Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

582 Chapter 
17 
Social Psychology
eating meat is immoral and still have a positive attitude toward hamburgers (Ajzen, 
2002; Conner et al., 2003; Levi, Chan, & Pence, 2006). 
Ironically, the consistency that leads attitudes to infl uence behavior sometimes 
works the other way around; in some cases our behavior shapes our attitudes. Con-
sider, for instance, the following incident:
You’ve just spent what you feel is the most boring hour of your life turning pegs for a 
psychology experiment. Just as you fi nally fi nish and are about to leave, the experi-
menter asks you to do him a favor. He tells you that he needs a helper for future 
experimental sessions to introduce subsequent participants to the peg-turning task. Your 
specifi c job will be to tell them that turning the pegs is an interesting, fascinating 
experience. Each time you tell this tale to another participant, you’ll be paid $1.
If you agree to help the experimenter, you may be setting yourself up for a state of 
psychological tension called cognitive dissonance. According to social psychologist 
Leon Festinger (1957),  cognitive dissonance  occurs when a person holds two contra-
dictory attitudes or thoughts (referred to as cognitions ).
If you participate in the situation just described, you are left with two contradic-
tory thoughts: (1) I believe the task is boring, but (2) I said it was interesting with 
little justifi cation ($1). These two thoughts should arouse dissonance. How can you 
reduce cognitive dissonance? You cannot deny having said that the task is interesting 
without breaking with reality. Relatively speaking, it is easier to change your attitude 
toward the task—and thus the theory predicts that participants will reduce disso-
nance by adopting more positive attitudes toward the task (Cooper, Mirabile, & 
Scher, 2005; Cooper, 2007; Rydell, McConnell, & Mackie, 2008). 
A classic experiment (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959) confi rmed this prediction. The 
experiment followed essentially the same procedure outlined earlier in which a par-
ticipant was offered $1 to describe a boring task as interesting. In addition, in a 
comparison condition, some participants were offered $20 to say that the task was 
interesting. The reasoning behind this condition was that $20 was so much money 
that participants in this condition had a good reason to be conveying incorrect infor-
mation; dissonance would not be aroused, and less attitude change would be 
expected. The results supported this notion. More of the participants who were paid 
$1 changed their attitudes (becoming more positive toward the peg-turning task) 
than participants who were paid $20.