Are you "Brett" the Iggy Enthuisiest (DurandPlace)?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=eVzcs9Ygb5Q
Here is some more amunition, but that entire book is focused on
cognitive dissonance in nearly all human thinking and decision making.
When I was a kid I carried it with me and called it "The Hitcher's
Guide To Much Longer Rides & Girlz"
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
"Inconsistency among related beliefs . . .produces motivation to do
whatever is easiest in order to regain cognitive consistency or
consonance among beliefs." --Jones and Gerard
During the late 1950's Leon Festinger developed the cognitive
dissonance theory to explain attitude formation and change. According
to the theory, there is a tendency to seek consistency among their
cognitions (i.e., ideas, beliefs, opinions).
Cognitive dissonance is the state
of tension one feels after making
a decision, taking an action, or
being exposed to some information
that is (contrary) to a prior attitude
-(Zimbardo et al., 1999, p. 752).
The state of tension is
psychologically unpleasant,
so something must change to
reduce the dissonance --
usually the prior attitude.
For example, a person may believe smoking is bad for her health, but
when she starts smoking she finds herself with inconsistent cognitions
("Smoking is unhealthy" and "I smoke") creating an unpleasant state of
dissonance, so she changes her prior attitude ("Smoking is not really
as bad for you as they make it seem"). Festinger also theorized that,
if a person could sufficiently attribute their behavior to an external
influence, his dissonance would be lower and thus there would be a
lesser attitude change. For a great example of this, see Supporting
Studies.
Cognitive dissonance explains well the process of effort
justification. If a person puts for a great deal of effort (i.e.,
energy, time, money), he wants to feel like it was worth it. For
example, if someone pays a high price for a new car and finds the car
uncomfortable, he may experience dissonance and so to reduce it, he
alters his attitude about the car to be more positive. One well-known
study that supported this, showed that if someone puts forth a lot of
effort to get into a group, the dissonance of potentially working hard
for nothing causes them to reduce that dissonance by liking the group
more (Aronson, 1969).
Cognitive dissonance is by no means a full-proof theory for predicting
attitude change. People do not always change their attitudes when
there is dissonance. For one thing, people differ in how much
inconsistency they can tolerate. Another thing is that two cognitions
that seem inconsistent to one person may not be to another. Still,
despite some mixed results, many studies have supported the idea that
dissonance does underlie many of our attitude shifts.
http://www.sfb504.uni-mannheim.de/glossary/cogdis.htm
http://chiron.valdosta.edu/mawhatley/9710/cogdiss.htm
http://www.apa.org/books/4318830s.html
---------------------------
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
Suppose a person smokes cigarettes and then reads a report of the
medical evidence linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer and other
respiratory diseases. The smoker experiences dissonance. The cognition
"I smoke cigarettes" is dissonant with the cognition "cigarette
smoking produces cancer." Clearly, the most efficient way for this
person to reduce dissonance in such a situation is to give up smoking.
The cognition "cigarette smoking produces cancer" is consonant with
the cognition "I do not smoke."
But, for most people, it is not easy to give up smoking. Imagine
Sally, a young woman who tried to stop smoking but failed. What will
she do to reduce dissonance? In all probability, she will try to work
on the other cognition: "cigarette smoking produces cancer." Sally
might attempt to make light of evidence linking cigarette smoking to
cancer. For example, she might try to convince herself that the
experimental evidence is inconclusive. In addition, she might seek out
intelligent people who smoke and, by so doing, convince herself that
if Debbie, Nicole, and Larry smoke, it can't be all that dangerous.
Sally might switch to a filter-tipped brand and delude herself into
believing that the filter traps the cancer-producing materials.
Finally, she might add cognitions that are consonant with smoking in
an attempt to make the behavior less absurd in spite of its danger.
Thus, Sally might enhance the value placed on smoking; that is, she
might come to believe smoking is an important and highly enjoyable
activity that is essential for relaxation: "I may lead a shorter life,
but it will be a more enjoyable one." Similarly, she might try to make
a virtue out of smoking by developing a romantic, devil-may-care self-
image, flouting danger by smoking cigarettes. All such behavior
reduces dissonance by reducing the absurdity of the notion of going
out of one's way to contract cancer. Sally has justified her behavior
by cognitively minimizing the danger or by exaggerating the importance
of the action. In effect, she has succeeded either in constructing a
new attitude or in changing an existing attitude.
