is the study that

probably got him the most attention and in this study he had women showing up because they had been invited to join a women's discussion group and I have no

idea what the discussion group was supposed to be about not important the key thing is is that he set them up okay and told them that in order to actually

get into this you have to pass a test okay and in one group there was just some simple control

tasks okay maybe it was just reading a paragraph out of a you know a GRE type of paragraph something boring and AH Q Asst okay just read that out loud and

the idea was we want to make sure that people are sort of good readers and can speak clearly that's what they were told was the purpose of this test if you're gonna be in this discussion group we want to make sure you can do that there

was another group that was given a mild initiation where they were given a paragraph to read and it had some mild taboo language sort of the kinds of

things that you can barely get on TV but you can get them on sort of ABC NBC CBS TV whatever that was back in 1958 I

don't know what that was like maybe using the word mom instead of mother was slightly taboo language I'm not sure but the key thing is that was then in

comparison to a severe initiation in which they were asked to read a paragraph that contained for the time very taboo language okay so they are in

one of these three conditions and then they're all told okay great you're in the group now and then you go in and have a discussion with this discussion group and after you're done with the discussion you come back out and you're

asked to fill out a number of different things and one of the questions people were asked is how much did you enjoy that conversation you had in the discussion group so they rate how much

they enjoyed it and the reason dissonance is relevant here is because on the one hand women in 1958 were likely to think I'm a traditional person

who speaks appropriately in public because they were reading these out loud in public in front of other people they didn't know but on the other hand they think to themselves I freely Ingrid

engaged in inappropriate public speech now we as social psychologists know they didn't freely engage we as social psychologists know the reason that

people in the severe initiation condition read this paragraph was because of obedience to Authority okay but they don't know that because

situations are invisible okay so when they think about what they've done this is how they have to probably construe the behavior they've engaged and they

believe that I chose to do that and at some level they did but it's probably not accurate to say they freely and sort of in an uninhibited way chose to do

that so there's sort of dissonance there between those two cognitions and that dissonance leads to those in the severe initiation group saying they really like

the conversation significantly more than the folks in the control and mild initiation groups okay so they had to work harder they had to

violate some norm of their own in order to get into this group and as a result of that they then said I really liked that group I really liked that

conversation and the reason this reduces dissonance is because by saying this is the best group ever I can't believe I got into such an awesome group it

creates a sufficient justification okay they can say wow you know I don't like speaking in a taboo way in public and

that's not really my thing but if I'm gonna get into the best group ever I'm willing to do something extra

but the way that this happens is it's not that they ahead of time knew that this was the best group ever and they would work harder to get into it instead they retrospectively are changing their

understanding of the group to justify the inappropriate behavior that they engaged in they're rationalizing at least that's what it looks like from the outside when you compare these three

folks and so this is why these are sometimes referred to as the effort equals liking study if I have to work harder to get into a group or to you

know get anything to get a book to get into a class whatever it is if I have to work harder part of the way my mind justifies that additional effort that I put in is by

essentially coding that thing that I then did as better the more effort I apply to get into a group or to get something the more dissonance is going

to lead me to think wow that was a really good thing to get into that's a

good question on a multiple level multiple levels we don't know how long an effect like this lasts because social psychologists almost never care about

what happens five minutes after the studies done okay this is one of the big real profound I think flaws in almost every study that I'm going to tell you about this quarter is that we don't know

if this would hold up you know 10 conversations later with the same group my guess is it would but not necessarily because of dissonance but because once you initially encode the group as being

the best group ever that sets in motions a series of other sort of self-fulfilling prophecies you engage the group in a different way and if you are more motivated that might actually make the group a better group and you know all these things that might follow

but there's a lot of effects that we look at where we establish that something happens because we're interested in what are the basic psychological mechanisms but there's

sort of more applied questions about how much do these things affect long-term consequences in the real world and social psychologists almost never look

at those things okay the last of the dissonance types of studies oh sorry and sorry the big obvious

implication and the reason I always talk about this one in this class is because this study is a beautiful illustration of why fraternities and sororities have

hazing right it really explains why you know I mean yes it's fun to haze people there's no question about that whether it's you know official hazing in the context of you know fraternities

