Leon Festinger
Psychologist · 1919-1989 · Psychology, stage 3: Meet the psychologists
Showed that people change their beliefs to fit what they have already done, and that small rewards do it better than large ones.
Overview
Leon Festinger studied under Kurt Lewin, who brought the Gestalt emphasis on organised wholes into social psychology, and his work keeps that inheritance: he treated beliefs as a system under pressure to stay consistent. In 1954 he and colleagues joined a small group that had predicted the end of the world, and observed that when the date passed without incident the members did not abandon the belief but proselytised harder, which became the field study reported in When Prophecy Fails. He then formalised the mechanism as cognitive dissonance and tested it with James Carlsmith in 1959, paying participants either one dollar or twenty to describe a dull task as interesting: the poorly paid group, having no external justification for what they had said, adjusted their actual opinion instead. Dissonance is among the better-supported findings in social psychology and has survived the replication reckoning that damaged many of its neighbours. Read the 1959 paper first; it is short and the design is easy to follow.
Where to start reading
When Prophecy Fails 1956
A covert field study, written with Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, of a group whose prediction of the end of the world failed and whose conviction then increased.
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance 1957
The full theoretical statement: inconsistency between beliefs, or between belief and action, creates pressure to change one of them.
Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance 1959
The one-dollar-versus-twenty-dollar experiment with James Carlsmith, the theory's clearest and most cited test.
Part of
Sources
- Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance Classics in the History of Psychology, York University
- Leon Festinger Wikipedia
- Cognitive dissonance Wikipedia
