Page 40 - How Children Learn to Hate Their Parents

People Don’t Have to Be Bribed to Make Major Attitude Changes:
Remarkably, it takes very little by way of incentive to arrive at a given attitudinal state. This is contrary to what people assume happens in alienation cases. The common assumption is that the alienating parent pressures the child with threats or actively rewards hateful behaviors.
It can happen that way but it certainly doesn't have to. Such extreme forms of programming may be utilized by some parents but may be entirely unnecessary. As a matter of fact outright bribery or threats would probably not work as well as more subtle forms of influence, whether they occur wittingly or unwittingly.
Festinger and one of his students, J. Merill Carlsmith (1979) performed a series of experiments where they encouraged experimental subjects to lie about whether their participation in an experiment was interesting or boring. They paid some of the students $1 to tell the lie that the experiment was interesting (when it was really boring) and others they paid $20. They made the bold prediction that in the group that was paid $1, the subjects actually came to believe the lie they told. As it turns out, they were correct. The answer they gave for the change in attitude was that the group that was paid $20 knew that $20 was enough incentive for them to maintain the belief that the experiment was boring. The group that was paid only $1 had insufficient justification for telling a lie. That insufficient justification created dissonance and to resolve the dissonance the students actually convinced themselves that the experiment was more interesting than it actually was, even though they were lying about it!
In one of my reconciliation counseling cases, the notion of providing little or no incentive to induce a child to hate a parent was seen in the example of the six-year old girl who complained of visiting her father because all they did was “go on his boat,” and “swim in his swimming pool.” When I asked what kinds of things she did at her mother’s house she said that she did “special things that Daddy would never do with her.” When asked what those special things were she said, “At Mommy’s we sit on the couch and watch TV, and that’s special.” When I asked her where her mother was during this “special time,” she replied, “upstairs talking on the phone to her friends.” Evidently, the very act of her mother identifying all of the things that she does with her daughter as “special time,” was enough to convince her that anything she did with her father was less than special, dull or annoying.
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