Dissonance and Meaning Maintenance running head: Dissonance causes compensatory affirmation



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RUNNING HEAD: Dissonance causes compensatory affirmation

Is dissonance reduction a special case of fluid compensation?

Evidence that dissonant cognitions cause compensatory affirmation and abstraction
Daniel Randles1, Michael Inzlicht2, Travis Proulx3, Alexa Tullett4, and Steven J. Heine1
1 University of British Columbia

2 University of Toronto

3 Tilburg University

4 University of Alabama

(in press) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
ABSTRACT

Cognitive dissonance theory shares much in common with other perspectives that address anomalies, uncertainty, and general expectancy violations. This has led some theorists to argue that these theories represent overlapping psychological processes. If responding to dissonance and uncertainty occurs through a common psychological process, one should expect that the behavioral outcomes of feeling uncertain would also apply to feelings of dissonance, and vice versa. One specific prediction from the meaning maintenance model would be that cognitive dissonance, like other expectancy violations, should lead to the affirmation of unrelated beliefs, or the abstraction of unrelated schemas when the dissonant event cannot be easily accommodated. This paper presents four studies (N = 1124) demonstrating that the classic induced-compliance dissonance paradigm can lead not only to a change of attitudes (dissonance reduction), but also to a) an increased reported belief in God (Study 2), b) a desire to punish norm-violators (Study 1 and 3), c) a motivation to detect patterns amidst noise (Study 3), and d) polarizing support of public policies amongst those already biased towards a particular side (Study 4). These results are congruent with theories that propose content-general fluid compensation following the experience of anomaly, a finding not predicted by dissonance theory. The results suggest that dissonance reduction behaviors may share psychological processes described by other theories addressing violations of expectations.

Arguably the most prominent theory in social psychology, the conceptualization of cognitive dissonance has traversed a long and meandering path since it was first proposed by Leon Festinger (1957). Despite an unusually large number of revisions and re-revisions of the theory (Aronson, 1969; Cooper & Fazio, 1984; Greenwald & Ronis, 1978; Harmon-Jones, Amodio, & Harmon-Jones, 2009; Harmon-Jones, Brehm, Greenberg, Simon, & Nelson, 1996; Steele & Liu, 1983; Tedeschi, Schlenker, & Bonoma, 1971; Zanna & Cooper, 1974), the core of dissonance theory remains relatively unchanged: people are bothered by inconsistencies between their mental representations and will work towards reducing those inconsistencies (Festinger, 1957; Harmon-Jones et al., 1996; Harmon-Jones, Amodio & Harmon-Jones, 2010).

Recently, it has been argued that dissonance theory shares a number of similarities with other uncertainty theories (Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006; Proulx & Inzlicht, 2012). In particular, both dissonance and uncertainty reduction theories describe inconsistent cognitions or unexpected events as leading to an aversive arousal state, which leads to predictable behavioral change in the service of reducing the arousal. Despite these and other similarities (Proulx, Inzlicht, & Harmon-Jones, 2012), there are also a number of key predictive differences. This paper focuses on one such difference described by the meaning maintenance model (MMM; Heine et al., 2006): dissonance theory does not predict that inconsistencies will lead to compensatory affirmation in domains unrelated to the dissonance-inducing event (Festinger, 1957; Harmon-Jones et al., 2009), while the MMM argues that affirming any committed belief may provide a palliative to the arousal elicited by inconsistencies. Thus, we propose an extension to classical dissonance theory by arguing that dissonance not only changes attitudes and behavior regarding the perceived inconsistency, but also attitudes in other unrelated domains, as people aspire to engage in any behavior that reduces the unpleasant arousal.



