 This is part two of lecture six. So by now you hopefully have a pretty good understanding of what cognitive dissonance is and also how you can reduce the feeling of dissonance. Now in this second part of the lecture we're going to talk about the applications and also the consequences of this interesting psychological phenomenon. And we're going to do so by starting off by talking about the classic study on cognitive dissonance which has already been conducted in 1959. This is a study in which the whole theory of cognitive dissonance is really well explained. It is quite a complex study and there's also some deception towards the participants and a lot of confederence in the study. So I'm curious what you think about it, and I invite you now to look at the video. In 1959 Leon Festinger and Merrill Carl Smith published a classic study demonstrating the potential for cognitive dissonance to lead to attitude change. In the first phase participants were asked to complete a series of mind-numbingly boring tasks. First they had to put 12 spools onto a tray. Then they emptied the tray and filled it with another 12 spools. All one-handed over and over again for a full half an hour. Next they were given a board with 48 square pegs. First participants had to turn each peg a quarter turn clockwise. Then they turn each peg another quarter turn. Again, using one hand only. Again over and over and over again for half an hour. As far as the participants knew, this was the end of the study. But in reality, this was when things just started to get interesting. Because next the experimenter told the participant an elaborate story, recruiting his or her help in order to keep the study going. So in this study we were looking at participants' expectations and how that would influence their task performance. So in some conditions participants didn't have any expectation of what to expect from the task. And that's what you experienced today. But half of our participants, we tell them that the task is going to be interesting and even a little bit fun. Does that make sense? Yeah. So the thing is we usually have a confederate that goes out and tells the next participant that the study is going to be interesting. But our confederate today caught on sick. So we already have a participant leaning outside and we were hoping that you might be able to help us out. Would you be able to go out and tell the participant that you had fun doing the task today? We can pay you. Um, I guess so. Great. All participants agreed to lend a hand, even though doing so put them in an uncomfortable situation. Having to tell the next participant, a fellow student, how great this dull study was going to be. Of course, this whole story to participants was really a deception. In reality, the confederate was the student in the waiting room. He wasn't really the next participant. He was working with the researchers and he was about to make the participant even more uncomfortable. Hey, well, this is Akshi. She just completed the experiment and I've asked her to tell you a little bit about it. Thank you. Thanks. Hey, how was the study? It was okay. It was pretty good. Pretty fun. Really? Because one of my friends did it last week and they said it really wasn't, you know, it wasn't very fun. No, I don't think so. I think it was pretty okay. Pretty fun. That's good to hear. Cool. Best thing here on Carl Smith expected that lying would lead to dissonance, that on the one hand, participants would think I'm a nice person. I'm honest. And on the other hand, they'd think I just lied to this person. This student's going to hate the study. With contradictory thoughts like these, something has to give to reconcile the dissonance. In this case, what changed were participants' private attitudes about how boring or fun the spool and peg turning study really was. Because if you could manage to convince yourself that it wasn't so bad, you're able to reduce dissonance. So for the last stage of the experiment, the participant headed to a post-study exit interview with a member of the department and was asked about their experiences with the spool and peg portion of the study. Hi, I'm a faculty member in the psychology department. I understand you were in a study today involving some physical manipulation of objects. You just have a couple of quick questions for you. First, did you find the study to be interesting, enjoyable at all? Yeah, it was okay. It was a little bit fun. Okay, great. We have a lot of studies like this in the department. And I was just wondering, would you be interested at all in being in a study like this in the future? Yeah, I guess. I would do it again. Great. Thanks a lot. To alleviate dissonance, the participants inflated their ratings of how enjoyable the study had been. Like the participant that you just saw. But not everyone did so to the same extent, because not everyone in the study experienced the same amount of cognitive dissonance. Do you remember how the experimenter we saw offered to pay the participant to lie to the person in the waiting room? And that payment amount varied by condition. Some of these participants were offered $20 for their help. A pretty nice payday for a simple lie, right? And it really was, because if you consider inflation, that's like being paid over $150 in today's money. In fact, these participants in the $20 condition had so much justification for their lie that lying didn't bother them as much. They didn't experience as much dissonance. They didn't feel the need to inflate the ratings of how fun the study had been. They just reminded themselves that they weren't bad people. They lied for the money. And really, who wouldn't have? But other participants were only paid $1 for their help. Not a huge amount of money. $1 in 1959 is worth about $8 today. Enough to get students like Akshi to agree to help, yes, but insufficient justification to deal with the dissonance that results. And so when these students felt uncomfortable about having lied, their best option was to make the lie a smaller one. And so they convinced themselves that the study itself hadn't been so bad. The participants in the $1 condition changed their