Dissonance Reduction or Artifact?

Abstract

The use of students as subjects for research in consumer behavior has given rise to the question of whether housewives in the marketplace behave like students in classroom experimental situations. One of the challenges to researchers is to specify the conditions under which the findings of classroom experiments can be generalized. In a recent study, Professor Sheth found that housewives and students did not differ in dissonance reduction behavior [9]. Although I agree with Sheth's conclusion, the similarity he found seems to be the result of an artifact (regression toward the mean), and the reason for the difference in the patterns of reevaluations between the high and low dissonance choice situations is the absence (or the presence) of the ceiling effect. The ceiling effect works in the following manner: the chosen, 7th-ranked item in the high dissonance condition (7-8 choice) has more positions to be reranked upward than the chosen, 3rd-ranked item in the low dissonance condition (3-7 choice). Similarly, the rejected, 4th-ranked item in the high dissonance condition (3-4 choice) has more positions to be reranked downward than the rejected, 7th-ranked item in the low dissonance condition (3-7 choice). In Sheth's table [9, p. 244], the predicted reevaluations occurred more frequently in the 3-4 choice condition (66 out of 85, or 77.5%) than in the 7-8 choice (82 out of 119, or 68.8%) and the 3-7 choice (63 out of 105, or 60.0%) conditions. When reevaluations are restricted by the ceiling, it is desirable to adjust the changes by converting the rank position changes to percentages of the total possible changes [5]. For example, when the unchosen, 4thranked brand was moved to the 5th rank, the change is one out of a possible six places (i.e., 4th to 10th place) or 16.6%. The sign is positive because the change is in the direction predicted by dissonance theory. When the unchosen, 4th brand was reranked to 3rd place, the direction is the opposite of dissonance theory prediction and the percentage change is -33.3%. Corrected for the ceiling effect, the present experiment replicated the Sheth-type experiments [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9] without arousing cognitive dissonance.