The Meaning Maintenance Model

According to the MMM (Heine et al., 2006; Proulx & Heine, 2010), any violation of expectation (i.e., a meaning violation) produces aversive arousal, motivating individuals to address the violation. This arousal is context general; people require contextual cues to identify the proximal cause of their aversive feeling. As such, inconsistent cognitions, experiences that do not match expected outcomes, interruptions to salient goals, or information that defies one’s understanding of the world may all elicit the same arousal, signaling to the individual that something is not as expected (Proulx & Inzlicht, 2012). The MMM argues that people are motivated to dispel the arousal by resolving it through accommodation (see Kuhn, 1962/1996; Piaget, 1960), by which their meaning frameworks are adjusted such that the offending anomaly is no longer at odds with their expectations (as is the case with dissonance reduction). However, if an individual does not have sufficient available resources to resolve the violation, they may seek to dispel the arousal in another indirect way, which is termed fluid compensation (Allport, 1943; 1954). This fluid compensation is domain general in that cognitive efforts in one domain can dispel the arousal caused by a threat in an entirely different domain, and there are at least two distinct ways that it can occur (Proulx, & Heine, 2010).

First, the arousal stemming from the original anomaly may lead people to affirm their commitment to another currently accessible but unrelated belief. By increasing their commitment to an alternative meaning framework that has not been damaged by violated expectations, people can dispel the bothersome arousal by focusing on aspects of the world that make sense. Much research has shown evidence for this mode of fluid compensation, across a broad range of meaning violations that may be as explicit and disturbing as considering one’s own death (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010) or reflecting upon a social rejection (Nash, McGregor, & Prentice, 2011), down to implicit and trivial experiences such as subliminally seeing incoherent word pairs (e.g., “quickly-blueberry”; Randles, Proulx & Heine, 2011) or reading an unexpectedly absurd story (Proulx, Heine, & Vohs, 2010). All of these manipulations have led people to affirm their commitment to unrelated beliefs, such as increasing their identification with their culture, becoming critical of someone who mocks their country, or becoming especially punitive towards a lawbreaker (for reviews see Heine et al., 2006; Proulx & Heine, 2010; Proulx & Inzlicht, 2012).

Second, when alternative meaning frameworks are not readily accessible, people may instead be motivated to seek out and learn novel meaning frameworks, a process that we term abstraction (Proulx & Heine, 2009). For example, upon encountering violations to meaning as diverse as considering the contradictory nature of one’s self-concept, reading a surreal Kafka story, or seeing incoherent word pairs, participants have demonstrated heightened motivation (Proulx & Heine, 2009, Study 1) and accuracy (Proulx & Heine, 2009, Study 2; Randles et al., 2011) on an implicit pattern-learning task. In a similar line of work, being made to feel uncertain can increase illusory perceptions of patterns amongst noisy images or stock market information (van Harreveld, Rutjens, Schneider, Nohlen, & Keskinis, 2013; Whitson & Galinsky, 2008) and leads to a preference for scientific explanations that emphasize clear order or patterns when describing reality (Rutjens, van der Pligt, & van Harreveld, 2010; Rutjens, van Harreveld, van der Pligt, Kreemers, & Noordewier, 2013). Thus, evidence coming from multiple paradigms speaks to increased motivation to detect patterns, with some data suggesting that ability may also increase, independent of motivation. It remains unclear whether this process serves to reduce arousal, or is a component of the searching process that identifies the source of one’s feeling that something is not right.



Dissonance and the Meaning Maintenance Model

According to the MMM, dissonance may prompt unpleasant arousal for the same reason as other violations of expectations: the relevant cognitions are inconsistent with available meaning frameworks. Although a number of theorists argue that dissonance reduction is primarily related to self-consistency, in that the inconsistency represents a threat to one’s self-esteem (Aronson, 1999; Steele & Liu, 1983), the original articulation of dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957), as well as some current ones (e.g. Harmon-Jones et al., 2009; Harmon-Jones et al., 2010) represent the perspective that any psychologically or logically inconsistent cognitions that occur simultaneously can create aversive arousal. For example, Festinger (1957, p. 14) writes that “If a person were standing in the rain and yet could see no evidence that he was getting wet, these two cognitions would be dissonant with each other.” Hence, the original formulation of dissonance and the MMM both share the view that any kinds of inconsistent cognitions, including those that do not involve the self, motivate efforts to dispel the associated arousal.