sororities whatever or just someone that you're sort of given a little bit of a hard time that can be fun in itself so I don't want to discount that part but it also serves a really important function if you have to work harder to make it in

the Marine if you have to work harder to get accepted into a fraternity that's going to lead you to be far more bonded to that organization because our brain

justifies the things that we work hard to do and that's probably the best evidence actually that this does have long-term effects because we know that people do end up super super bonded to those kinds of organizations when

there's a really high bar to getting into those it's messy because obviously those folks were really motivated to get into the fraternity but having them have to work even harder to get in I think

helps promote that and that's one of the things I think this study probably demonstrates all right the last of these kinds of studies are called the counter

attitudinal essay studies and these were done by Gerald BAM so remember we talked about Daryl BEM before when we were discussing the philosophers and and in

particular Conte Daryl BEM was the psychologist is the psychologist who came up with the idea of self perception theory that sometimes we know ourselves

by looking at our own behavior okay here he's focusing on dissonance and he does

something a little bit like the free choice studies with the ranked eight items okay so there's a parallel here but it's it's different but he measures

attitudes toward some topic at the beginning and at the end of a study okay and so in this study let's imagine that

people are asked they go to UCLA they go to this classroom and they say how do you feel about the idea of raising tuition for next year okay on a scale

from one to twenty how much of a good idea do you think it is to raise tuition next year and of course undergraduates typically say not a good idea right so

they say nope don't like that my attitude is negative towards that idea of raising tuition and then he asked them to do something just like in the

free choice study they're asked to sort of freely choose to do something that's going to create dissonance in this case the subjects are asked to write a

counter attitudinal essay on topic X so here they're asked to write an essay on why raising tuition next year would be a good thing

some people are told we have some people the experimenter says this to some of the subjects they say okay we're having some people write Pro to ition essays

where it's about increasing tuition and we're having some people take the sort of anti position where they're writing on why you shouldn't raise tuition you've been assigned to the pro tuition

raising position so you are required to spend the next 10 minutes writing an essay on why raising tuition next year would be a good thing these folks do not feel like they have any choice they feel

like I'm in an experiment and I have to do this but they know that they've been coerced to do it on the other hand there's another condition where sort of

sly social psychology comes in and here the experimenter says alright we're having people write essays about these two positions okay and you can choose

yourself which essay you want to write but here's the thing we already have more essays than we need for the anti position see we need 50 and 50 essays

and right now we have 50 people who have already written essays saying why raising tuition is a bad thing and we really need some more essays on why raising tuition would be a good thing so

you know if you wanted to that would be really great it would really help us out okay but it's your choice your choice okay and most of the people but not all

but most of the people in this condition choose to write the pro essay and they feel that they freely chosen to do it now they throw out the data from anyone

who writes the anti essay because they're only interested in what happens if you write the pro essay either when you feel forced to do it or you feel that you freely chosen to do it it's

your own free will after doing this at some point after doing it they measure your attitude again and what they're interested in

is do you become more in favor of topic X in this case raising tuition as a function of having freely chosen to do something that's inconsistent with your

own attitudes on that topic and so here the dissonant cognitions are a I'm against X I'm against raising tuition

but in this condition I feel that I just I freely chose to write an essay in favor of raising tuition so these two cognitions are in conflict with one

another ok so the basic finding from this that has been shown again and again and again and again with lots of different attitude topics is this so

some people write no essay and from before to after they show no attitude change so you can't really see it but there's a little basically flatlined yellow bar here so that if they wrote no

essay at all and you measure their attitudes at two different times their attitude stays the same I was against it when we started I'm against it now if

they feel coerced they show a little bit of an increased attitude change from the first attitude rating to the second but not much and this isn't significantly different than 0 but if subjects feel

that they freely chose to write this essay in favor of raising tuition they now have a significantly more positive

attitude towards raising tuition next year ok significantly more positive now I don't remember what scale this is on this might be on a 1 to 30 scale in

which case their attitudes might still be relatively negative so that's not the the the sort of end point of their attitude is less important what's more important for the purpose of

understanding this dissonance process is that their attitudes reliably change in the direction of an essay that they freely chose to wrote right and it's an essay that they wrote that's in contrast

to their sort of previously stated attitudes their basic attitudes because there's dissonance there now there's been many many studies using this paradigm but BAM and McConnell did

