The Need to Justify Our Actions The Costs and Benefits of Dissonance Reduction
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The Need to Justify Our Actions 15 attitudes to make them more understanding and more sup- portive of the police? In a different domain, could you change the attitudes of those students who believe that marijuana is harmful and should be prohibited, persuading them to favor its use and legalization? The answer, in both cases, is yes. And you can change these hot-button attitudes not by offering people large incentives to write a forceful essay supporting the police or the legalization of marijuana, but with small incentives. When Yale University students were offered a large cash reward for writing an essay supporting the excessive force used by the local police, they did not need to convince themselves that they believed what they had written; the external justification was enough. However, when they were induced to write a supportive essay for a small reward, they did, in fact, soften their attitudes toward the actions of the police (Cohen, 1962). Another study found the same pat- tern of results with students at the University of Texas who were opposed to the legalization of marijuana. When they were well paid for writing an essay favoring legalization, their real attitudes did not change. When they were given only a small fee, however, they needed to convince themselves that there was some truth in what they had written, and their attitudes became more prole- galization (Nel, Helmreich, & Aronson, 1969). In these studies, as in many others, the smaller the external incentive, the greater the attitude change. Experiments on counterattitudinal advocacy have been applied to a wide range of real-world problems, from reducing prejudice to reducing the risk of eating disorders. In the former, white college students were asked to write a counterattitudinal essay publicly endorsing a controversial proposal at their university to double the amount of funds available for academic scholarships for African American students. Because the total amount of funds was limited, this meant cutting by half the amount of scholarship funds available to white students. As you might imagine, this was a highly dissonant situation. How might the students reduce dissonance? As they came up with more and more reasons in writing their essays, they ended up convincing themselves that they believed in that policy. And not only did they believe in it, but their general attitude toward African Americans became more favorable (Leippe & Eisenstadt, 1994, 1998). Later experiments with diverse groups have gotten the same results, including a decrease in white prejudice toward Asian students (Son Hing, Li, & Zanna, 2002) and, in Germany, German prejudice toward Turks (Heitland & Bohner, 2010). Counterattitudinal advocacy has also been effective in dealing with a far different problem: eating disorders (such as bulimia) and dissatisfaction with one’s body. In American society, where super-thin is considered beautiful, many women are dis- satisfied with the size and shape of their own bodies, and the internalization of the media’s “thin ideal” leads not only to unhappiness but also to constant dieting and eating disorders. For more than a decade, a team of researchers has been applying cognitive dis- sonance to counteract these self-destructive feelings and behaviors. In a series of ex- periments, high school and college women with body-image concerns were assigned to either dissonance or control conditions. Women in the dissonance condition had to compose their own arguments against the “thin is beautiful” image they had bought into, by writing an essay describing the emotional and physical costs of pursuing an unrealistic ideal body and by acting out that argument to discourage other women from pursuing the thin ideal. Participants in the dissonance condition showed significant increases in their satisfaction with their bodies, as well as a decrease in chronic dieting, and were happier and less anxious than women in the control conditions. Moreover, their risk of developing bulimia was greatly reduced (McMillan, Stice, & Rohde, 2011; Celebrities are paid huge amounts of money to endorse products. Do you think that Brad Pitt believes the message he is delivering about this expensive watch? Is the justification for his endorsement internal or external? M06_ARON6625_08_SE_C06.indd 15 07/03/12 3:31 AM
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The Need to Justify Our Actions Stice et al., 2006). Follow-up studies using variations of this method have found that its benefits are long lasting and that it is as effective for Latina and Asian/ Hawaiian/ Pacific Island women as for white and African American women (Rodriguez et al., 2008; Stice et al., 2008). punishment and Self-persuasion All societies run, in part, on punishment or the threat of punishment. You know, while cruising down the highway at 80 miles an hour, that if a cop spots you, you will pay a substantial fine, and if you get caught often, you will lose your license. So we learn to obey the speed limit when patrol cars are in the vicinity. By the same token, school children know that if they cheat on an exam and get caught, they could be humiliated by the teacher and punished. So they learn not to cheat while the teacher is in the room, watching them. But does harsh punishment teach adults to want to obey the speed limit? Does it teach children to value honest behavior? We don’t think so. All it teaches is to try to avoid getting caught. Let’s look at bullying. It is extremely difficult to persuade children that it’s not right or enjoyable to beat up other children (Olweus, 2002). But, theo- retically, it is conceivable that under certain conditions they will persuade themselves that such behavior is unenjoyable. Imagine that you are the parent of a six-year-old boy who often beats up his four-year-old brother. You’ve tried to reason with your older son, to no avail. In an attempt to make him a nicer person (and to preserve the health and welfare of his little brother), you begin to punish him for his aggressive- ness. As a parent, you can use a range of punishments, from the mild (a stern look) to the severe (spanking, forcing the child to stand in the corner for two hours, depriv- ing him of TV privileges for a month). The more severe the threat, the higher the likelihood the youngster will cease and desist—while you are watching him. But he may hit his brother again as soon as you are out of sight. In short, just as most drivers learn to watch for the highway patrol while speeding, your six-year-old still enjoys bullying his little brother; he has merely learned not to do it while you are around to punish him. Suppose that you threaten him with a mild punishment. In either case—under threat of severe punishment or of mild punishment—the child experiences dissonance. He is aware that he is not beating up his little brother, and he is also aware that he would like to beat him up. When he has the urge to hit his brother and doesn’t, he im- plicitly asks himself, “How come I’m not beating up my little brother?” Under severe threat, he has a convincing answer in the form of a sufficient external justification: “I’m not beating him up because, if I do, my parents are going to punish me.” This serves to reduce the dissonance. The child in the mild threat situation experiences dissonance too. But when he asks himself, “How come I’m not beating up my little brother?” he doesn’t have a convinc- ing answer, because the threat is so mild that it does not provide a superabundance of justification. This is called insufficient punishment. The child is refraining from doing something he wants to do, and while he does have some justification for not doing it, he lacks complete justification. In this situation, he continues to experience dissonance; therefore, the child must find another way to justify the fact that he is not aggressing against his kid brother. The less severe you make the threat, the less exter- nal justification there is; the less external justification, the higher the need for internal justification. The child can reduce his dissonance by convincing himself that he doesn’t want to beat up his brother. In time, he can go further in his quest for internal justifica- tion and decide that beating up little kids is not fun. To find out if this is in fact what happens, Elliot Aronson and J. Merrill Carlsmith (1963) devised an experiment with preschoolers. They couldn’t very well have young children hitting each other for the sake of science, so they decided to change another Parents can intervene to stop one sibling from tormenting another right at the moment of the incident, but what might they do to make it less likely to happen in the future? insufficient Punishment individuals lack sufficient external justification for having resisted a desired activity or object, usually resulting in individuals devaluing the forbidden activity or object. M06_ARON6625_08_SE_C06.indd 16 07/03/12 3:31 AM Yüklə 2,11 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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