Cognitive dissonance
Concept · Leon Festinger · Psychology, stage 1: Learn the vocabulary
Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort of holding two beliefs, or a belief and an action, that do not fit together, and the pressure that discomfort creates to change one of them. Festinger predicted the counter-intuitive part: people who are paid a lot to say something they do not believe feel little dissonance, because the money explains their behaviour, while people paid barely anything have no such excuse and shift their actual opinion instead. He and James Carlsmith tested this in 1959 by paying participants either one dollar or twenty dollars to tell a waiting stranger that a boring task had been interesting, and the one-dollar group afterwards rated the task as more enjoyable. The effect has held up well under replication.
Why it matters
It predicts that small rewards change minds more than large ones, which reverses the intuition that people are bought by the highest bidder.
Part of
Cognitive dissonance in the glossary
Sources
- Cognitive dissonance Wikipedia
- Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance Classics in the History of Psychology, York UniversityThe full text of the 1959 Festinger and Carlsmith experiment, with its numbers.
- Leon Festinger Wikipedia