Although some versions of dissonance theory and the MMM agree on the conditions that cause this disrupted state, they differ in explaining how people respond to the corresponding arousal. In the case of the typical dissonance experiment, participants seek to directly reduce the offending inconsistency by accommodating their attitudes (e.g., “I just agreed to write an essay in favor of a tuition increase; it must be because I actually am in favor of such an increase”). Direct accommodation is possible only when participants are consciously aware of the anomaly that lies at the source of their arousal. In contrast, the inconsistent cognitions involved in many MMM studies are either not consciously accessible (e.g., a change blindness task; Proulx & Heine, 2008), or have included a number of distractor tasks following the manipulation and prior to the measure of fluid compensation (Burke et al., 2010; Proulx & Inzlicht, 2012; Randles, Heine, & Santos, 2013). All else being equal, people may prefer to directly deal with the inconsistency rather than indirectly reduce their arousal (Stone & Cooper, 2001; Stone, Wiegand, Cooper & Aronson, 1997; Tullett, Teper, & Inzlicht, 2011). However, given that in these situations there is no direct way to accommodate the inconsistencies or affirm related beliefs, and it is easy to misattribute the cause of one’s state, people may use alternative indirect tactics to dispel the arousal, such as affirmation or abstraction of unrelated meaning frameworks. Self-affirmation theory has produced some of the strongest indirect support for this hypothesis. A number of studies have shown that self-affirmation can provide a buffer for, or resolution of, dissonant arousal (Sherman & Cohen, 2006; Steele & Liu, 1983). From this perspective, dissonance interferes with self-integrity and as such is resolvable via any experience that restores a global sense of a positively viewed self.

Although findings from the self-affirmation perspective are consistent with our predictions, the theory argues for a narrowing of the dissonance process to pertain only to events that threaten the self. Some dissonance researchers challenge this revision on the grounds that young children who lack a complex sense of self, as well as many non-human animals, still show evidence of dissonance reduction (Egan, Santos, & Bloom, 2007; Harmon-Jones et al., 2009; Lydall, Gilmour, & Dwyer, 2010). This same criticism applies to the proposed function of self-affirmation in general, which has been described as maintaining goal-pursuit in the face of frequent failure. For instance, Sherman & Cohen (2006) note that “for a ‘good’ [baseball] hitter who bats .300 but fails nearly 70% of the time, it seems important to maintain a sense of self-worth and efficacy in order to take advantage of those few opportunities where one could get a ‘hit’” (pp. 227). Many non-human animals struggle with goal-pursuit in the face of low-frequency stochastic rewards (e.g. McLinn & Stephens, 2006), and the brain regions identified to manage these processes (Amiez, Joseph, & Procyk, 2005; Seo & Lee, 2007) have analogues in the human brain (Behrens, Woolrich, Walton, & Rushworth, 2007; Rushworth & Behrens, 2008; Shackman et al., 2011). Additionally, violated expectations that are neither consciously perceived nor related to the self can nonetheless lead to affirmation (Proulx & Heine, 2008; Proulx, et al., 2010; Randles et al., 2011; Randles, et al., 2013). In brief, we suggest that self-affirmation findings support our predictions for dissonance leading to fluid compensation. However, rather than restrict dissonance processes to self-relevant threats, they may hint at a much broader process, where the self is neither a critical component of either dissonant arousal or repair.

Empirical results from the MMM also provide indirect support for fluid compensation following dissonance. First, some of the meaning violations that have been found to prompt fluid compensation are similar to cognitive dissonance manipulations. For example, participants showed enhanced implicit pattern learning if they were reminded of situations where they had acted inconsistently (i.e., they were shy in one situation and outgoing in another) and were asked to argue against their own unified self-concept (Proulx & Heine, 2009). To the extent that dwelling on behavioral inconsistencies could be seen as a dissonance manipulation, this would be evidence that dissonance leads not only to dissonance reduction, but also to abstraction.