something special in this study that makes it my favorite study of this type that's been done the first thing to know is that while they had people give their initial

attitudes and write the essay on one day they didn't measure their final attitudes until a week later a week later they had the same subjects come back into the lab and the first thing

they asked them is what's your attitude towards raising tuition okay and that's where these results come from so this is from a week ago to now and I wrote an

essay a week ago and now my attitude has changed so I guess this one answers your question as well they looked at a week apart usually they do this all in one testing session in the course of an hour

but in this particular study there was a week delay between when they wrote the essay and when they gave their final attitudes the reason why this is really interesting is because they then asked

subjects okay for this next one don't tell us what your attitude is towards raising tuition now what I want you to

do is remember what you told us your attitude was a week ago before you wrote that essay okay remember you came in and we could go you wrote that essay and

we're not going to talk about the essay but you wrote that essay and before that we asked you what is your attitude towards raising tuition tell us what was

your attitude then and so what I'm going to show you here is what's referred to as the attitude recall error this is the discrepancy between there our initial

attitude and what they now say was their initial attitude so let me walk you

through this so you're really clear on what we're seeing here in each case people are essentially saying the

attitude that they now have after having written the essay is the same attitude they had a week ago before they wrote the essay okay so these folks who don't

change their attitude are pretty good at saying what their old attitude was because they still have the same attitude and they're saying yeah I have that same

attitude it hasn't changed I said five a week ago I think it's a five now my attitude hasn't changed so I'm going to say five again and they're pretty much

right now here in the big error condition these folks are saying okay in reality let's say they said five on a

thirty point scale a week ago so all these folks a week ago said five so these folks actually said five but now they've changed their attitude by 10

points right this is how much they've changed so now their attitudes of 15 so they were five a week ago now there are 15 and when you say what were you a week

ago they say I was a 15 okay they're saying they've always had the same attitude it hasn't changed so they're changing

their attitudes by 10 points and now they're mistaken about what their old attitude was by 10 points because they think they've had the same attitude all

along and so they're using their current attitude to figure out what their old attitude was okay they're not

introspectively pulling out the truth of what their attitude was a week ago they're doing something that's inferential they're saying well if I'm a 15 now I was probably a 15 a week ago so

each of these groups is as exactly mistaken as how much they've changed their attitudes because of the dissonance process okay so sort of going

back to the question that was asked here this really starts to raise the question of our subjects aware that they're changing their attitudes as a result of the dissonance process are they aware of

that and we're going to come back to that but this was one of the studies when I was in graduate school that I read that made me think geez you know maybe people aren't aware because if they knew their attitude had changed

they would be more accurate here when they were asked about their old attitude so the the general finding here is that people are changing their attitude to be more consistent with their essay writing

behavior that's a basic dissonance effect they don't seem to realize they've changed their attitudes and as a function they miss remember the original attitude to be

consistent with the current attitude okay so again there's this sense of I've been consistent all along nothing's changed about me I believe what I've always believed but from the outside we

know that they've changed but from the inside it's not clear that they know they've changed okay so one of the

things this tells us potentially is that our attitudes aren't stored with sort of tags or ways of remembering them that

remind us when we form those attitudes and how they've changed over time okay we miss remember lots of things in terms

of how we used to be compared to now and when we miss remember them we typically miss remember them in ways that serve our current motivational goals so in the

dissonance study people are miss remembering their old attitude as being consistent with their current attitude which makes them feel consistent but there's other times where we actually

exaggerate the difference between what we remember sort of being originally where we are now so let me give you an example there was a study done and most

of these studies were done by Michael Ross he's the guy who's not the brother of Lee Ross that we mentioned I think in the last class and he does all this work on autobiographical errors and so he

does these studies where he'll get someone's SAT scores so let's say you take the SATs or the GREs and you don't do as well as you wanted to and now you're going to go to the Princeton