Indeed, shortly after the publicity surrounding the original surgeon
general's report in 1964, a survey was conducted to assess people's
reactions to the new evidence that smoking helps cause cancer.
Nonsmokers overwhelmingly believed the health report, only 10 percent
of those queried saying that the link between smoking and cancer had
not been proven to exist; these respondents had no motivation to
disbelieve the report. The smokers faced a more difficult quandary.
Smoking is a difficult habit to break; only 9 percent of the smokers
had been able to quit. To justify continuing the activity, smokers
tended to debunk the report. They were more likely to deny the
evidence: 40 percent of the heavy smokers said a link had not been
proven to exist. They were also more apt to employ rationalizations:
Over twice as many smokers as nonsmokers agreed that there are many
hazards in life and that both smokers and nonsmokers get cancer.
Smokers who are painfully aware of the health hazards associated with
smoking may reduce dissonance in yet another way-by minimizing the
extent of their habit. One study found that of 155 smokers who smoked
between one and two packs of cigarettes a day, 60 percent considered
themselves moderate smokers; the remaining 40 percent considered
themselves heavy smokers. How can we explain these different self-
perceptions? Not surprisingly, those who labeled themselves as
moderates were more aware of the pathological long-term effects of
smoking than were those who labeled themselves as heavy smokers. That
is, these particular smokers apparently reduced dissonance by
convincing themselves that smoking one or two packs a day isn't really
all that much. Moderate and heavy are, after all, subjective terms.
Imagine a teenage girl who has not yet begun to smoke. After reading
the surgeon general's report, is she apt to believe it? Like most of
the nonsmokers in the survey, she should. The evidence is objectively
sound, the source is expert and trustworthy, and there is no reason
not to believe the report. And this is the crux of the matter. Earlier
in this book, I made the point that people strive to be right, and
that values and beliefs become internalized when they appear to be
correct. It is this striving to be right that motivates people to pay
close attention to what other people are doing and to heed the advice
of expert, trustworthy communicators. This is extremely rational
behavior. There are forces, however, that can work against this
rational behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance does not picture
people as rational beings; rather, it pictures them as rationalizing
beings. According to the underlying assumptions of the theory, we
humans are motivated not so much to be right as to believe-we are
right (and wise, and decent, and good).
Sometimes, our motivation to be right and our motivation to believe we
are right work in the same direction. This is what is happening with
the young woman who doesn't smoke and therefore finds it easy to
accept the notion that smoking causes lung cancer. This would also be
true for a smoker who encounters the evidence linking cigarette
smoking to lung cancer and does succeed in giving up cigarettes.
Occasionally, however, the need to reduce dissonance (the need to
convince oneself that one is right or good) leads to behavior that is
maladaptive and therefore irrational. For example, many people have
tried to quit smoking and failed. What do these people do? It would be
erroneous to assume that they simply swallow hard and prepare to die.
They don't. Instead, they try to reduce their dissonance in a
different way: namely, by convincing themselves that smoking isn't as
bad as they thought. Thus, Rick Gibbons and his colleagues recently
found that heavy smokers who attended a smoking cessation clinic, quit
smoking for a while and then relapsed into heavy smoking again,
subsequently succeeded in lowering their perception of the dangers of
smoking.
Why might this change of heart occur? If a person makes a serious
commitment to a course of action, such as quitting smoking, and then
fails to keep that commitment, his or her self-concept as a strong,
self-controlled individual is threatened. This, of course, arouses
dissonance. One way to reduce this dissonance and regain a healthy
sense of self-if not a healthy set of lungs-is to trivialize the
commitment by perceiving smoking as less dangerous. A more general
study that tracked the progress of 135 students who made New Year's
resolutions supports this observation. Individuals who broke their
resolutions-such as to quit smoking, lose weight, or exercise more-
initially felt bad about themselves for failing but, after a short
time, succeeded in downplaying the importance of the resolution.
Ironically, making light of a commitment they failed to keep serves to
restore their self-esteem but it also makes self-defeat a near
certainty in the future. In the short run, they are able to feel
better about themselves; in the long run, however, they have
drastically reduced the chances that they'll ever succeed in achieving
their goals.