attitudes in order to deal with the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. Okay, so now let's continue by looking at the results of this study. Here you see the behaviors of the participants and actually the answer to the question, how much did you enjoy the experiment? You see that in the no dissonance condition, participants said that they didn't enjoy the experiment, which makes a lot of sense because the experiment was not enjoyable. And for people that experienced low dissonance, that were the people that were paid $20 to tell the lie, they said they enjoyed the experiment a little bit more, but hey, they also received $20, so it makes quite a lot of sense. And they had sufficient justification to lie to the next participant. While in the high dissonance condition, something really interesting happens. All of a sudden, participants are saying that they really enjoyed the experiment, even though the experiment was very, very dull, but they had insufficient justification in order to tell the lie. So here you see the difference between the low dissonance and the high dissonance condition is the justification that participants have in order to explain their behavior. So if they were paid $20 to tell a lie to the next participants, they can reduce the dissonance they experienced by pointing at a very strong external reason and explanation for their behavior. So yes, I did tell a lie, but hey, I got $20 for it, so who wouldn't have told a lie? So they had an external justification to explain their behavior. That was not the case for the participants that only received $1. They didn't have sufficient external justification, so they made up an internal justification. They reduced the dissonance by changing something about themselves, your cognition or your behavior. So their behavior, they could no longer change it, so they changed their cognition instead of staying true to what they actually thought. Namely, this experiment is super dull and super stupid. They changed their cognition saying, yes, I said to the next participant that I liked it, and I only got $1 for it, but that is because I also actually really enjoyed doing these stupid tasks. So they changed their cognition. And if people change their minds in order to resolve dissonance, we call this counter-attitudinal behavior. And this means that we show behavior that is actually in contrast with our own private belief or attitudes. And this actually can be used, this principle of counter-attitudinal behavior to change stuff for the better. So this is, for example, witnessed if we ask people to do someone a favor, even if it's a person that they don't really like. So if you convince a person to, for example, help the neighbor across the street that you don't really like, you help this person moving a closet. And even though you really don't like the neighbor, you still sort of got lured into helping. So you saw this neighbor on the street trying to carry this closet by himself, and it didn't work at all. And you thought, okay, I have to help this person. Even though I don't like him, I'm still gonna help. Then showing this behavior, helping this neighbor that you initially didn't like, can actually change your mind about the neighbor. Because you showed certain behavior, helping a person, that is in contrast with your belief, namely, I don't like the neighbor. In order to resolve this, you can start changing your cognition. And you say to yourself, hey, the neighbor is actually not so bad after all. And this strategy has actually successfully also been used to reduce prejudice in people. So if you start helping people out that are from a different ethnic background, a group that people have a lot of prejudice against, if you interact with these people, and especially if you show helping behavior, we know that we can change attitudes and actually improve a person's attitudes towards minority groups. So cognitive dissonance can help us understand positive behaviors and attitude changes, such as why people help and how prejudice can be reduced. Now, let's see if this theory of cognitive dissonance can also help me raising my kids. So I have three boys, oh, I'm saying four, but it's actually three boys. That's a lot of boys. And they sometimes fight with each other. I guess it's what kids do or boys do, I don't know. And of course, I don't like this. So I don't like them fighting. These are actually not my kids, but just for you to get an idea. So if I want to stop, help them stop fighting, there's several things that I could do. So broadly speaking, I could induce severe punishment, really severely punish them if they fight. Or I could use miles or even insufficient punishments. So what should I do? Should I punish them mildly or should I punish them severely? What will be more effective? So in one way, you would of course argue, yeah, you should punish them severely because it's a severe punishment. We all want to avoid it. So that will help them refrain from fighting. And that is correct. But the problem is it will help them stop fighting if I'm around, if they know I can catch them fighting. But it will not change their attitude towards fighting with each other. So they will stop from doing so, but only if I'm around. But I want to change their attitude. I want them to like each other more and want them to cooperate and be nice to each other, always. So how can I achieve that? To get an answer to that question, let's go to a classic study, also on cognitive dissonance on toys. It's called the Forbidden Toy Experiment. And I think it's a very beautiful, clever way of seeing how we can subtly influence, in this case, children to change their behaviors. So in this experiment, which was conducted in 1963, there were two researchers, Aronson and Colsmith, and they asked kids that could come into their laboratory to rate several toys. So there were different toys that they could play with, and they had to rate them on attractiveness. And what they then did was they said to the children, so now you can play with the toys, you can play with any toy you like, except for this one. And that happened to be the most attractive toy. So the toy that