Review class so you go spend months doing the Princeton Review class it's grueling and then you take the SATs or GREs or whatever it is again and what he

asks people is okay so what you get on your final SATs and also what do you remember having gotten on your initial SATs and what he finds is that people

who have gone through things like the Princeton Review say that their initial SAT scores were lower than they really were they miss remember them as being

because then it makes them feel like the benefit they got from Princeton Review was better by misremembering my initial scores being worse I feel like I've improved more and people do things like

this all the time when it's a domain where we want to feel that we've improved we miss remember our earlier mark as having been worse than it is whether it's SATs or weight when you're

trying to go on a diet people miss remember their weight as having been higher than it really was when they've been on a diet so that they can now say I've lost more weight okay

so this is a common phenomenon and part of this is that we don't have real good memory for these things in the first place these things aren't typically things that we track really closely and

attitudes are really strong candidates for this kind of slipperiness this ambiguity in terms of when they formed so you know most people if you ask them when they're 40 you know what's your

political orientation how strongly are you liberal conservative Democrat Republican most people can tell you and then you ask them so what were you 10

years ago 20 years ago and so on and what most people do is they'll say well I was roughly what I am now right I don't think I've changed but it turns

out there's lots of people who change between their 20s and 40s a surprising amount do change but those folks tend to overestimate the extent to which they've always held the same attitude because

our memory doesn't seem to tag when we get an attitude we only seem to keep track of our current attitude and then we apply a theory to figure out what was my old attitude probably the same as

what it is now unless of course you have some major conversion event right so you were like a serious Democrat and then something happens that makes you lose faith and you become a serious

Republican now you're likely to overestimate how liberal you used to be okay because you have this theory of I

had a big switch and that is consistent with a really big change in attitudes and so you overestimate okay now

let's go back to dissonance how does dissonance reduction or the attitude change that we ultimately see happening how does it happen okay at a very simple

level we know the events are supposed to occur as follows you have some initial attitude or belief I think raising tuition is a bad idea you then have some

counter attitudinal event you write an essay about why raising tuitions a good idea this creates some kind of experience of dissonance that yucky

feeling in your gut that makes you uncomfortable and somehow in this magic box when dissonance occurs this leads to something like a revised attitude in

most cases now I find myself thinking you know I can see why raising tuition wouldn't be the worst thing in the world it provides more services it allows blah-blah-blah-blah-blah

now what we want to do is understand what's going on in this magic red box here and Festinger and others who followed him said it was something like

this okay you've got the conflict between your counter attitudinal event and your initial attitude I wrote the counter attitudinal essay but I had the

other attitude initially and having this conflict literally causes physiological arousal it turns on your autonomic nervous system okay when we're

distressed when we are stressed when we are threatened this turns on the autonomic nervous system makes us feel uncomfortable okay so we have physiological arousal

which is then thought to lead to a conscious awareness of that discomfort okay so we become aware that we're sort of sweating and and physiologically

aroused which is kind of an aversive experience to have and there is data to support that if you give someone a shot of adrenaline and don't tell them that they're getting it it makes them

uncomfortable it does and then this is a key thing once you become aware that you're physiologically you know uncomfortable you've got to make an attribute

Oshin for why you're feeling this comp discomfort and you need to attribute that back to this conflict so you've got this cognitive conflict that causes

arousal you become aware of that negative feeling and then you say well why am I feeling this way I know I am feeling this way it's because I just did something that conflicts with my general

beliefs and then you engage in a process of changing your attitude in order to make everything consistent again if I change my attitude now I feel more

consistent about the counter attitudinal behavior I gauged it yeah no that's a

good thought right so maybe it's it's just an introspective error so now let me ask you though do you think if I asked you to write an essay on why raising intuitions a good thing do you

think that that even though you might try to list some things would get you to change your true beliefs about it right a little bit maybe but I think for a lot of these things most people from the

outside and this has been done when they're asked you know imagine you went through this study how much would your attitudes change most people say not at all I know what I believe I can write an essay but I'm

faking it it's acting it's not real so most people say this would not change my attitudes also if it was just an introspective error people might be more

able to remember that they used to have a different attitude they might say yeah you know I've come to see the light a little bit but I remember that I used to not be able to see the light and they don't seem to be

doing that either these folks don't seem to recognize that their attitude has changed yeah does the attitude change

what I can't hear the very end go either way so the attitude change in these studies always goes in the direction of the sort of counter attitudinal behavior

that you engaged in so that's the way I didn't get it goes now if you had someone that was really really in favor of raising tuition and you had them write an anti raising tuition essay you could get the attitude to