Is this the only way to reduce the dissonance associated with failing
to achieve a goal? No. An alternative response-and perhaps a less
maladaptive one-would be to lower one's expectations for success. For
example, a person who has been unable to give up smoking completely,
but who has cut down on the number of cigarettes smoked daily, could
interpret this outcome as a partial success rather than as a complete
failure. This course of action would soften the blow to his or her
self-esteem for having failed while still holding out the possibility
of achieving success in future efforts to quit smoking altogether.
Let's stay with the topic of cigarette smoking for a moment and
consider an extreme example: Suppose you are one of the top executives
of a major cigarette company-and therefore in a situation of maximum
commitment to the idea of cigarette smoking. Your job consists of
producing, advertising, and selling cigarettes to millions of people.
If it is true that cigarette smoking causes cancer, then, in a sense,
you are partially responsible for the illness and death of a great
many people. This would produce a painful degree of dissonance: Your
cognition "I am a decent, kind human being" would be dissonant with
your cognition "I am contributing to the early death of a great many
people." In order to reduce this dissonance, you must try to convince
yourself that cigarette smoking is not harmful; this would involve a
refutation of the mountain of evidence suggesting a causal link
between cigarettes and cancer. Moreover, in order to convince yourself
further that you are a good, moral person, you might go so far as to
demonstrate how much you disbelieve the evidence by smoking a great
deal yourself. If your need is great enough, you might even succeed in
convincing yourself that cigarettes are good for people. Thus, in
order to see yourself as wise, good, and right, you take action that
is stupid and detrimental to your health.
This analysis is so fantastic that it's almost beyond belief-almost.
In 1994, under the chairmanship of Henry Waxman, the U.S. Congress
conducted hearings on the dangers of smoking. At these hearings, the
top executives of most of the major tobacco companies admitted they
were smokers and actually argued that cigarettes are no more harmful
or addictive than playing video games or eating Twinkies! In a
subsequent hearing, in 1997, James J. Morgan, president and chief
executive officer of the leading U.S. cigarette maker, said that
cigarettes are not pharmacologically addictive. "Look, I like gummy
bears, and I eat gummy bears. And I don't like it when I don't eat
gummy bears," Morgan said. "But I'm certainly not addicted to them."
This kind of public denial is nothing new, of course. Over a quarter
of a century ago, the following news item was released by the
Washington Post's News Service:
Jack Landry pulls what must be his 30th Marlboro of the day out of one
of the two packs on his desk, lights a match to it and tells how he
doesn't believe all those reports about smoking and cancer and
emphysema. He has just begun to market yet another cigarette for
Philip Morris U.S.A. and is brimming over with satisfaction over its
prospects. But how does he square with his conscience the spending of
$10 million in these United States over the next year to lure people
into smoking his new brand? "It's not a matter of that," says Landry,
Philip Morris'vice president for marketing. "Nearly half the adults in
this country smoke. It's a basic commodity for them. I'm serving a
need. . . . There are studies by pretty eminent medical and scientific
authorities, one on a theory of stress, on how a heck of a lot of
people, if they didn't have cigarette smoking to relieve stress, would
be one hell of a lot worse off. And there are plenty of valid studies
that indicate cigarette smoking and all those diseases are not
related." His satisfaction, says Landry, comes from being very good at
his job in a very competitive business, and he will point out that
Philip Morris and its big-selling Marlboro has just passed American
Tobacco as the No. 2 cigarette seller in America (R. J. Reynolds is
still No. 1). Why a new cigarette now? Because it is there to be sold,
says Landry. And therein lies the inspiration of the marketing of a
new American cigarette, which Landry confidently predicts will have a
1 percent share of the American market within 12 months. That 1
percent will equal about five billion cigarettes and a healthy profit
for Philip Morris U.S.A.
It is possible that James Morgan and Jack Landry are simply lying. But
it may be a bit more complicated than that; my guess is that, over the
years, they may have succeeded in deceiving themselves. Near the close
of Chapter 3,I discussed the fact that information campaigns are
relatively ineffective when they attempt to change deep-seated
attitudes. We can now see precisely why. If people are committed to an
attitude, the information the communicator presents arouses
dissonance; frequently, the best way to reduce the dissonance is to
reject or distort the evidence. The deeper a person's commitment to an
attitude, the greater his or her tendency to reject dissonant
evidence. You may recall that in Chapter 1,I described an incident in
which, shortly before their suicide, the members of the Heaven's Gate
cult demanded their money back because the telescope they had just
purchased didn't reveal the spaceship they believed was following in
the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet. Needless to say, there was no
spaceship. But if you are deeply committed to believing in the
existence of a spaceship and your telescope doesn't reveal it, then
obviously there must be something wrong with the telescope!