this kid liked the most, this became the Forbidden Toy. They could not play with this toy. And half of the kids were saying something, the researchers said something like, if you still play with this toy, even though you're not allowed to, there will be severe punishment. I don't know what the punishment is, but it was severe punishment. To the other half of the group, it was the same story, but then there was a threat of mild punishment. So if you still play with the toy, then you will receive a punishment that is mild. Okay, so these two groups, all children behave very well, in the sense that no one played with the attractive toy. But that was only the first part of the experiment. What then happened was a couple of weeks later, all the kids from this experiment could return to the lab. And then the researchers said, so here are the toys, you remember you rated them, and then you could play with them, except for one. Now you can play with whatever toy you like. And of course the researchers were interested in the behavior of the children. Will they play with the toy, yes or no, especially with the forbidden toy? And what they then witnessed was something that I think, as someone who's also raising kids, is super interesting. That is, after participants were threatened with severe punishment, almost all the children played with a forbidden toy. So the moment this boundary was removed, they can now play with it. Everybody was super eager to play with it. But for the children that were threatened with only mild punishment, they were not so interested anymore. They sort of convinced themselves that, you know, I didn't play with the toy, there was not actually a lot of consequences if I didn't play with it. You know, then they experienced cognitive dissonance, and what they then do is change the recognition. I actually don't like the toy after all. I don't even feel interested in playing with it, even now I'm allowed to. So here you see the effect of severe and mild punishment on attitude change, and that if you induce miles or insufficient punishments, this is actually an ideal way of changing children's minds about something. So for example, dealing with a temptation or changing their minds and stop fighting with their brothers. So in the forbidden toy experiment, the kids convinced themselves, basically, to not play with the attractive toy. But sometimes people need a little bit more help in order to change their behavior. And we can use cognitive dissonance also in order to steer people, guide people in order to show more moral behavior or behavior that is more in line with their own core values. This is also something that my kids do a lot. For example, if I tell them that they have to eat everything for lunch and they cannot have something sweet, and then later on I skip lunch and I eat some delicious-looking chocolate brownie thing that I found in the freezer, then my kids say, hey, I had to eat all my lunch, but you are now just eating a brownie for lunch. What's happening here? So they induce hypocrisy. They remind me that I'm behaving inconsistently. I'm showing behavior that's not in line with my own core values. And doing so can make me feel more self-aware and it can induce me to change my behavior and indeed also just eat my healthy lunch before I grab some chocolate. Also, for more famous people than me, this can be used. For example, here you see there's actually quite a lot of platforms that use hypocrisy induction when it comes to climate change and people that are sort of hypocrites when it comes to changing the climate, like Bill Gates who has his foundation and he also really openly talks about how serious climate change is, but then still he is showing a lot of behaviors, having all these cars and a private jet that is, of course, also very polluting. So that's also in contrast with his own belief. So reminding people that their behavior is hypocrites that can also lead to behavior change and helping people to show better and more moral behavior. So in this lecture, we extensively talked about cognitive dissonance and also the many ways in which we try to reduce dissonance. So remember, there are three different ways. We can change our behavior. We can change our cognition or we can add cognition, but reducing dissonance in this way is not always necessary and it's also not always helpful because at times we will just be flawed human beings and we are all occasionally show behavior that is not moral. We all lie at times. We all show behaviors that is actually not in line with our core values. We take planes. We eat avocados. We spend too much money on very expensive coffee when we really definitely want to have coffee and I think it's also, by the end of this lecture, important for you to realize that it's okay every now and then to just show behavior that's not ideal, that you should also just sometimes accept the fact that we cannot always live up to our own expectations and live up to our own moral standards. And one way of also reducing dissonance has a lot to do with this perspective and that is using self-affirmation. So if you use self-affirmation, you remind yourself at the things that you are good at and these are things that are unrelated to the area where you experience dissonance. So it can be reminding yourself that you are still a very good and loyal friend. So for example, if you go take that airplane to Ibiza in the summer, even though you really care a lot about the environment and you feel super guilty about it but you still do it and then you can say to yourself, you know I worked really hard this year and I will still be committed to stopping climate change and reducing my carbon footprint but this one thing I just really want to do and I'm still a valid and important human being, I will make sure that I'm a good friend, I will work hard for my studies but this is also, you know, I'm still a good human being. So reminding yourself that you still have positive attributes is also a way of reducing the dissonance and I think sometimes that's perfectly fine because we cannot be perfect all the time. So this is the end of the lecture and I hope to see you next time.