on the other direction but it's always going to be shifting away from their initial attitude towards the counter attitudinal behavior that they engaged

in okay so this is kind of the official model of what happens during dissonance and and so I want to show you a couple

studies that relate to this model the first of these has to do with this clever insight that mark Zanna and his advisor Joel Cooper had in the 70s where

they said okay if this is true what if you mistakenly attribute the physiological arousal to something other than this discrepancy see this model says when you feel the negative arousal

you've got to think I know where that's coming from it's coming from the fact that I just did something that goes against my own beliefs and values and that makes me uncomfortable that's why I'm feeling this way but what if you

were tricked into thinking that something else caused that physiological arousal would that prevent you from changing your attitudes so they did a

clever study involving placebos placebo pills so what is a placebo pill a placebo pill is typically a pill that's

nothing but a little sugar pill that a doctor or someone else tells you has some particular effect on you so if I give you a pill and say this pill is going to make it so that you don't feel

pain from your headache and you take it and you believe that it's a you know it's an Advil but it isn't really to the extent that you have less of a headache

because of that pill that's a placebo effect there was no active pharmacological agent in the pill yet we reliably see symptom reductions

associated with what the doctor tells you the pills going to do so that's just background on what placebo pills do in this particular study people before they

went through the I think counter attitudinal essay type of study they were either given no pills so they went through the same study you know that I just described to you pretty much or

they were given a pill called an arousal pill okay and they were told this pill will make you feel physiologically aroused okay so you can

think of this as the Red Bull pill okay this is the Red Bull pill okay so one third of people get no pill one third of people get a pill that they're told will

make them physiologically aroused but it's a placebo this pill is exactly the same as this pill or you know this pill is exactly the same as getting nothing there's nothing in that pill that

actually makes people aroused and then in a third condition they were told they were given a pill that was called relax ative okay and the idea is this pill will make you feel relaxed okay yeah

it's a chill pill so one pill is going to make you aroused one pill will make you relaxed and the other group has no pill in all cases nobody's actually taking a pill that

changes their arousal level but what's changing is their belief about what they're ingesting what state they're likely to be in in a few minutes they then go through the counter attitudinal

essay-writing paradigm and let's see what happens here so if you get no pill you get the same effects as in the bem study I just showed you

people who freely chose to write the counter attitudinal essay show significantly more attitude change than folks who knew they were coerced okay so

this is the standard counter to attitudinal essay effect but then we have the folks who took the relaxed it

in so these folks believe that they're going to be in a very relaxed state low arousal they go through the dissonance

paradigm and now they find themselves in a high arousal state because dissonance causes arousal when you have conflicting

cognitions that causes an aroused state okay and to these folks in some ways feels even more aroused why because they're essentially doing a comparison

they're saying how aroused am i right now compared to how aroused I should be see these folks are saying I'm pretty aroused and that's compared to a neutral baseline

these folks are saying I'm pretty aroused but I should be below my normal baseline right now because they gave me a pill to calm me down so these folks

feel even more aroused than they would or they think they're more aroused than they should be relative to these folks and as a result they show even more

attitude change okay these folks feel like they have an even bigger physiological conflict going on with them and so they're more motivated to change their attitude to a greater

degree okay now the last condition these are the folks who got the arousal pill okay the folks who got the arousal pill are told you're going to feel aroused in

20 minutes so when they go through the dissonance paradigm and they have the conflict where I freely chosen to write an essay that conflicts with my basic attitudes and beliefs about raising

tuition when they get to the point where they recognize that they're aroused they have an explanation for that arousal that doesn't have anything to do with

dissonance they say oh I just took a pill that made me aroused and because they can attribute their arousal to the

pill rather than to the discrepancy they show no attitude change so these folks

who have another explanation for their high level of current arousal the pill they believed was going to cause and be aroused these folks do not show the same

attitude change that everybody else does okay yeah so in both of these groups the no pill and the relaxing group they believe the reason they're feeling arouse right now

is because they did something dissonant they wrote a counter attitudinal essay but these folks think not only am i aroused right now but i'm way more

aroused than i should be because i should be below baseline in terms of arousal so for them it's kind of like they think the conflict is even bigger which warrants an even bigger attitude

change in order to kind of cope with the the negative physiological state okay any other questions on this study I know it's it's sometimes a complex study to

understand because there's kind of placebo stuff and other stuff mixed in here okay so this is a description that

