Ever wonder why people do what they do? This course—which includes more than $1,000 of video and reading materials—offers some answers based on the latest research from social psychology. Students taking the course for a Certificate will also receive free membership in Social Psychology Network (SocialPsychology.org). COURSE DESCRIPTION FROM PROFESSOR PLOUS: Each of us is dealt a different hand in life, but we all face similar questions when it comes to human behavior: What leads us to like one person and dislike another? How do conflicts and prejudices develop, and how can they be reduced? Can psychological research help protect the environment, and if so, how? This course offers a brief introduction to classic and contemporary social psychology, covering topics such as decision making, persuasion, group behavior, personal attraction, and factors that promote health and well-being. Our focus will be on surprising, entertaining, and intriguing research findings that are easy to apply in daily life. The course will also draw from the websites of Social Psychology Network, the world's largest online community devoted to social psychology. I hope you'll join me for this course, have fun, and learn some useful information that enriches your life.
Lecture 2.5: Two Flavors of Dissonance: Vanilla and Earthworm
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Nov 08, 2018
Learning so much and I'm only in week 1. It's untangled and clarified some of my own experiences and interactions in such an easy format with relevant and informative resources.
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May 10, 2019
Professor Plous has made this course interesting with a number of additional videos, Ted talks and snapshot quiz. It is one of the best courses that I have taken on Coursera.
From the lesson
WEEK 2: The Psychology of Self-Presentation and Persuasion
This week's goals are to: (1) learn how people explain their behavior and the behavior of others; (2) explore the link between attitudes and behavior; (3) understand what cognitive dissonance is and why it matters; and (4) gain some practical tips from the science of persuasion and social influence.
Taught By
Scott Plous
Professor of Psychology; Executive Director, Social Psychology Network; recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching
Since the 1950's, over 2,000 studies have been conducted on cognitive dissonance
exploring things like who experiences it, why they experience it, how they
experience it, what are the implications, and so forth.
Although there are many different flavors of cognitive dissonance, most situations
fall into one of two general categories. The first is "predecisional dissonance,"
in which dissonance or the possibility of dissonance influences the decisions
people make. So, in this case dissonance comes before
people make a decision. The other type is "postdecisional dissonance,"
in which dissonance (or again, the
possibility of it), follows a choice that's already been made,
and efforts to avoid or reduce this dissonance affect later judgments.
So, in this case, dissonance comes after a decision.
The power of predecisional dissonance was beautifully illustrated in a classic
study by Jim Sherman and Larry Gorkin published in 1980.
To understand how it worked, consider the following story.
A father and his son are out driving. They are involved in an accident.
The father is killed, and the son is in critical condition.
The son is rushed to the hospital and prepared for the operation.
The doctor comes in, sees the patient, and exclaims, "I can't operate; it's my son!"
Question: Is this story possible?
Most people, particularly before 1980 (when the study was published), would answer
that it's not. Their reasoning would be that the patient
can't be the doctor's son if the patient's father has been killed.
At least, they would reason that way until it occurred to them that the surgeon
might be the patient's mother. Now, if you live in a country where women
can be surgeons, and this possibility hadn't occurred to you, and if you
consider yourself a relatively non-sexist person,
there's a good chance you're experiencing dissonance right now—in this case,
an uncomfortable feeling that your behavior and beliefs are inconsistent.
Moreover, the theory predicts that if you're experiencing cognitive dissonance,
you'll be motivated to reduce that dissonance by behaving in a more
non-sexist way than ever, to show yourself that you're in favor of
equality between women and men. At least, that's what Sherman and Gorkin
hypothesized. In their experiment, they randomly assigned
77 college students, male and female, to one of three conditions in an
experiment on "the relationship between attitudes
toward social issues and the ability to solve logical problems."
In the sex role condition, students were given five minutes to explain how the
story of the female surgeon made sense. In the non-sex role condition, students
were given five minutes to solve an equally difficult problem concerning dots
and lines. That way, Sherman and Gorkin could make
sure that the results weren't simply due to students working on a difficult problem.
And in the control condition, students
were not given a problem to solve. In the sex-role and non-sex-role
conditions, the experimenter provided the correct solution after five minutes
had passed. Roughly 80% of the students were not able
to solve the problems within five minutes.
Next, the experimenter told students that the study was over, and she gave them
booklets for another person's study about legal decisions.
This wasn't a surprise, by the way. The students had been told previously
that they'd be participating in a couple of unrelated research projects.
The experimenter explained that the other researcher was out of town
and that they should put their completed booklet into an envelope addressed to
that person and drop the envelope in a nearby outbox.
Then she left, seemingly never to see their answers to the second experiment.
In reality, the second experiment was
nothing more than a cover story to collect information on sexism without
students detecting a connection to the first part of the experiment.