Second, the role of arousal is apparently key in mediating the compensation process for both types of manipulations. When participants are given a placebo that they believe will cause them to feel tense or anxious, they show less motivation to reduce dissonance (Zanna & Cooper, 1974), affirm beliefs following a meaning violation (Proulx & Heine, 2008) or affirm alternative controlling agents following a control violation (Kay, Moscovitch, & Laurin, 2010b), presumably because they have a benign explanation for their arousal that reduced the need for further palliative action. The reverse is also true when directly altering the subsequent arousal. The motivation to reduce dissonance can be dampened if the person has consumed alcohol, pain relievers or tranquilizers (Cooper, Zanna, & Taves, 1978; DeWall, Chester, & White, 2014; Steele, Southwick, & Critchlow 1981), but it can also be increased by stimulants such as amphetamines, provided the person is unaware that they have consumed a stimulant (Cooper et al., 1978). Likewise, pain medication (acetaminophen) reduces compensatory affirmation if taken prior to completing the meaning violation (Randles et al., 2013). The implication is that arousal is a necessary component for both dissonance and meaning violations.

Beyond behavioral parallels, both theories have outlined similar neurological processes to explain their observed effects (Proulx et al., 2012). For instance, in both a post-choice (Izuma et al., 2010; Kitayama, Chua, Tompson, & Han, 2013) and induced-compliance dissonance paradigm (van Veen, Krug, Schooler, & Carter, 2009), participants showed increased activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). It is argued that this area functions to detect and emotionally react to incompatible information being processed in the brain (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001; Botvinick, Cohen, & Carter, 2004; Inzlicht & Al-Khindi, 2012; Luu, Collins, & Tucker, 2000), regardless of whether the incompatibility is a low level perceptual discrepancy such as a flanker task error (Gehring, Goss, Coles, Meyer, & Donchin, 1993), or a more complex violation of meaning, such as being told that one’s performance is better or worse than expected (Oliveira, McDonald, & Goodman, 2007), being denied performance feedback when it was expected (Hirsh & Inzlicht, 2008), or contemplating one’s impending death (Quirin et al., 2012; for a review, see Proulx & Inzlicht, 2012). Additionally, misattributions of arousal appear to reduce activity in this region following errors (Inzlicht & Al-Khindi, 2012), in the same way that they reduce the motivation to respond to dissonance, meaning violations, or control threats.

Thus far, dissonance studies have not investigated whether encounters with dissonant cognitions will lead people to affirm unrelated beliefs or to abstract new patterns, as participants have never been provided with opportunities to do so. We hypothesize that participants will use any means at their disposal to alleviate their aversive arousal, and although in traditional dissonance studies this has been largely limited to attitude change or affirmation of important personal attributes, we propose that affirmation of unrelated beliefs and abstraction could also occur, if those options are made available. We conducted four studies to test this hypothesis, using two versions of the induced-compliance dissonance paradigm. In the first two studies we employ a classic induced-choice dissonance paradigm and give participants the opportunity to affirm their moral position on prostitution (Study 1) and their belief in God (Study 2). In the third study, we employ a different version of the induced-choice paradigm and additionally test whether abstraction as well as affirmation can occur following dissonance. Study 4 directly compares the effects of induced-choice dissonance relative to a meaning violation on the motivation to affirm unrelated beliefs.



Study 1

Participants and procedure

Four-hundred and forty-six participants (35% women) with a mean age of 30 (SD = 10.6) were recruited online through MTURK (www.mturk.com). Participants were largely White (76%), followed by Black (7%), South Asian (4.5%), East Asian (4%), or other (8.5%). Participants were given fifty cents to complete the study, and up to an additional dollar based on their success in a memory task.

After giving informed consent and completing some demographic questions, participants were told they would read a randomly selected article from a set, but were all given the same boring article to read. The participants were asked to read the article thoroughly and were informed that there would be a memory test based on the content.