I've just gone over a couple times if given a pill that you believe will relax you then dissonance induced arousal is surprising and as is experiences more intense leading to great a greater

dissonance reduction and then this one explains the arousal pill condition so okay now I want to come back sort of formally to this question is cognitive

dissonance always a conscious process okay when we rationalize do we know that we're doing it when we change our attitudes in these ways do we recognize

that our attitudes are changing okay I think we already have a hint from the Daryl BEM study that we don't at least sometimes and if we don't this might contribute to us not knowing ourselves

as well as we think because we think our attitudes are more constant than they are or at least some of our attitudes are more constant than they are okay and it also might contribute to our

misunderstanding of others because we see them from the outside rationalizing and we think to ourselves and what's wrong with you that you can't just like acknowledge what we both knew was true

last week like you know I'm sorry that that girl wouldn't go out with you but we both know a week ago you were crazy about her and you can't say now that you weren't that into her ever because we both know you were

well maybe the person who changed their attitude doesn't know that they used to feel differently maybe some of the time these things change and as they change

it's a little bit like that clip from dark city where something changes in your mind and you have no memory that things were ever different and so you go on thinking this is what I always

believed and it's not an inauthentic process at least from the inside on the other hand Festinger and others said various things about dissonance that

that make us think that they really believed this was a conscious process so Festinger wrote dissonance reduction does indeed require that time be spent in thinking about the characteristics

all the alternative and there's various other quotes from folks then and more recently talking about sort of the the conscious way we think about what happened to us why we're feeling aroused

okay and going through the process of effortfully changing our attitudes so let's look at we're conscious processes might be a work remember these are three

of the steps that are involved in the the mechanism of dissonance reduction as described by Festinger so you get the discomfort physiologically you become aware of the discomfort you attribute

that discomfort to the conflict and then you change your attitude and so awareness of the discomfort naturally involves awareness that's a conscious

process attributing the conflict that you're feeling the distress that you're feeling to the counter attitudinal behavior okay should involve explicit

conscious memory for the fact that you just wrote a counter attitudinal essay okay and then if the attitude change itself is an effortful process that

should involve thinking reflective conscious processes so the sort of first study that I did that actually got any

attention long ago had to do with this issue of explicit conscious memory and what happens to this process if you can't remember now that should say discrepant

but instead it says discrepant which is not a word as far as I know but I wrote it so there it is so what if you can't remember that you

just did something counter attitudinal that you wrote this essay that went against okay well of course all of you if I had you write an essay ten minutes

ago about why raising tuition is good you'd remember that no problem okay but amnesiac don't okay so amnesiac SAR folks who have trouble forming new memories so I've

told you about them before and you've heard about them in in different contexts so you can go in and you can you know meet an amnesiac talk to them for a half an hour have a pretty normal

conversation with them walk out of the room come back in five minutes later and they'll treat you as if they've never met you before okay because they can't lay down new

memories explicitly new explicit memories where they can consciously say I remembered what happened five minutes ago ten minutes ago yesterday so they have a major problem with explicit

memory so we ran a free choice study than what kind with the aid appliances although we didn't use appliances in ours I'm not going to go into the details of exactly how we did the study

but the critical thing is that we compared how amnesiac s-- and non amnesiac healthy controls showed attitude change in this kind of

dissonance paradigm so not surprisingly when you run the healthy controls they show that the items that they selected go up in the rear ankles compared to the

initial rankings and the items that they rejected went down in the rear ankang compared to the initial rankings okay and this is the standard attitude change effect you get in the free choice

paradigm right it's just like the bream study okay so what do our magicks subjects do well they actually show the exact same effect okay so the eniac

subjects say now that they like the thing that they selected they don't like the thing that they rejected more so than in their initial rankings except are amnesiacs

cannot remember that they ever so affected between these items and these items and we tested that so we showed them the two items okay in our case it was actually four items it's a little

complicated that's not what's important here but we showed them the items that they were selecting among after they made these Arirang Kings and they were at chance for saying which one they had