There was no second experiment. Pretty tricky, pretty tricky.
In this part of the study, students read about an affirmative action legal case in
which a woman claimed that she had been turned down for a university faculty
position on the basis of her gender. Students then gave their opinion about
three things: First, what they thought the verdict
should be. Second, how justified they thought the
university was in hiring a man rather than the woman.
And third, how they felt about affirmative action in general.
What were the results? Sherman and Gorkin found that compared
with students in the control group, and compared with students who were presented
with the problem concerning dots and lines,
people who had failed to solve the female surgeon problem were more likely to find
the university guilty of sex discrimination,
less likely to see the university as justified in hiring a male for the job,
and more supportive of affirmative action policies in general.
Based on these findings, Sherman and Gorkin concluded that students who failed
the female surgeon problem tried to reduce their dissonance by acting as
pro-equality as possible, trying to show themselves that they
weren't biased against women. Let me share one other study on predecisional
dissonance—an entertaining and startling experiment published by Ronald
Comer and James Laird in an article entitled, "Choosing to Suffer as a
Consequence of Expecting to Suffer: Why Do People Do It?"
In the study, 50 college students were assigned to one of three experimental
conditions: worm expectancy/worm choice,
worm expectancy/shock choice, and neutral expectancy control group.
I'll explain the right two columns in a few minutes, but first, let's just walk
through the study. As soon as students entered the
laboratory, they saw a table set up for the experimental tasks.
On one side of the table, there were eight covered cups weighing different
amounts for a weight discrimination task— you know, judging which cup is heavier.
In the worm expectancy/shock choice condition, there was also an electric
shock apparatus sitting on the table. And in another area, there was a plate
with a dead worm on it, a cup of water, a napkin, and a fork for a worm eating task.
And by the way, no worms were harmed in the making of this video—
that's a candy gummy worm, not a real worm.
The experimenter then read a statement reminding students that they were free to
refuse or to terminate participating at any time.
Three participants immediately pulled the ripcord and bailed out of the study.
But the other 47 students remained, and a post-experimental interview indicated
that they fully expected to eat a worm before the study was over.
Students in all three experimental conditions began by completing a
personality questionnaire that asked, among other things, how brave they thought
they were and how much they deserved to suffer.
Then the experimenter described each of the experimental tasks, seated students
in front of the task that they were assigned, and left the room to take care
of some preliminary details. Students in the neutral expectancy control group
were assigned to the weight discrimination task,
and students in the two worm expectancy groups were assigned to the worm eating
task—that is, they expected to eat a worm.
Ten minutes later, after students seated in front of the dead worm had been given
lots of time to contemplate their fate, the experimenter returned and announced
that there would be a short delay. The experimenter said, "While you're
waiting, I was thinking, it's been quite a while since you filled out the pretask
personality survey. I don't even know if it's valid anymore.
Would you just fill it out again now?" In this way, the participants were led to
provide a second self-rating of how brave they were and how much they deserved to suffer—
so the researchers could see whether these ratings changed at all during the
ten minutes or so that students had sat in front of their task.
Then, a few minutes later, the experimenter returned and asked students to rate how
pleasant or unpleasant the tasks were. Students simply gave their general
impressions because they hadn't actually performed the assigned task.
Students in the control condition and the worm choice condition evaluated the
weight discrimination task and the worm eating task.
And students in the shock choice condition evaluated the weight
discrimination task and a shock task in which they would give themselves a shock
on the hand. Finally, the experimenter shuffled
through his papers again and declared that—whoops!—the correct experimental
condition hadn't been assigned, and students would now be able to choose
the task they wanted to complete. Students in the control condition or the
worm choice condition were given a choice between doing the weight discrimination
task or the worm eating task, and students in the shock choice
condition were given a choice between the weight discrimination task and the shock
task—that is, a task that involved
the self-infliction of suffering but didn't have to do with worms.
After students indicated their preference, they were fully debriefed,
meaning that they were informed about the purpose of the experiment.
You'll be happy to hear that none of the students were actually required to eat
a worm, which may have come as a disappointment to some of them
because, when given the choice, 12 of the 15 people assigned to the worm choice
condition preferred to eat the worm. And 10 of the 20 people in the shock
choice condition chose to give themselves painful electric shocks.
That is, a large number of students chose to suffer through a disgusting or painful
task rather than opting for the harmless weight discrimination task.
In contrast, all 15 people in the control condition chose the weight discrimination
task over the worm eating task. For people in the control condition,
a typical response might be, "Well, you know, thank you for giving me the choice
but I think that I'm just going to stick with the weight discrimination task.
You know, I've been really trying to cut
down on the number of worms that I eat, but thanks for thinking of me."
Now, put on your dissonance hat for a second and answer the following
pop-up question: Why would so many people choose to suffer?