After this task, participants were told that the researchers were interested in studying whether the act of describing an event as interesting or not interesting affects recall memory for the event. In the control condition, participants were told that they had been randomly assigned to write that the passage they read was very interesting. In the dissonance condition, participants were told they could freely choose to write a paragraph describing the passage as very interesting or not at all interesting. However, before they began, a prompt informed them that it would be helpful to the researchers if they could choose to write that the passage was interesting, as follows:

“A large number of people have chosen to write about why they thought the article was not very interesting. Thus, in order to finish the study with a good number of people on both sides, we need people to now write that they thought the passage they read was very interesting. Although it is your choice, we would really appreciate it if you would write one short paragraph that firmly says that the passage you read was very interesting.”

Participants then completed a measure of compensatory affirmation (the social judgment survey), and a question measuring dissonance reduction: “despite what you wrote earlier, how interesting was the passage you read?” The order of these two items was counter-balanced. Finally, participants completed a manipulation check question: “How much choice do you feel you had over which type of sentence you wrote?”



Materials

Boring passage: A 3-page advertisement for Gerbrands Tachistoscopes was selected as a boring passage, where the tachistoscope is described in highly specific and technical terms. This passage was picked because it is very difficult to read, has no narrative and contains no information that an individual would find meaningful or worthwhile, unless they were purchasing a tachistoscope. This passage has been used in previous induced-compliance dissonance paradigms (Harmon-Jones et al., 1996; Harmon-Jones, Harmon-Jones, Serra, & Gable, 2011).

Social judgment survey: Participants read a hypothetical arrest report about a prostitute and were asked to set the amount of the bail, between $0 and $999. This identical measure has been used in several meaning violation studies (e.g., Proulx & Heine, 2008; Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989; Randles et al., 2013). Participants should increase the bond value following a meaning violation because sex for money is at odds with commonly held views of relationships in North American culture, and is against the law throughout most of the continent. Thus, increasing the penalty provides an opportunity to affirm what most of our participants already believe: that prostitution is morally wrong.

Oppenheimer Instructional Manipulation Check: This measure contains a short, dense paragraph, explaining to the participant that researchers are concerned about people not reading instructions, and that to show that they are paying attention, certain questions should be left blank. This measure has been shown to effectively remove people who complete the study, but who are not paying attention to the materials. There is evidence showing that people who fail the check are not different in demographics or psychological characteristics, other than that they are not attending to the study (Oppenheimer, Meyvis, & Davidenko, 2009).

Results

For all studies we report the observed means and standard deviations for each group, but control for sex and age in the analyses. We control for these variables, as they are related to most of our dependent variables across the studies (e.g. attitudes towards prostitution, belief in god, and support for affirmative action) independent of condition. This allows us to remove unrelated error variance, and adjusts for incidental imbalances across any conditions.

Twenty-eight participants were removed for failing the Oppenheimer Instructional Manipulation Check, and 6 were removed for taking more than 3 standard deviations longer than average to complete the study. Nineteen participants in the control condition refused to write that the passage was interesting (90.4% compliance) and 68 in the dissonance condition refused (68.5% compliance).

Recently, a concern about the free-choice dissonance paradigm (Chen & Risen, 2010) has also generated concern about the induced-choice paradigm that we employ in this paper. The concern is that the induced-choice condition often has higher rates of non-compliance relative to the forced-choice condition (as is the case in our studies). Although participants who choose not to write against their beliefs have not experienced dissonance, and thus shouldn’t feel motivated to reduce it, they are also likely the most strongly opposed to the topic at hand. Selectively removing a larger number from the induced-choice condition will confound the result and inflate the estimated magnitude of the effect. It is also possible that an uncontrolled 3rd variable (e.g. low agreeableness) is somehow related to non-compliance and the affirmation measure; without true random assignment, the premise of experimental causality is undermined. At the same time, those participants who did not comply were never made to feel dissonance, and thus they should have neither motivation to reduce dissonance nor to engage in fluid compensation. To address this, we report the analyses in two ways: in a more conservative analysis that achieves random assignment, we include non-compliers and test for a main effect of condition. Additionally, we also ran follow-up analyses, including compliance as a 2-factor moderating variable, allowing us to assess the strength of the effect for only those who comply vs. those who do not.