chosen okay they couldn't tell us which one they had chosen previously they couldn't even tell us which two items out of the whole set of items they had been asked to make a choice between so

they have no memory for having chosen item number four over item number five and yet they now show the same attitude change process okay so this suggests

that it is very unlikely that in all cases of dissonance people are actually consciously remembering the thing they did that's counter attitudinal they're not consciously remembering the conflict

something is happening that doesn't involve that kind of conscious memory and I'm not going to go into all the details of what probably is happening

for those of you who are sort of on the cogs I end of things maybe majoring in cogs I what we think might be going on here is something that's referred to as a constraint

satisfaction process but I'm not going to go into details and trust me I won't ask you about constraint satisfaction on the final if I do you can hit my thumb

with a hammer okay fair enough I said that on tape go ahead so this suggests that there's a major hole in the sort of standing theories of cognitive

dissonance we also wanted to test this another way so this time we did a study where we used cognitive load versus no cognitive load so this is where you're rehearsing an eight digit number

although that's not how we did in this study but it's kind of the same idea and so folks who aren't rehearsing the eight digit number show us spread between the ones they rejected and the ones they

sorry the ones they selected versus the ones they rejected okay and also the folks who are under cognitive load show a similar spread now this one seems to

be a little bit more about the selection side and this one a little bit more about the rejection side but when you applicate this that goes away the key thing is that the new difference between

these two of 1.15 is pretty close to the difference here of 1.25 so these folks are under cognitive load the whole time and the likelihood that they could be thinking about their physiological

arousal and then thinking about well why am I feeling this way I know I'm feeling this way because of the counter attitudinal essay I wrote I better suspend some time changing my attitude they're not going to be able to do this

because they're busy rehearsing other information that prevents them from engaging in that kind of reflective conscious thinking about their attitudes

okay so that addresses this issue of thinking and then Laura Egan and some other folks at Yale did some other studies actually explicitly building on

this study that we had done where they looked at some other folks that probably couldn't engage in a lot of conscious reflective thinking they looked at little kids three-year-olds and monkeys

okay and I'm not going to explain the whole study to you because it's a slightly different paradigm and it gets a little complicated the thing to take away from this is that monkeys show the same dissonance effects

adults do and little three-year-olds show the same dissonance effects that adults do so these folks are probably not consciously reflectively engaging in these rationalization processes all

these studies together suggest that these things are happening relatively automatically without awareness and it makes sense that if your attitude is changing automatically you wouldn't

recognize it and so when you're later asked what was your old attitude you'd say well it's the same as the attitude I have now because I have no awareness that my attitude ever changed because it

changed automatically okay this set of studies clear so so the question was is this something you learn or is it innate it's not about innate or learned it's

about sort of the way the mechanisms of the mind work when we're in a situation that produces kind of a conflict between two cognitions the key distinction here is whether it's an automatic perhaps

stream-of-consciousness process or whether it's a reflective conscious process that requires explicit thought and mental effort and what I want to tell you is that these studies do not

establish that dissonance is always automatic but it establishes at least that it is sometimes automatic and that's not something the original theories took into account we haven't

proved that every time someone ever rationalizes it's it's an automatic process I'm sure there are times when people rationalize and it's not an

automatic process at all but at least in a number of situations it appears that it may be an automatic process which changes the way we look at the people

that we see rationalizing if you see someone rationalizing don't assume to yourself that they know that their position has changed okay they may not

in the same way that we have subjective controls that allow us to see the world differently from one another without realizing that we're probably seeing the world differently the same person sees

the world differently at different points in time before and after the dissonance process these processes have kicked in and the before person and the after person don't realize that they

have different positions okay so when you look at that person from the outside don't assume that they're just choosing to tell lies now I mean maybe they are if they're a politician they probably

are okay but if they're not a politician if they're just one of us there's a chance that they may not actually know so the last thing I want to say here is I want to make the connection back to objective self-awareness because

probably for some of you you've been thinking some of these things sound a lot like the kinds of things that were looked at an objective self-awareness or maybe was just sort of rattling somewhere in the back of your head with

you really explicitly making the connection but in both cases you're dealing with kind of a conflict between sort of some behavior and your sort of

attitudes beliefs and values now an objective self-awareness typically the behavior hasn't occurred yet well sometimes at least right so sometimes you're debating whether to cheat whether

to take more candy and objective self-awareness can prevent you from engaging in the bad behavior okay or objective self-awareness says if you've already engaged in the bad behavior and

you're made objectively self-aware you might leave the situation or just feel worse about yourself those are kind of the options that were discussed in the context of objective self-awareness

cognitive dissonance theory CDT suggests that there's another way to essentially escape objective self-awareness this extra way that we have to escape is that

we can revise our beliefs attitudes and so on so now our behavior in retrospect fits more with our attitudes and beliefs

that we think we've always held but we actually just got do I think that there's a module responsible for that

