Individual differences, self-presentation, and cognitive dissonance: Their concurrent operation in forced compliance.

Abstract

Experiments on forced compliance have typically been designed to demonstrate the superiority of one competing theory over another. The present study was designed to separate and assess the contributions of cognitive dissonance and self-presentation to the forced-compliance effect. Individual differences in selfpresentation were assessed using three scales: Need for Approval, Self-Monitoring, and the Other-Deception Questionnaire. In Experiment 1, subjects in the experimental group were induced to lie about a boring task, then rated task enjoyability on both pencil-and-paper and bogus-pipeline measures. One control group did not lie about the task but gave both types of rating. A second control group lied about the task and then gave two pencil-and-paper ratings. The pattern of results indicated that dissonance reduction and self-presentation contributed independently to the forced-compliance effect. These results were replicated in Experiment 2. The observed pattern of individual differences was critical in ruling out alternative explanations. Tedeschi's theory of self-presentation was supported over Rosenberg's formulation. Several theories integrating the self-presentation and dissonance views are discussed. The term forced compliance is applied to that class of social psychology experiments in which subjects are induced to perform a counterattitudinal behavior and subsequently come to express attitudes more consistent with that behavior. In the classic Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) procedure, for example, subjects were induced (for either $1 or $20) to tell a waiting fellow student that a boring task was actually interesting and fun. When subjects' attitudes were later assessed, the low-compensation ($1) subjects expressed significantly more favorable attitudes toward the task than high-compensaThis article is based on a doctoral dissertation com