Juicy anecdotes are suggestive. But they do not constitute scientific
evidence and are, therefore, not convincing in themselves. Again,
taking the cigarette example, it is always possible that Mr. Morgan
and Mr. Landry know that cigarettes are harmful and are simply being
cynical. Likewise, it is possible that Landry always believed
cigarettes were good for people even before he began to peddle them.
Obviously, if either of these possibilities were true, his excitement
about the benefits of cigarette smoking could hardly be attributed to
dissonance. Much more convincing would be a demonstration of a clear
case of attitudinal distortion in a unique event. Such a demonstration
was provided back in the 1950s by (of all things) a football game in
the Ivy League. An important game between Princeton and Dartmouth, the
contest was billed as a grudge match, and this soon became evident on
the field: The game is remembered as the roughest and dirtiest in the
history of either school. On the Princeton team was an All-American
named Dick Kazmaier; as the game progressed, it became increasingly
clear that the Dartmouth players were out to get him. Whenever he
carried the ball, he was gang-tackled, piled on, and mauled. He was
finally forced to leave the game with a broken nose. Meanwhile, the
Princeton team was not exactly inactive: Soon after Kazmaier's injury,
a Dartmouth player was carried off the field with a broken leg.
Several fistfights broke out on the field in the course of the game,
and many injuries were suffered on both sides.
Sometime after the game, a couple of psychologists-Albert Hastorf of
Dartmouth and Hadley Cantril of Princeton-visited both campuses and
showed films of the game to a number of students on each campus. The
students were instructed to be completely objective and, while
watching the film, to take notes of each infraction of the rules, how
it started, and who was responsible. As you might imagine, there was a
huge difference in the way this game was viewed by the students at
each university. There was a strong tendency for the students to see
their own fellow students as victims of illegal infractions rather
than as perpetrators of such acts of aggression. Moreover, this was no
minor distortion: It was found that Princeton students saw fully twice
as many violations on the part of the Dartmouth players as the
Dartmouth students saw. Again, people are not passive receptacles for
the deposition of information. The manner in which they view and
interpret information depends on how deeply they are committed to a
particular belief or course of action. Individuals will distort the
objective world in order to reduce their dissonance. The manner in
which they will distort and the intensity of their distortion are
highly predictable.
A few years later, Lenny Bruce, a perceptive comedian and social
commentator (who almost certainly never read about cognitive
dissonance theory), had the following insight into the 1960
presidential election campaign between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy:
I would be with a bunch of Kennedy fans watching the debate and their
comment would be, "He's really slaughtering Nixon." Then we would all
go to another apartment, and the Nixon fans would say, "How do you
like the shellacking he gave Kennedy?" And then I realized that each
group loved their candidate so that a guy would have to be this blatant
-he would have to look into the camera and say: "I am a thief, a
crook, do you hear me, I am the worst choice you could ever make for
the Presidency!" And even then his following would say, "Now there's
an honest man for you. It takes a big guy to admit that. There's the
kind of guy we need for President."
People don't like to see or hear things that conflict with their
deeply held beliefs or wishes. An ancient response to such bad news
was literally to kill the messenger. A modern-day figurative version
of killing the messenger is to blame the media for the presentation of
material that produces the pain of dissonance. For example, when
Ronald Reagan was running for president in 1980, Time published an
analysis of his campaign. Subsequent angry letters to the editor
vividly illustrated the widely divergent responses of his supporters,
on the one hand, and his detractors, on the other. Consider the
following two letters:
Lawrence Barrett's pre-election piece on Candidate Ronald Reagan
[October 20] was a slick hatchet job, and you know it. You ought to be
ashamed of yourselves for printing it disguised as an objective look
at the man.
Your story on "The Real Ronald Reagan" did it. Why didn't you just
editorially endorse him? Barrett glosses over Reagan's fatal flaws so
handily that the "real" Ronald Reagan came across as the answer to all
our problems.
Needless to say, the diversity of perception reflected in these
letters is not unique to the 1980 campaign. It happens every 4 years.
During the next presidential election, check out the letters to the
editor of your favorite news magazine following a piece on one of the
leading candidates, and you will find a similar array of divergent
perceptions.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