Marc summers if that is your fake name that's right so we've we've done some fMRI studies on this now so I mean we

have some data I don't actually believe in modules in the sense that I think evolutionary psychologists sometimes think about them or Jerry Fodor who kind of came up with the idea in the 80s

thought about them but I do think that there's specific mechanisms in the brain that are associated with this and I can give you a copy of the paper that we've

written on this if you email I can send you that we have the paper under review right now okay I've also told you about this already so I'm going to skip over

that and now we're gonna move on to our next lecture we are done rationalizing okay we're gonna start

with a couple of video clips and hopefully for one of them be able to get some sound going so

okay so okay so what I want you to do

here okay so I'm going to show you this little video here and I just want you to watch it and pay attention

simple little video just watch at last think about 40 seconds or so here we go okay so somebody raise your hand and

tell me what you saw very simple somebody what you see a triangle bullying another small triangle

and what about the circle the circle hides okay what else in the back yep they seem to be in a relationship with

each other and where's the big triangle fit in he's the other man right so the

two triangles are fighting over the

circle okay anyone else that's what you saw and okay okay

so Dennis the Menace situation the big triangle was the old guy who says get off my lawn I like that yeah okay anything else did anyone see sort of

parents and children yeah okay so you get sort of about 10% of people who say they see parents and children although you get more of that if you show this to an audience of people who

are parents who have children how many people saw some kind of like sort of romantic triangle where there's sort of the two triangles were fighting over the

circle okay good chunk of people so you usually get 50% or more of people who see it that way

who was the meanest of the three the big triangle and who is the most scared of the three that's right and what did the

small triangle want freedom to protect the circle the circle wanted to protect

the small triangle all right okay so the key thing to understand here is that you're all wrong of course because they're triangles and circles made out

of felt okay so nobody was chasing anybody there was no romantic relationship okay the the people who made this video made sure that the felt all stayed in different boxes they'd

never met each other before they were in this okay nobody wanted to do anything in this video nobody was a bully nobody was the tough one and nobody was the

weak one because they're little pieces of felt okay little pieces of felt don't

have intentions desires experiences okay this video was made in 1944 by Fritz Heider he was the guy who came up with

balance theory that we talked about two lectures ago it's referred to as the fighting triangles and the critical thing here is that when we look at this video

we can't help but see what's in this video in terms of human mental states thoughts beliefs

desires personality right we can't help but immediately see these events in

human social terms okay anyone want to guess who doesn't see this that way what group of people don't see this that way

children see it this way who doesn't autistic kids so kids with severe autism are the only people who when you ask them to write down their description of

what they saw they say there was a triangle that moved up the triangle moved left the circle did this and it's

all in non psychological terms okay also people who have with damage to a region of the brain called the amygdala if they have that damage essentially when

they're an infant not when they get it as an adult but if they have it when they're a very young child they also miss describe this just in terms of

physical movements but for the rest of us this is the example that since the beginning of the class when I refer to

the fact that we don't see snakes and decide they're dangerous we see dangerous snakes that's what you were all doing here you were seeing a bully

you didn't say to yourself there's a triangle and if I had to describe it in Psychological terms I would apply the label bully to that right that's not what you did you saw a bully everyone

sees a bully or they see some other narrative that has some coherent piece to it okay I want to show you one other brief video and then we'll end this

didn't used to be in my lectures but it's a commercial that I saw hmm gotta

get the sound up here and I'm gonna have to do this manually

but it's worth waiting to see this this is IKEA [Music]

you're getting the sound [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Music]

many of you feel bad for this lab that is because you crazy it has no feelings

and the new one is much better okay we'll discuss next time