Our manipulation check indicated that the dissonance prime was effective; participants in the dissonance condition claimed they had more choice in writing about the paragraph, M = 4.20, SD = 2.12, compared to the control group, M = 2.34, SD = 1.94; B = 1.87, p < .0001, d = .93 CI.975[.74, 1.12]. The dissonance condition reported significantly more interest in the paragraph MDiss = 2.70, SD = 1.8, MCont = 2.28, SD = 1.56; B = .43, p = .01, d = .26 CI.975[.06, .45], supporting the original dissonance reduction finding, even accounting for the methodological concern caused by asymmetric noncompliance (see Table 1). However, when compliance was included as a moderating variable, there was a significant interaction for dissonance reduction between condition and willingness to comply, B = 1.07, p = .02. Amongst those who complied with instructions, we observed a classic dissonance effect, such that participants in the dissonance condition claimed that the passage was more interesting, M = 3.14, SD = 1.81, than those in the forced choice condition, M = 2.31, SD = 1.56; B = .86, p < .0001, d = .47 CI.975[.28, .66]. Those who did not comply showed no difference between conditions, MDiss = 1.74, SD = 1.3; MCont = 2.0, SD = 1.60; B = -.21 p = .62, d = .05 CI.975[-.15, .25].

We anticipated an order effect, such that if a person affirmed an unrelated belief first, they would not feel as motivated to reduce dissonance and vice versa. Non-compliers were included, but to prevent interpreting a 2X2X2 with some unstable cells1, compliance was not added as a moderating term. Order did not moderate the effect of the manipulation on either dissonance reduction, B = .47, p = .16, or the prostitution bond, B = -43.92, p = .43. Given the null interactions, the remaining analyses are collapsed across order.

In the context of successfully replicating dissonance reduction, we tested our main hypothesis of interest; that feeling dissonant would also lead to compensatory affirmation. A main effect emerged for affirmation, MDiss = 429.59, SD = 289.99, MCont = 382.26, SD = 277.44; B = 50.03, p = .07, d = .18 CI.975[-.02, .37] (see Table 1), but we again found an interaction between condition and willingness to comply, B = 255.3, p = .001. As hypothesized, dissonance caused those who complied to re-affirm their cultural worldview by increasing the value of the bond, MDiss = 447.68, SD = 304.6, MCont = 364.76, SD = 264.67; B = 86.18, p = .006, d = .28 CI.975[.08, .47]. For those who did not comply, we anticipated a null effect, as participants who did not experience dissonance should presumably not feel a greater need to affirm unrelated beliefs. However, there was a significant effect for this group in the opposite direction, such that those who refused to write a supporting paragraph despite not being given any choice set the bond higher than those who refused but were given a choice, MDiss = 389.63, SD = 252.28, MCont = 547.11, SD = 343.52; B = -169.22, p = .02, d = .23 CI.975[.04, .43].

In Study 1, we produced both a classic dissonance effect and compensatory affirmation. However, it is possible that dissonance only increases negative affect (Harmon-Jones et al., 2009), which led to a more punitive action. In Study 2, we attempt to replicate these findings with a different form of cultural affirmation that should be less focused on antagonistic attitudes. We selected belief in God, because it is unclear why feeling frustration may lead someone to espouse stronger beliefs, in the same way that it might lead them to be more aggressive towards law-breakers. Additionally, some have argued that belief in God is an especially effective form of affirmation, because it serves as a reminder that the world is orderly and intentional, and that one’s identity is part of a larger purposed world (Inzlicht, Tullett, & Good, 2011; Kay, Gaucher, McGregor, & Nash, 2010a; Norenzayan & Gervais, 2012). To this end, past research has shown that people will affirm their belief following primes related to lack of control (Kay et al., 2010b) or mortality salience (Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006).



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