The purpose in asking you this question
was simply to stimulate your thinking—it wasn't to see if you have the correct answer,
because there isn't a single correct answer.
What the researchers concluded is that
most students who expected to eat a worm changed their beliefs in at least one of
three ways: First, they convinced themselves that
eating a worm wasn't that bad after all. They convinced themselves that they
were brave. Or they convinced themselves that they
deserved to suffer. By changing their beliefs this way,
students were presumably able to reduce the dissonance caused by agreeing to
suffer for no good reason. In commenting on how people will adapt
their belief systems to fit their situation,
even if the situation is assigned at random as in the case of an experiment,
Comer and Laird wrote the following: "Although it is superficially striking to
observe people choosing to eat a worm, the more impressive aspect of these
findings is the degree to which people will change their conceptual system to
make sense of the random events of their lives."
One can only wonder whether the same sort of mechanism is involved in other
self-destructive situations. For example, think about battered women
who choose to stay with their boyfriend or their husband and tell themselves that
they deserve to suffer or that they're brave,
or that it's really not that bad. Well, that's predecisional dissonance
because the dissonance is influencing later decisions—
whether to stay with a boyfriend, whether to render a guilty verdict against a
university, whether to eat a worm, and so on.
What about postdecisional dissonance— how does that work?
Well, one of the most straightforward demonstrations of postdecisional
dissonance—really, about as vanilla as you can get—was published in the 1960s by
Robert Knox and James Inkster. This was a very simple study in which
they approached 141 horse betters at Exhibition Park Race Track in Vancouver,
Canada—69 people who were about to place a $2
bet in the next 30 seconds, and 72 people who had just finished placing a $2 bet
within the past 30 seconds. Knox and Inkster reasoned that people who
had just committed themselves to a course of action
by betting $2 would reduce any postdecisional dissonance by believing
more strongly than ever that they had picked a winner.
To test this hypothesis, Knox and Inkster asked people to rate their horse's chances
of winning on a seven-point scale in which a 1 indicated that the chances
were "slight" and a 7 indicated that the chances were "excellent."
According to their results, people who were about to place a bet rated the
chances that their horse would win at an average of 3.48, which corresponded to a
"fair chance of winning." On the other hand, people who had just
finished betting gave an average rating of 4.81, which corresponded to a "good
chance of winning." So the hunch that Knox and Inkster had
was right. In less than 60 seconds, a $2 commitment
increased people's confidence that they had picked a winner.
And the same finding holds when people vote.
People enter the voting booth with a certain degree of confidence,
but after pulling the lever or dropping a ballot into the box,
they're more likely to believe that their candidate will win
because they don't want to feel dissonance from the thought that they
just threw away their vote on a loser. Two other notes before we end:
One about how universal cognitive dissonance is (for example, does it occur
in the East, as well as West) and the other about how useful it is to understand
cognitive dissonance theory. On the first question, research suggests
that cognitive dissonance does occur across the globe,
but the form it takes is somewhat different country to country.
Here in the West, we tend to feel dissonance from inconsistencies that
might suggest we're incompetent, or bad in some way,
whereas people in the East tend to be more concerned about choices and
behaviors that could lead to social rejection—
for example, bad choices made on behalf of other people.
The second question has to dowith usefulness,
and to address that question, I'd like to discuss a very interesting 2012 study
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—a study
on cheating. The Snapshot Quiz included the following
item on this topic: "If you want to reduce cheating on things
like tax returns or exams, would it be more effective to have people sign a
declaration of honesty, an honor code, at the top or the bottom
of the tax return or exam?" Let's pause so that you can see how you answered.
What these researchers found is that
people were much less likely to cheat if they signed a statement at the
beginning of a tax form, which would make it dissonance-arousing
to cheat on the questions that followed. Through a tricky procedure using a mock
tax form, the researchers were able to determine
that 63% of people in their particular study were honest when they signed a
statement at the top that said: "I declare that I will carefully examine this
return and that to the best of my knowledge and
belief, it is correct and complete." That number, 63%, fell to 21% in another
experimental condition when people signed an equivalent statement at the bottom of
a tax form, after they had already answered the questions.
And I should add that 36% of people were honest when not asked to sign a statement
of any kind—significantly different from 63% but not from 21%.
So, the bottom line is that if you want to reduce cheating, the signature shouldn't
go in the bottom line. It shouldn't go at the end of an exam or
a tax form that has already been completed.
Yet this is exactly where taxpayers in the United States are currently asked to
sign—at the bottom, where it has no effect on cheating.
And that really illustrates the concluding point that I wanted to make—
that knowing something about cognitive dissonance theory is useful.
In the next video we'll look at another research area that's got all sorts of
practical applications—the psychology of persuasion.
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