An Examination Of Festinger — страница 3

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nights. Okay, McDonalds is killing off animals and rainforest at a quicker rate than anyone would care to know about, and maybe they are ripping off the minimum wage employees and getting rich quick off of the public indifference towards their operational standards, but that’s the way of the corporate American world, which is going to end eventually anyway (we are all going to end someday…) and I will be retired in Australia living off all the investments I made with the money from my job at McDonalds, and hey- they really do have better French fries. Once I have been through Cooper and Fazio’s four steps, I feel much better. More recently (1996), French psychologists Jean-Leon Beauvois and Robert-Vincent Joule have published a book entitled A Radical Dissonance Theory,

which discusses some of the most recent additions to Festinger’s original theory of dissonance. A specific focus of the book is the mathematical process of dissonance ratio, which the authors feel much of the post-Festinger research has overlooked. The ratio is defined as number of dissonant cognitions divided by the number of dissonant and consonant cognitions (Stone, 1988). One of the insights made by the psychologists is that if a person changes certain cognitions in order to minimize dissonance, even more behavioral and emotional inconsistencies will arise, therefore attitude change can never really restore consonance, and any form of dissonance reduction attempted will merely be a rationalization (Stone, 1998). Cooper and Fazio’s 1984 experiments regarding the causal

attribution process comes under fire when Beauvois and Joule argued that causal explanation of dissonance is separate from the dissonance ratio. The psychologists tested this by having subjects perform a boring task under high and low choice conditions and then answer a survey that would determine whether attributions for the action were internal or external. The outcome was that justification became less and less across the three conditions (no-attribution, internal attribution, and external attribution) respectively. This data corresponded with the idea that dissonance could be reduced by attributions that would produce consistent cognitions (Stone, 1998). Beauvois and Joule also present two paradigms for testing predictions based on their radical theory. The first is the

double-forced compliance procedure. This comes from Festinger and Carlsmith’s original experiment, where the subjects performed the boring task and then reported that it was enjoyable. Beauvois and Joule theorize that the boring task was enough to produce dissonance on it’s own, but that by lying about the enjoyment of the experiment, the subjects will feel an increased dissonance (Stone, 1998). The psychologists use this theory to predict that when the second dissonance inducing behavior is consistent with the first, there will be less of an attitude change over time than if only the first action is accomplished. Their experiments proved the hypothesis, and the results showed that subjects felt more favorably towards the task when they told the truth- that it was boring, as

opposed to the subjects who only read a description of the boring task and then said it was boring, or just performing the task (Stone, 1998). The second paradigm was derived from the hypothesis that people will rationalize negative behavior by replacing that behavior with something more consistent to the first behavior. In other words, if the opportunity arises to correct one behavior with another, people will be more likely to do that than to wait for the attitude change to take place, which will result in less desirability to replace the negative act with a positive since the attitude has changed. Joule also teamed up with Fabien Girandola to recreate Festinger’s 1959 experiment, and the results were very confusing even for the psychologists conducting the experiment.

Setting out to prove a hypothesis that double compliance will produce a greater attitude change than single compliance. As was expected, subjects who said that the boring task was, in fact, boring evaluated the task as more enjoyable than those who only performed the task. Perhaps when forced to describe the task as tedious and boring, the subjects felt that it was really not that bad after all, and changed their attitude accordingly. Girandola felt that hypothesis would be disqualified because the role play of telling the confederate the task was boring would set up a self-persuasive effect (Girandola, 1997). In the end, the results showed that people who performed the task and then described it as boring, turned out enjoying the task more than people who simply performed the