Changes in interpersonal perception as a means of reducing cognitive dissonance.

Abstract

one of two (low choice). Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) found that the greater the monetary incentive for 5s to argue the merits of a series of boring tasks, the less were the 5s own attitudes toward the tasks likely to become more favorable. The greater apparent choice in the low incentive condition seemed to produce greater dissonance regarding the persuasion attempt, and this dissonance was reduced when the 5s rated the tasks as more enjoyable than 5s in the high incentive (low choice) condition. The present experiment is both an extension of the above considerations into the area of person perception and an investigation of an alternative mode of dissonance reduction which has largely been ignored in experimental predictions from dissonance theory: the possibility of withdrawing or canceling out one's discrepant behavior instead of showing accommodating changes in attitude. A recent paper by Jones and Thibaut (1958) emphasized the importance of interaction context in constructing any sensitive and comprehensive theory of person perception. Specifically emphasized in this paper was the role played by the perceiver in denning the situation and eliciting information from the stimulus person. In situations where one individual (A) has, for whatever reason, behaved toward another (B) in a manner which is discrepant with his private feelings about B, we might well expect the production of dissonance and a consequent change in A's attitude toward B. At least dissonance theory alerts us to this possibility and suggests the conditions under which such attitude change might occur. If Person A is pressured by strong incentives or imperative role demands to behave in an overly warm or overly hostile fashion toward B, we would expect little change in A's private impression of B. If, however, A is less certain about what is expected and perceives alternative ways of responding to B, the same extreme behavior would likely produce corresponding changes in A)NG the problem areas to which Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance may be applied, none has been as intensively explored in recent experiments as the area of attitude change. The paradigm of creating in an experimental group high dissonance that may be reduced by alterations of belief or feeling has been applied with reference to such attitudinal objects as toys (Brehm & Cohen, 1959b), consumer objects (Brehm, 1956), the interest value of a particular experimental task (Brehm & Cohen, 1959a; Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), nonfavored vegetables (Brehm, 1959), membership in a discussion group (Aronson & Mills, 1959), marriage before 23 (Cohen, Terry, & Jones, 1959), and cheating (Mills, 1958). In spite of the heterogeneity of research settings, almost all of these studies have involved the creation of cognitive dissonance by inducing the subject (5) to engage in some behavior running counter to his private belief. It has been theoretically proposed and empirically verified that, above the minimum of pressure required to induce the S to perform the discrepant behavior, the greater the force to comply the less the resulting dissonance and the smaller the tendency to adjust one's private beliefs to support the act of compliance. If an individual has no alternative but to behave in a fashion running counter to his beliefs, relatively little dissonance is created—it is as if he sees himself as the passive victim of fate. If he sees the possibility of behaving in a different fashion more consonant with his beliefs, and still performs in a manner at odds with his private feelings, more dissonance is created. Following this logic, there has been much explicit interest in the variable, degree of choice. For example, Brehm and Cohen (1959b) found that children, asked to choose one of cither two or four toys to keep, increased their liking of the chosen toy more when it was one of four (high choice) than when it was