Leon Festinger and Cognitive Dissonance
1942- Festinger received his masters degree in psychology after studying under the prominent Kurt Lewin. He continued to serve as Assistant Proffessor to Lewin at the University of Michigan’s Group Dynamics Center, eventually taking the position of Associate Professor when Lewin died in 1947. -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Festinger 1956- Leon Festinger first coins the term “Cognitive Dissonance” in a publication entitled “When Prophecy Fails” which studied a doomsday cult who’s leader was involved with Dianetics, predecessor to Scientology, and incorporated those ideas into the cult. She claimed to have received messages from alien beings that told her the exact end date of the world, Dec. 21, 1954, and that only the faithful would be saved by a UFO. Members made strong commitments to the belief, left families, money and possessions. Festinger infiltrated the cult to study “the arousal of dissonance” that would occur when the prophecy failed.
Festinger identified Cognitive Dissonance as the discomfort of holding onto conflicting ideas simultaneously and used this term to account for the psychological effects of disconfirmation of fervently held beliefs. He proposed that, in order to reduce the dissonance, people will be motivated to alter their attitudes, beliefs, and/or behavior. He also theorized that proselytizing is a way people attempt to reduce cognitive dissonance, converting others to their belief serves as confirmation.
Festinger observed this sequence of events:
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Prior to December 20. The group shuns publicity. Interviews are given only grudgingly. Access to Keech's house is only provided to those who can convince the group that they are true believers. The group evolves a belief system—provided by the automatic writing from the planet Clarion—to explain the details of the cataclysm, the reason for its occurrence, and the manner in which the group would be saved from the disaster.
December 20. The group expects a visitor from outer space to call upon them at midnight and to escort them to a waiting spacecraft. As instructed, the group goes to great lengths to remove all metallic items from their persons. As midnight approaches, zippers, bra straps, and other objects are discarded. The group waits.
12:05 A.M., December 21. No visitor. Someone in the group notices that another clock in the room shows 11:55. The group agrees that it is not yet midnight.
12:10 A.M. The second clock strikes midnight. Still no visitor. The group sits in stunned silence. The cataclysm itself is no more than seven hours away.
4:00 A.M. The group has been sitting in stunned silence. A few attempts at finding explanations have failed. Keech begins to cry.
4:45 A.M. Another message by automatic writing is sent to Keech. It states, in effect, that the God of Earth has decided to spare the planet from destruction. The cataclysm has been called off: "The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction."
Afternoon, December 21. Newspapers are called; interviews are sought. In a reversal of its previous distaste for publicity, the group begins an urgent campaign to spread its message to as broad an audience as possible. “ –
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http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... Tzmg90N5Xw -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_FailsAnother famous experiment by Leon Festinger studied dissonance resulting from forced public compliance theorizing that “if a person makes a public statement which is dissonant with his beliefs in order to receive a small reward, there is little justification for having made the statement.” The theory leads to the prediction that, “he will change his private belief in the direction of the public statement; increasing the size of the reward will decrease the degree to which he will change his private opinion.”
In this experiment subjects perform a series of boring, tedious tasks. After finishing the experimenter falsely “explained the purpose of the experiment.” They are told the purpose of the experiment is to test whether people perform better if they are told previously that the tasks are interesting and enjoyable than if told nothing at all. Each subject is told they are in the ‘control’ condition, meaning they had not been told beforehand that he tasks were interesting.
The experimenter explains that in the ‘experimental’ condition an “accomplice poses as a subject who has just finished the experiment and tells the waiting subject that the task was a lot of fun.” The experimenter then explains that another subject is waiting to be tested but the “accomplice” has not shown up yet. So the subject is asked if he would “do him a favor and substitute for the accomplice and tell the waiting subject that the tasks are interesting and fun.”
The subjects were run in three conditions. (a) the subject is paid $1 for serving as accomplice (b) a $20 condition (c) a control in which the subject was not asked to lie to the waiting subject. Upon interviewing the subjects, the results supported the theory. In the control, and the $20 condition, the subjects felt the tasks were unenjoyable. In the $1 condition however the subjects rated the tasks as rather enjoyable, significantly more positive than the other two conditions, supporting the theory that the dissonance actually caused the subjects to modify their private beliefs. As well it was observed that if “too much force was applied to elicit the overt behavior, the dissonance aroused is correspondingly less and private change in opinion does not occur.”
- Group Dynamics: Research and Theory. Dorwin Cartwright and Alvin Zander. Harper & Row Publishers 1968.
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